Kennedy, X. J.

X. J. Kennedy, born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1929, to avoid confusion with better-known Joe Kennedys, stuck an X on his name when his first poems came out in The New Yorker, and ever since has been stuck with it. He has served as a destroyer sailor, as the father of five, as poetry editor of The Paris Review, and as Professor of English at Tufts (he quit the last two jobs in order to write). Nude Descending the Staircase (Lamont Award, Doubleday, 1961) was his first book of poems; more recent ones are In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems (an American Library Association notable...