Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Four Decadesof
MICHAEL COLLIER
the American ]Joetic landscape_
Eighty-six poets arc represented.
MICHAEL COLLIER, editor
heralds the lasting impact of a
single puhlishing program on
A maior anniversary volume
Four Decades
of American Poetry
The Wesleyan Tradition
~ l ~ a n
Tradition
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS 316pp. Cloth,O-H195-221OA. $29_95
New England At your bookstore
Department of English
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
University Press of New England Hanover, NH 03755-204H H00-421-1561
MARCHI APRIL 1994 PAGE 47
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Third annual week of
workshops, panels, readings,
field studies in fiction,
non-fiction and poetry.
Writers, editors and agents at
6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada,
near Lake Tahoe.
THE ART OF THE WILD
Jull] 1994
Squaw U [alifornia
Writing with wilderness.
nature and environment.
_ uz;z iUS
b m m cd
Wild
writers Weinberger has chosen, the only women are Denise Levertov and
Susan Howe.
Weinberger has selected an anti -Vietnam war poem by Levertov and
Howe's poem, "Thorow," which he believes is proof that she is an heir of
Charles Olson. How is one supposed to read the juxtaposition of these
writings by Howe and Levertov with selection from
neth Rexroth's book, The Love Poems of Marichiko? In a note
panying the poems, Rexroth states that "Marichiko is the pen name of a
contemporary young woman who lives near the temple of Marishi-ben in
Kyoto." In his essay, "At the Death of Kenneth Rexroth" (Works on
Paper, 1986), Weinberger posits that "Marichiko" is Rexroth's
invention. "Man as woman: a renunciation of identity, a transcendence
of self," Weinberger points out. "Rexroth became the other." I am not
saying that Rexroth couldn't transcend the self and become the Other,
but that Weinberger has, in this anthology (both in its choice of poets
and poems) barely given a nod to women writers. The Other remains
invisible; they are they. A woman, it would seem, cannot transcend the
self.
The Other that Weinberger recognizes is one that conforms to his
model. Susan Howe is praised for having assimilated into the Pound-
Williams-Olson tradition. This is a disservice to both Howe and to those
women-the other Others-who Weinberger believes has rejected this
tradition. The problem with American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators &
Outsiders doesn't lie with the poets so much as with the editor, Eliot
Weinberger, and the misrepresentative context he places them in.
After reading Rexroth's "Marichiko" poems, his attempt at a "trans-
cendence of self," the reader will read Robert Kelly's poem, "Studying
Horses," which opens:
When you wake up from sleeping with women
whether or not you yourself are a woman,
there are only a few matters left to consider:
Wanting to appear politically correct, Kelly uses the second line to coyly
qualify the opening line, Is this the "us of others. all of us talking" that
Weinberger would have everyone inhabit? Is this the "hubbub of conver-
sation"-one man talking to us all about the nature of women-that we
are supposed to hear? Are these the tales the tribe is telling and passing
on, the tradition younger poets are supposed to revere? Kelly is being
directive in "Studying Horses," and there is no room for the reader.
I suspect that Kelly knew that if he had simply moved from the poem's
first line to its third line, he would have left himself open to the charge of '
being labeled a "sexist." In the poem he wants to come off as a gentle
teacher given to talking a little too much: "Sorry for the lecture." The
s T N E s E R
The Man Who Was
Marked By Winter
A collection of poems by Irish poet
Paula Meehan.
$12.00 paperback
p
"... a wonderful zest and warmth of tone. The
themes are daring and open up new areas for
... contemporary Irish poetry."
-Eavan Boland, The Irish Times
EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PRESS
"... compassionate and skillful"
-Kathleen Shields, Connacht Tribune
lished. Donning a falsely modest, aw shucks pose, Weinberger thanks
Eshleman for "giving me this space to fool around in. I'll try not to do it
again." Both the timing of the issue and Weinberger's false modesty
suggest that Eshleman offered him a chance to guest edit Sulfur so he
could publish a number of poets who aren't in his anthology; this is their
consolation prize.
