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failing marriage. In Glück’s memorable The Wild Iris (1992), different kinds of flowers utter short metaphysical monologues. The book’s title poem, an exploration of resurrection, could be an epigraph for Glück’s work as a whole. The wild iris, a gorgeous deep blue flower growing from a bulb that lies dormant all winter, says: “It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth.” Like Jorie Graham’s vision of the self merged in the snowstorm, Glück’s poem ends with a vision of world and self merged — this time in the water of life, blue on blue: You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice; from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater. Like Graham, Glück merges the self into the world through a fluid imagery of water. While Graham’s frozen water — snow — resembles sand, the earth ground up at the sea’s edge, Glück’s blue fresh water — signifying her heart — merges with the salt sea of the world. CHARLES WRIGHT Photo © Nancy Crampton 125 THE POETRY OF PLACE number of poets — these are not groups, but nationwide tendencies — find deep inspiration in specific landscapes. Instances are Robert Hass’s lyrical evocations of Northern California, Mark Jarman’s Southern California coastlines and memories of surfing, Tess Gallagher’s poems set in the Pacific Northwest, and Simon Ortiz’s and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poems emanating from southwestern landscapes. Each subregion has inspired poetry: C.D. (Carolyn) Wright’s hardscrabble upper South is far from Yusef Komunyakaa’s humid Louisiana Gulf. Poetry of place is not based on landscape description; rather, the land, and its history, is a generative force implicated in the way its people, including the poet, live and think. The land is felt as what D.H. Lawrence called a “spirit of place.” A Charles Wright (1935- ) One of the most moving poets of place is Charles Wright. Raised in Tennessee, Wright is a cosmopolitan southerner. He draws on Italian and ancient Chinese poetry, and infuses his work with southern themes such as the burden of a tragic past, seen in his poetic series “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” which is based on the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. His works include Country Music: Selected Early Poems (l982); Chickamauga (1995); and Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000). Wright’s intense poetry offers
moments of spiritual insight rescued, or rather constructed, from the ravages of time and circumstance. A purposeful awkwardness — seen in his unexpected turns of colloquial phrase and preference for long, broken lines with odd numbers of syllables — endows his poems with a burnished grace, like that of gnarled old farm tools polished with the wear of hands. This handmade, earned, sometimes wry quality makes Wright’s poems feel contemporary and prevents them from seeming pretentious. The disparity between transcendent vision and human frailty lies at the heart of Wright’s vision. He is drawn to grand themes — stars, constellations, history — on the one hand, and to tiny tactile elements — fingers, hairs — on the other. His title poem “Chickamauga” relies on the reader’s knowledge: Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 19 and 20, 1862, was the scene of a decisive battle in the U.S. Civil War between the North and the South. The South failed to destroy the Union (northern) army and opened a way for the North’s scorched-earth invasion of the South via Atlanta, Georgia. “Chickamauga” can be read as a meditation on landscape, but it is also an elegiac lament and the poet’s ars poetica. It begins with a simple observation: “Dove-twirl in the tall grass.” This seeming idyll is the moment just before a hunter shoots; the slain soldiers, never mentioned in the poem, have been forgotten, mowed down like doves or grass. The “conked magnolia tree” undercuts the romantic “midnight and magnolia” stereotype of the antebellum-plantation South. The poem merges present and past in a powerful epitaph for lost worlds and ideals. Dove-twirl in the tall grass. End-of-summer glaze next door On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree. Work sounds: truck back-up-beep, wood tinhammer, cicada, fire horn. _____ History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Mid-morning, late-century light calicoed under the peach trees. Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. ______ The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, Absolute, incommunicado, unhoused and peregrine. _____ The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in One by one into its suffocating light and air. _____ Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax And grammar a catechist, Their words what the beads say, words thumbed to our discontent. The poem sees history as a construct, a “code with no message.” Each individual exists in itself, unknowable outside its own terms and time, “not the mask but the face underneath.” Death is inevitable for us as for the fallen soldiers, the Old South, and the caught fish. Nevertheless, poetry offers a partial consolation: Our articulated discontent may yield a measure of immortality. THE POETRY OF FAMILY An even more grounded strain of poetry locates the poetic subject in a matrix of belonging — to family, community, and changing traditions. Often the traditions called into play are ethnic or international. A few poets, such as Sharon Olds (1942- ), expose their own unhealed wounds, resorting to the confessional mode, but most contemporary poets write with an affection that, however rueful, is nonetheless genuine. Stephen Dunn 126
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Outline of AMERICAN LITERATURE ❦
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The following text materials may no
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special songs for children’s game
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Painting courtesy Smithsonian Insti
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he accepted his lifelong job as a m
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solo trip in 1704 from Boston to Ne
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mon, “Sinners in the Hands of an
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CHAPTER 2 DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS AND RE
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should look out for themselves. Bad
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of a Horse the Rider was lost, bein
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translate Homer. Dwight’s epic wa
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Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)
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ness, and they became legends in th
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CHAPTER 3 THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820
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physical self-discovery. For the Ro
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great detail, is a concrete metapho
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Whitman’s voice electrifies even
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anti-slavery poems such as “Ichab
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CHAPTER 4 THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820
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cratic families: “The truth is, t
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emanates from the Book of Genesis i
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of ratiocination, or reasoning. The
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has become legendary: I have plough
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looked until recently. The same can
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the weak or vulnerable individual.
