Pierre Martory

Pierre Martory (December 1, 1920 – October 5, 1998) was a French poet whose influence on New York School poets was quiet but profound. His work was admired by Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews, and others, and translated extensively by John Ashbery, with whom he shared his life in Paris for nearly a decade. His work has appeared in many books in both England and the United States, as well as in The New Yorker and Poetry. Martory’s personal “charm,” the poet Ann Lauterbach once said, “devolved back to the original meaning of ‘spell.’” However, as Ashbery has noted, “Both the humor and the sadness in his poems are always rendered with an unemphatic clarity that is certainly Mozartian.” Born in Bayonne, France, of partly Basque ancestry, Pierre Martory spent much of his early life in Morocco. He joined the Free French Forces in North Africa when World War II interrupted his college studies at the School of Political Science, Paris. Afterwards, he began writing fiction and poetry and studied music as well. In 1953, Denoël published his first novel, Phébus ou le beau mariage. His other novels remain unpublished. For more than twenty years, he was drama and music critic at Paris Match, where he mentored and worked with the journalist Denis Demonpion, now editor of Le Point and a biographer.