His first book of poems, All Roads at Once, appeared in 1976, followed by A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (1978), The Various Light (1980), Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), The West Door (1988), Autobiographies (1992).
[2] Additional fellowships and prizes awarded for his poetry include the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at The Bellagio Center for the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 2007 he directed a poetry-writing course at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire, and in 2008 he taught at the Almássera Vella Arts Center in Spain.
In the same year, he published an e-book, Transatlantic Bridge: A Concise Guide to American and British English, detailing differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar and punctuation.
The title poem is an extraordinary and quite inevitable extension of the New York tradition of major visionary poems, which goes from Poe’s ‘City in the Sea’ and Whitman's ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ to Hart Crane's The Bridge and Ashbery's ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’ Corn achieves an authority and resonance wholly worthy of his precursors.
His aesthetic prospects are remarkable, even in this crowded time.” Bloom’s characterization of these books as belonging to the tradition of American Romanticism was a stimulus for much of the critical attention, positive or negative, focused on Corn during the following decades.
Critics and poet-critics as diverse as Richard Howard, Charles Molesworth, Robert B. Shaw, Joel Conarroe, Jay Parini, John Hollander, Wayne Koestenbaum, David Lehmann, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Amy Clampitt, and Carolyn Forché, have made penetrating observations about his work.
A noticeable percentage of his poetry uses meter, rhyme, and verseform, and he has written a widely circulated introduction to English-language prosody, The Poem’s Heartbeat.