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falling tree, and every lick makes
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Edel calls James’s first, or “i
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who had lived a century earlier. Pr
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the quiet poverty, loneliness, and
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TWO WOMEN REGIONAL NOVELISTS Noveli
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CHAPTER 6 MODERNISM AND EXPERIMENTA
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more technological, and more mechan
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erary and social traditions for the
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(1935), and Parts of a World (1942)
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themes of Greek tragedy set in the
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Fra
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where he lived most of his life. Fa
Page 75 and 76: John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Like Sin
Page 77 and 78: ZORA NEALE HURSTON Photo © Carl Va
Page 79 and 80: (1928), a winner of the Pulitzer Pr
Page 81 and 82: TRADITIONALISM Traditional writers
Page 83 and 84: ground melody. It was experimental
Page 85 and 86: John Berryman (1914-1972) John Berr
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Page 93 and 94: Acoma, New Mexico. A central text i
Page 95 and 96: Americans, from Harper (a college p
Page 97 and 98: At the opposite end of the theoreti
Page 99 and 100: Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) Robe
Page 101 and 102: was set in Mexico during the revolu
Page 103 and 104: ful people whose inner faults and d
Page 105 and 106: veiled account of the life of Bello
Page 107 and 108: (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Fal
Page 109 and 110: eing reported. In The Electric Kool
Page 111 and 112: own phrase) in negotiating the chao
Page 113 and 114: the sweep of time from the end of t
Page 115 and 116: vivid, and often comic novel is a s
Page 117 and 118: sister discovers her inner strength
Page 119 and 120: paths of life in his early years, f
Page 121 and 122: acism and adopted the surname of hi
Page 123 and 124: Bishop, generally considered the fi
Page 125: arate vantage point. As in a film
Page 129 and 130: the city in which I love you. And I
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Page 133 and 134: Billy Collins (1941- ) The most inf
Page 135 and 136: in a musicians’ “jam session.
Page 137 and 138: CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LI
Page 139 and 140: with private lives. Influenced by T
Page 141 and 142: ecognition for her Crimes of the He
Page 143 and 144: Kennedy as an explosion of frustrat
Page 145 and 146: Coast. Cotton and the plantation cu
Page 147 and 148: tle, open-ended fiction; recent vol
Page 149 and 150: nature essayist Rick Bass (1958- ),
Page 151 and 152: AMY TAN Photo: Associated Press / G
Page 153 and 154: Sherman Alexie (1966- ), a Spokane/
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Page 159 and 160: GLOSSARY Faust: A literary characte
Page 161 and 162: GLOSSARY Poet Laureate: An individu
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Page 165 and 166: INDEX Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) 60,
Page 167 and 168: INDEX Cummings, Edward Estlin (e.e.
Page 169 and 170: INDEX Golden Apples, The (Eudora We
Page 171 and 172: INDEX Kumin, Maxine 90, 130 Kushner
Page 173 and 174: INDEX “Negro Speaks of Rivers, Th
Page 175 and 176: INDEX Seascape (Edward Albee) 117 S
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INDEX Waiting (Ha Jin) 155 Waiting
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE / BUREAU O
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