Why did Weinberger feel it was necessary to categorically dish other
anthologists, when he himself is implicated by his choices, perhaps even
more so than the nameless ones he is quick to point at? After all, of the
nineteen living poets he chose to include in his anthology of "Innovators
and Outsiders," five men (or more than one fourth of the active writers)
have been, at one time or another, listed on the masthead of Sulfur. No
doubt Weinberger believes that the women poets listed on the masthead
of Sulfur (Marjorie Welish and Rachel Elau DuPlessis) aren't good
enough to be included in this anthology. But the reasons for his belief
need to be scrutinized.
I think the real reason that Weinberger left out Marjorie Welish and
Rachel Elau DuPlessis, not to mention the others I've named. is that he
simply can't read their work. They don't write poems that correspond to
his ideal poem, which must both address and uphold male culture in an
acceptable confluence of mythology, geography, history, and the exoti-
cizing view of the Other. It is quite telling that among the nineteen active
"... an urgent and uncompromising feel"
-Katie Donovan, Graph
"Paula Meehan is a poet of generation. Hers is
the voice of one sure in her knowing and sure in
her speaking of it. She addresses all humankind,
the liVing and the dead. Her language is strong
in sensual and sensuous imagery, and she is a
storyteller, a bard."
-Kate Newmann, The Irish Review
Robert Hass
Terrl] Tempest IIJilliams
luci Tapahonso
John Daniel
Brenda Hillman
Pam Houston
Sandra mcPherson
Garl] Snl]der
Eli2abeth Tallent
Presented by the Squaw Valley
Community of Writers and the
University of California, Davis.
Apply by May I I, 1994
Academic credit available.
To order The Man Who Was Marked By
Winter contact:
Eastern Washington University Press
Showalter Hall, Mail Stop 133
Eastern Washington University
Cheney, WA 99004-2496
(509) 359-4222; Fax: (509) 623-4381
Brochure &
Information
The Art ot the Wild
Dept ot English,
UC Davis
Davis, CA 95616
PAGE 48 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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LSD t Press
chronological limits. The fact that Stein wrote these poems decades be-
fore they were published, as well as the fact that she died in 1946, disqual-
ifies her from being included in this anthology. And yet, Weinberger has
stated: "Of the poets nowdeceased, more thanhalf died with most of their
work unpublished or out of print." Stein may have written these poems
years earlier, but their impact was not felt until they were first pub-
lished, which was after 1950. Because Weinberger has, in his essays,
drawn attention to poets whose work has not been, at one time or another,
widely available, because either unpublished or out of print, his use of
"chronological limits" seem suspicious if only because it ignores the real-
ity: some poets are dead when their work is published. History doesn't
follow the pattern of orderliness that Weinberger suggests exists.
Weinberger believes the birth of Modernist poetry originates with
Ezra Pound and his belief that the Self could become the Other; that he
could, for example, become a forlorn or abandoned woman living during
the T'ang dynasty. This is why Weinberger's exclusion of Gertrude
Stein is all the more disturbing. For while Pound practiced the aesthetics
of assimilation and appropriation, Stein insisted on articulating the
materials of resistance and difference.
Weinberger's claim that the birth of Modernism originated with
Pound enables him to construct a tidy patrilineal tradition, which can be
used to misrepresent many of the poets he has included, assimilating
second line may help deflect the charge that he's a sexist, but the poem's
inclusion in this anthology raises a question. Is "Studying Horses" more
important and necessary, or, as Weinberger might stress it, more inno-
vative and outside, and more in the "hubbub of conversation," than
poems by Kathleen Fraser, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Gertrude
Stein, and Rosmarie Waldrop?-all of whom have written about what is
important to consider after waking up from sleeping with the Other.
Kelly's poem is, chronologically speaking, the most recent poem to be
included in the anthology; it is the latest news Weinberger saw fit to
emphasize.
In terms of literature and its relationship to language usage and repre-
sentations of gender, what Weinberger proposes in this anthology is that
a man can become the Other, in this case a woman, but he has not allowed
a particularly wide range of women to speak. This is why the absence of
Gertrude Stein is so disturbing. When Stein died in 1946, much of her
poetry remained unpublished. In the 1950's, Yale University Press pub-
lished Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1953), and Stanzas in Meditation
and Other Poems (1956). The erotic sequence, "Lifting Belly" was in-
cluded in Bee Time Vine. It was included in the Yale Gertrude Stein (Yale
University Press, 1980) and was edited by Rebecca Marks in a single
volume, Lifting Belly (The Naiad Press, 1989). I don't think this
sequence (or much else) by Stein owes its existence to Pound. It is worth
remembering that Stein said something to the effect that "Pound is a vil-
lage explainer, which is fine if you're a village. But if not, not." Thus,
decades before Weinberger accused the "irradiated generation" of writ-
ing poems for a "community of like souls," Stein issued a very similiar
view of Pound.
The publication of Stein's work inspired strong and almost immediate
responses from Robert Duncan and John Ashbery, both of whom were
under forty at the time. In Duncan's Derivations (Fulcrum Press, 1968),
one comes across three large gatherings of poems, "Imitations of Ger-
trude Stein Imitations 1951-1952," "Writing Writing," and" Imitations
of Gertrude Stein 1953-1954." And one year after John Ashbery was se-
lected by W.H. Auden to be the Yale Younger Poet, he reviewed Stanzas
in Meditation in Poetry (July 1957). Both Duncan and Ashbery, along
with David Antin, John Ca&e, Clark Coolidge, Robert Kelly, Michael
Palmer, and Jerome Rothenberg (all of whom have honored Stein in one
way or another) are included in Weinberger's anthology; Stein is not. Nor
has Weinberger chosen any work by a woman who has been influenced
by Stein.
The publication of Stein's unpublished writings between 1951 and
1958 by Yale University Press is an important and influential event
which Weinberger has decided to ignore, because she does not fit into his
Writtrs
Rttreat-
June 19-25, 1994
NEW HARMONY, INDIANA
WORKSHOPS CONFERENCES WRITING TIME
In the historic setting of two 19th century utopias
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Science and Other Poems
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Winner of the 1993 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of
American Poets
In her first collection of verse, Alison Hawthorne
Deming establishes astonishing parallels between the
mute, inexorable processes of the physical universe
and the dark mysteries of the human heart. "I greatly
admire Alison Deming's lucid and precise language,
her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and
generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning....
I am amazed, and delighted, by her authority and her
tenaci ty. "--Gerald Stern
$17.95 cloth, $9.95 paper
Red and Yellow Boat
Poems by Anthony Petrosky
In his long-awaited second book, Anthony Petrosky,
winner of the 1982 Walt Whitman Award, deftlyjuggles
themes of class and family conflict, unity and brother-
hood, love, suffering, and transformation. "With this
book Petrosky affirms a profoundly redemptive talent.
It brings a smile of relief and gratitude that such an art
can happen."-David Ignatow
$15.95 cloth, $8.95 paper
Crossroads
. Poems by David R. Slavitt
In his twelfth book of original verse, David R. Slavitt
leads us to a crossroads where terror, loneliness, and
despair are transfigured by love and art. Throughout
this collection Slavitt's keen intelligence, wry humor,
and deep compassion shine through, revealing a poet
working at the peak of his powers. .
$15.95 cloth, $8.95 paper
For more information contact
Engl ish Department
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA
Evansville, Indiana 47712
812/464-1735 800/467-8600
MARCH/APRIL 1994
1993 National Book Award Finalist
The Vigil
A Poem in Four Voices
Margaret Gibson
"The poems [are) extraordinarily well crafted, conjuring clear, individual voices....
An admirable and compelling work."-Booklist
"Gibson's impressive ability with line and meter contribute greatly to the volume's
success. "-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
$19.95 cloth, $9.95 paper
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSIlY PRESS BatanRouge 70803
PAGE 49
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WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY PRESS
Phone 910-759-5448 / Fax 910-759-9831
Box 7333 / Winston-Salem, NC / 27109
The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems
Eilean Ni Chuilleamlin
64 pages cloth $15.95 (signed) paper $8.95
Nonfiction:
Richard Hawley,
Ron Powers
For information and
application materials,
please write to:
Mrs. Carol Knauss
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Middlebury College - APR
Middlebury VT 05753-6125
or call (802) 388-3711, Ext. 5286
Poetry: Marvin Bell, Michael Collier,
Carol Frost, Richard Jackson, Mark Jarman,
Donald Justice, Gary Margolis,
Paul Mariani, William Matthews,.
Jean Nordhaus, Carole Oles,
Robert Pack, Linda Pastan,
Lawrence Raab
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Special Guest Readers:
Iii Richard Ford,
John Irving
The 69th Annual
BREAD LOAF
WRITERS' CONFERENCE
August 9-21,1994
Robert Pack, Director
Fiction: Julia Alvarez, Elizabeth Arthur, Andrea Barrett,
Pinckney Benedict, Larry Brown, Rosellen Brown,
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Thomas Gavin, Philip Gerard, Ron Hansen,
Amy Hempel, Ann Hood, David Huddle, Margot Livesey,
Antonya Nelson, Bob Reiss, Dinitia Smith,
Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn, Nancy Willard, Hilma Wolitzer
Her eyes were gentle, her voice was soft for singing
In the stiff-backed pew, or on the porch when evening
CO'!les slowly over Atlanta. But she remembered.
She said: "After they cleaned out the saloons and the dives
The drunks and the loafers, they thought that they had better
Clean out the rest of us. And it was awful.
They snatched men off of street cars, beat up women.
Some of our men fought back and killed too. Still,
It wasn't their habit. And then the orders came
For the milishy, and the mob went home
And dressed up in their soldiers' uniforms,
And rushed back shooting just as wild as ever.
Some leaders told us to keep faith in the law,
In the govem9r; some did not keep that faith,
Some never had it; he was white, too, and the time
Was near election, and the rebs were mad.
The poem ends: "And then/ there wasn't a riot anymore."
"An Old Woman Remembers" was written over a "score of years"
before it was first published in 1963. On a simple level, the poem
reminds us that riots have been a recurring feature of race relationships
in America throughout the twentieth century, that the riots in t h ~ wake
of the Rodney King verdict were part of a long history. In 1975,
Broadside Press, Detroit, published The Last Ride of Wild Bill and
Eleven Narrative Poems, and in 1980, Michael Harper selected The
Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (Harper & Row) to appear in The
National Poetry Series. Brown is a major figure whom Weinberger com-
pletely ignores.
Brown's empathetic adherence to the woman's speech patterns, pro-
nunciation, and word usage is comparable to Charles Reznikoff's use of
between the end of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1940's and the
beginnings of the Black Nationalist movement in the 1960's. His
interest in blues, jazz, folk art and speech helped legitimize them in the
eyes of his students, as well as his contemporaries.
Brown (b. 1901), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), and Melvin Tolson
(1900-1966) were contemporaries. All three men brought aspects of jazz,
blues, and black speech into their poetry. All of them articulated a
complexly-textured music through language, the written. Thus, Wein-
berger is wrong when he states that the "Harlem Renaissance, with the
notable exception of Hughes, refused to admit African-American speech
into poetry." In direct contradiction to Weinberger's summary is
Brown's poem, "An Old Woman Remembers" (The Collected Poems of
Sterling A. Brown, Harper & Row, New York, 1980) which begins:
Ciaran Carson
is the winner
of the 1989
Irish Times/
Aer Lingus
Award for
Belfast Con-
fetti.
80 pages
cloth $13.95
paper $8.95
Ciaran Carson First Language
-Gerald Dawe,
Irish Times
First Language is
a spectacular
collection.... If
you buy only one
poetry book ...
this year, make
sure it's this one."
"Ciaran Carson's
them to a tradition to which they do not belong. I am thinking of John
Cage, William Everson, John Ashbery, and Clark Coolidge, none of
whom could be (or would even want to be) considered heirs of the
triumvirate of Pound, Williams, and H.D. The fact that Barbara Guest,
poet and author of Herself Defined: The Poet R.D. and Her World, is
absent suggests that Weinberger understands tradition to be patrilineal.
And because he understands tradition to be patrilineal, he did not stop to
consider the influence H.D. had on Barbara Guest and Ann Lauterbach,
for example. This is one of the primary faults of his anthology. The other
is his representation of African-American writing.
