William Corbett (October 11, 1942 – August 10, 2018)[1] was an American poet, essayist, editor, educator, and publisher.
Corbett's work and public readings acknowledge the influence on him of jazz, modernist and imagist poetry (especially William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound in his later work), the group of poets in Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, many of them from the Black Mountain College community (most notably Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, his friends Robert Creeley and John Wieners, and his mentor, Charles Olson), classical Chinese poets (mainly Li Po), and French poetry of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries (especially Guillaume Apollinaire).
Corbett served as a teacher in the Expository Writing program at Harvard University and as writer-in-residence in the Program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught classes focusing on the craft of the personal essay and the creation of poetry.
He edited for the small publisher Pressed Wafer, which specializes in poetry broadsides, chapbooks and books.
He lived in Boston's South End for most of his adult life, but moved to Brooklyn, New York.