PoemsCountryFINALcover

The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice

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price:  $25.00
isbn:  978-0-9970994-1-62
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pages:  250

In twenty-nine innovative essays, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice considers how the question of place shapes contemporary poetry. Responding from cities and rural communities across the United States, the contributors of The Poem’s Country thoughtfully and passionately explore issues of politics, personal identity, ecology, the Internet, war, sexuality, faith, and the imagination. Essential reading for students of poetry at every level, The Poem’s Country examines the connection between lyric and geographical constraint, as well as how place challenges, enchants, and helps clarify the intersections between language and the world.

With essays by: Kazim Ali, Nicky Beer, Eavan Boland, Elizabeth Bradfield, Abigail Chabitnoy, Hayan Charara, Katy Didden, Jehanne Dubrow, Keith Ekiss, Rigoberto González, James Allen Hall, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Janine Joseph, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Christopher Kempf, Nick Lantz, Shara Lessley, Sandra Lim, Sabrina Orah Mark, Shane McCrae, Molly McCully Brown, Philip Metres, Wayne Miller, Craig Santos Perez, Emilia Phillips, Spencer Reece, Bruce Snider, Peter Streckfus, Mark Wunderlich, and Monica Youn.

“This remarkable and exciting gathering of prose on contemporary poetry is international and generational at once–this is important because it represents the imaginations and insights of emerging poets writing across a spectrum of taste, “place and poetic practice.”  Yet the critical nature of the writing is more testimony than theory, more personal than panoramic, which means that the individual essays are that much more alive, more in touch, and more unique.  Overall, The Poem’s Country resists tradition even more than it replaces it.”

-Stanley Plumly

“The Poem’s Country demonstrates that poetry isn’t limited to the landscapes we inhabit but by the scope of the imagination itself. In these ravishing essays, the next generation of poets explores the influence of place on contemporary poetry, and a diverse reimagining of place emerges that both grounds and lifts us up.”

-Quan Barry

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..11

Foreword: Evan Boland…………………………………………………………………………..15

Introduction: Editors………………………………………………………………………………22

Selected Writings

Fluid States: Ocean as Place & Poetic……………….…………………………………………31

Elizabeth Bradfield

The Cloud, The Desktop, & the Poetics of No-Place……….…………………………….45

Christopher Kempf

What’s American about American Poetry?…………………………………………………60

Kazim Ali

Making Space: A Notebook………………………………….….……………………………..75

Sandra Lim

Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural………..……………………………..80

Bruce Snider

Ghost Towns…………………………………………………………………………….…..…..93

Nick Lantz

Unpeopled Edens…………………………………………………….……………………….106

Rigoberto González

The Broken Line………………………………………………..…………………………….115

Joan Naviyuk Kane

The Lyric City……………………………………………………………….…………………124

Wayne Miller

Broad Daylight…………………………………………………..………………………….…135

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Herrick to Harjo:  Looking for Food in the Nature Poem…………………………..151

Keith Ekiss

Recovery………………………………………………………………….…………………….162

Janine Joseph

Place in Mind………………………………………………………………………………….169

Peter Streckfus

If You Need Me, MOTHER Is the Poem Where I’ll Be……..……………………..184

Sabrina Orah Mark

On Blackacre……………………………………………………………….…………………190

Monica Youn

Thinking Detriot……………………………………………………………………………..194

Hayan Charara

Homing In: The Place of Poetry in the Global Digital Age………………………..203

Philip Metres

On Writing from the New Osceania…………………………………………….…….213

Craig Santos Perez

In the Country of War…………………………………………………………………….219

Jehanne Dubrow

Bone Will Adapt to Loads of Pressure: The Body & Poetic Space……………….228

Emilia Phillips

A Place for Ghosts…………………………………………….…………………………….237

Abigail Chabitnoy

Tapping the Glass: On Poems, Aquariums, & Form……………………………….244

Nicky Beer

Locating Silence…………………………………………………………………….……….256

James Allen Hall

Famous Mushroom……………………………….…………….…………………………..263

Mark Wunderlich

My Backyard, but Not What Happened to My Body………………………………270

Molly McCully Brown

Lone Tree, Far Away……………………………………………………………..………..276

Shane McCrae

A Poetics of Tectonic Scale: The Great Distance Poem…………….…………….279

Katy Didden

One Cluster, Bright, Astringent……………………………………………….………..304

Shara Lessley

I Had a Place……………………………………………………………..…………………..317

Spencer Reece

Five Essential Poems of Place: Contributors…………………………..……………323

Editors’ Recommendation: Contemporary Poems of Place……………………..330

Sources………………………………….……………………………………………………334

About Shara Lessley & Bruce Snider (Editors)

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife (forthcoming 2018), she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s awards include theMary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship from the Gilman School, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Shara was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She currently lives in Oxford, England.

Bruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he’s also the recipient of a James A. Michener fellowship from The University of Texas at Austin, where he received his MFA in poetry and playwriting. Bruce’s other awards include residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, and the James Merrill House as well as a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, VQR, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Southern Review and Best American Poetry 2012. He has taught at numerous universities including Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Connecticut College. He was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University in Washington DC for 2012-2013, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco.