Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935. At age 10 she spent half a year acting with a traveling theater, but was happy when schools reopened and she could settle for the quieter pleasures of reading and writing which she has since pursued in and out of universities (Ph.D., U of Michigan, 1966), in several countries, but mostly in Providence, RI where she lives with Keith Waldrop (with whom she also co-edits Burning Deck Press).

Her books of poetry include A Key Into the Language of America,  Split Infinites,  the trilogy, The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities, and a Selected Poems, Another Language.

Two novels, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All have recently been reprinted in one paperback by Northwestern University Press.

She has translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès's  work (The Book of Questions, The Book of Resemblances, etc.). Her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, is coming out from Wesleyan University Press in 2002.

She has also translated, from the French, Jacques Roubaud and Emmanuel Hocquard; and from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior, and others.

Her work has appeared in anthologies like Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994), From the Other Side of the Century: New American Poetry 1960-90, (Sun & Moon, 1994). Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998) and Poems for the Millennium, vol. II (University of California Press, 1998)  

Translations of her work have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Serbia and Mexico.

She has received awards or fellowships from the NEA, the Fund for Poetry, the Howard Foundation, the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. The French government has made her a “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.”

See also:

Steven Evans, “Rosmarie Waldrop,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 169: American Poets Since World War II, Detroit: Gale Research, 1996, pp.284-97

Joan Retallack, “A Conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop,” [essay plus interview], Contemporary Literature, 40, 3 (Fall 1999)

Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.205-1

Jonathan Monroe, “Syntextural Investigations,” Diacritics 26, 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1996)

Lynn Keller, “Fields of Pattern-Bounded Unpredictability”: Recent Palimptexts by   Rosmarie Waldrop and Joan Retallack, Contemporary Literature, 42, 2 (Summer 2001)

Kornelia Freitag, "Decomposing American History as Cultural  Analysis: Rosmarie Waldrop's Shorter American Memory," in The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period, ed. Udo J. Hebel (Heidelberg: Verlag Winter, 1999)

The Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry,ed. Michel Delville & Christine Pagnoulle (Université de Liège: 2000), essays by Kornelia Freitag and Michel Delville

We Who Love to Be Astonished, ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), essays by Lynn Keller and Jonathan Monroe