Both in his selection and in his accompanying essay, Weinberger fails
to acknowledge the importance of Sterling A. Brown, Henry Dumas,
Robert Hayden, Stephen Jonas, Bob Kaufman, Etheridge Knight,
Larry Neal, Lorenzo Thomas, Melvin Tolson, and Jay Wright. In
addition to being a major poet, Sterling A. Brown taught for more than
fifty years at Howard University and influenced numerous generations
of students, including Amiri Baraka, Stokeley Carmichael, and Ossie
Davis, among others. Brown taught courses in African-American
literature at a time when almost no one was teaching such courses at
black colleges, and certainly no one at all was doing so at so-called
mainstream (or white) schools-the kind of schools most of the poets in
this anthology attended. Brown is one of the most important bridges
Winner of the first T. S. ELIOT POETRY PRIZE
for most outstanding book of poetry published
in Britain or Ireland in the past year.
News of the World: Selected Poems
Peter Fallon
"Peter Fallon's poetry has become very tough and alive,
like a just-cut holly stick. Snappy and weighty. Very
strong, sharp savour - and where do you find that these
days." - TED HUGHES
79 pages cloth $13.95 paper $8.95
The Astrakhan Cloak
Poems in Irish by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
Translations by Paul Muldoon
112 pages cloth $15.95 paper $10.95
PAGE 50 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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court records of eyewitness accounts in Testimony and in Holocaust.
Both men wanted to enable the unassimilable Other-the marginalized,
scorned, and hated-to testify. Rather than speaking for the Other, they
found ways to have the Other speak. Almost all of Brown's poems were
published long after they were written. The larger impact his work had
(and we might want to remember Gertrude Stein's poems in this regard)
came later. And yet, as even a few lines of "An Old Woman Remembers"
make clear, the best of Brown's poems remain fresh and undated.
The variousness of language to be found in the poems of African-
American writers is absent from Weinberger's anthology. He states that
the decade of black nationalist poetry "brought in a great deal of African
and African-American history, mythology and religion previously
absent in American poetry," but doesn't offer us much in the way of
examples. The poems of Baraka's he picks are aggressive oral attacks.
Since Baraka is the only active African-American poet Weinberger has
included in his anthology, I am led to believe that his vision of an African-
American is as limiting as Pound's vision of the Chinese; African-Ameri-
cans are angry screamers, rather than reticent fatalists. Weinberger's
choices of poems by Hughes and Baraka indicate that he believes in the
Western assumption that orality is far more authentic than writing.
The supposed connection between orality and truth can be traced back
to Plato and Aristotle. However, by valorizing orality and performance
in African-American poetry at the expense of all else, Weinberger up-
holds a degrading view of African-Americans and African-American
literature; they can talk jive, but they can't write. They can swear, but
they can't spell. This is the liberal, postwar update of Rousseau's notion
of the relationship between the pure self and corrupt society, as well as
the valorization of the Noble Savage. Rousseau believed that, while
society corrupted the individual, the individual could recover aspects of
a purer self. Rousseau's belief in the possibility of achieving a state of
purity is not only one of the cornerstones of Romanticism, but it also
anticipates Modernism's notion of recovering the "archaic self."
For Weinberger, the "most vital movement" of the 1960's-the Viet-
nam Era-"emphasized oral performance and poetry rituals and talis-
mans"; it was based on the "archaic." It should be pointed out that the
academic poems he rails against, the kind which are nothing more than
"reminiscences of summer camp," are really nothing more than bland
versions of the self as archaic being or Noble Savage. Purity, as everyone
by now should know, is a major American obsession. And all too often,
the "archaic self" is a product of the avant-garde's fixation on recover-
ing the pure or noble self; it is the elitist, hedonistic version of advertise-
ment's puritanical call for breath freshener, soap, and spot remover, a
way of slumming both in history and among the Others.
The reason Weinberger excludes the work of other African-American
poets is that they don't conform to his view of what constitutes
authenticity; they aren't black enough, because they don't scream,
stamp, or shout the blues. Weinberger's view of African-American liter-
ature is both simplistic and reductive. Thus, an African-American poet
who prefers literacy to orality, singing (disparate things woven together)
to speech (something which immediately communicates its message), is
a person to be distrusted. And an African-American poet who subverts
both the authenticity of orality and literacy must be mad. Thus, Jay
Wright and Bob Kaufman, two poets who emerged in the 1960's, are
excluded.
