ou can write about pigs," is the advice David Lee heard from John, a wise and unlettered pig farmer in Utah. And write Lee did, while creating a collection of narratives and epic tales about the rural Southwest. Using the direct and uncompromising impact of common talk, Porcine Canticlesa lyrical tribute to the indomitability of the human heart, a rare book of poems that "reads like a good novel."--Western American Literature
"One can only wish for more poets like David Lee."--Chowder Review Set in the American Southwest, So Quietly the Earth is a book of landscape meditations on philosophical, theological and environmental issues. Radically departing from his justly famous narratives of rural life, David Lee weaves the archetypal elements of earth, fire, water, and air throughout his poems as he explores spiritual connections to the natural world. David Lee, author of 15 books of poems, was named Utah's first Poet Laureate and in 2001 was a finalist for the United States Poet Laureate. A former seminary candidate, semi-pro baseball player and hog farmer, he recently retired as the head of the languages and literature department at Southern Utah University.
Inside a truck in rural Utah, a pig farmer tells his young friend "Turn right up there / and get off these pavements." What follows are cold beers and the monologue of a semiliterate man telling his heart's tale. The interweaving stories--caustic, hilarious and heart-rending--create one of the most haunting and accomplished poems of our time. Driving and Drinking takes about an hour to read. It will stay with you a lifetime.
The poetry of rural Utah. In Prelude, he writes: "I go home every day / don't matter where I am / I'm the prodigal son coming back / I don't even need a Greyhound bus / I can go to my town right now / right here talking to you / because this / is everywhere / I've ever been."
Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.
Treays looks at life in a town through the e yes of Ted, a young boy, and introduces the basic concepts o f human and social geography. Fold-out pages reveal cross-se ctions of buildings, and help to encourage map-reading skill s '
Richard Neuse here explores the relationship between two great medieval epics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He argues that Dante's attraction for Chaucer lay not so much in the spiritual dimension of the Divine Comedy as in the human. Borrowing Bertolt Brecht's phrase "epic theater," Neuse underscores the interest of both poets in presenting, as on a stage, flesh and blood characters in which readers would recognize the authors as well as themselves. As spiritual autobiography, both poems challenge the traditional medieval mode of allegory, with its tendency to separate body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus Neuse demonstrates that Chaucer and Dante embody a humanism not generally attributed to the fourteenth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well. The Poet's Companion presents brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing, each followed by distinctive writing exercises. The ups and downs of writing life—including self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.