The following is a short poem from Jay Wright's Elaine's Book
(University Press of Virginia, 1988):
CORNELIA STREET
You compromise with size when you step around
the comer from Bleecker, or when you come from the opposite end,
taking that little dogleg left just as you pass Sixth Avenue.
A couple of trees cinch the street at the waist.
There is always an Italian dough and chicory air
in its hair.
SQ!)AW VALLEY COMMUNITY OF WRITERS
POETRY WORKSHOP
JULY 24 - JULY 31, 1994
LUCILLE CLIFTON
RICHARD HOWARD
GALWAY KINNELL
LUCI TAPAHONSO
Participants in the Poetry Program are asked to spend much of the time
writing. Only new work is discussed in the morning workshop. The idea is
to try to expand the boundaries of what one can say. There are afternoon craft
sessions. Deadline for submission of manuscript: May 10.
Call or write for a Brochure: (415) 389-5931 or (916) 583-5200
S.V.C.W. P.O. Box 2352 Olympic Valley, CA 96146
PRESENTING THE NEWEST COLUMBIA
GENERATION'S DEFINITIVE OVERVIEW OF POETRY IN ENGLISH
AT BEITER BOOKSTORES - CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED
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DiI1Ilcr (served at Someplace Special, included In registration)
Reading by Li-Young Lee
Wine and Cheese Reception following
Adults, $30 in advance, $35 at the door, Seniors
and Students, $20 in advance, $25 at the door.
Martins Feny Public Library
P.O. Box 130
Martins Feny, OH 43935
(614) 633-0314 Fax (614) 633-0935
Ohio Arts Council, Martins Feny Public Library,
Eastern Ohio Arts Council, Ohio University.
2:30
3:30
5:30
7:00
Registration
Sponsors
ForDetaiIs
Friday, April 15, 7:00 p.m.
7:00 Remarks, Annie Wright
7:30 Reading by Jean Valentine
8:30 Open Mike (please limit your selections to 5 minutes)
Wine and Cheese Reception
Saturday, April 16
11:00 Discussions on Contemporary Literature
12:00 Lunch (served at library, induded in registration)
1:30 Reading James Wright's Work
Li-YoungLee and Jean Valentine
Readings by Regional Poets
TBA
14th Annual
JAMESWRIGHT
April 1516, 1994
U-YOung Lee 'i JeanValentine
POETRY FESTIVAL
1MOW MtH oNno8 oNV SlImOO11118WnlQ)
YOUROWN POET'S CORNeR
THE COLUMBIA HISTORY
OF BRITISH POETRY
CARL WOODRING, EDITOR
James Shapiro, Associate Editor
700 pp / $59.95 cloth
This magmficent new history assimilates and interprets thirteen centuries of British
poetry, sweeping from Beowulf to Seamus Heaney to map the poetical landscape of
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Rethinking the boundaries of British poetry,
critics reexamine the individual achievements of poets as well as the movements in genre
and politics that shaped their worlds. Highlights include Margaret Anne Doody on
eighteenth-century poetry; Jerome McGann on Romanticism; Calvin Bedient on Yeats,
Lawrence, and Eliot; and Edna Longley on contemporary Irish, Scottish, and Welsh poetry.
8
;;;:
8
,..
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=o
=
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""
THE COLUMBIAHISTORY
rn OF AMERICAN POETRY
JAY PARINI, EDITOR
Brett Millier; Associate Editor
800 pp / $59.95 cloth
Parini's book captures the spirit of American poetry: its search and struggle for individual
as well as national identity. America's best, contemporary critics begin with
the Puritans and end with the visionary poetics of our time, including thorough
discussions of African American and Native American poetry. Highlights Helen
Vendler on Wallace Stevens; Diane Wood Middlebrook on confessional poetry; Arnold
Rampersad on the Harlem Renaissance; and Dana Gioia on Longfellow.
MARCH/APRIL 1994 PAGE 51
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Cornelia, coming from Cornelius.
Not much manure for berries in that one.
There used to be a cafe, about here,
where country scribblers shook out their city aches
among the cups.
Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus,
mother of the Gracchi and of Sempronia,
as proud of her family jewels as of letters.
Here she lies, just a heartbeat away
from the tombs of city benches,
where old Sicilians gnash the vowels
of a song she can never learn to sing.