{"product_id":"poems-of-the-american-south-isbn-9780375712449","title":"Poems of the American South","description":"This one-of-a-kind collection of poems about the American South ranges over four centuries of its dramatic history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions. \u003ci\u003ePoems of the American South \u003c\/i\u003eincludes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, and Donald Justice, and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.Foreword \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSONGS OF FREEDOM \u003cbr\u003e\"Bound for Canaan Land\"\u003cbr\u003e\"Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Had\"\u003cbr\u003e\"The Good Old Way\"\u003cbr\u003e\"Go to Sleep\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eLOOKOUTS \u003cbr\u003eHart Crane, \"Southern Cross\"\u003cbr\u003eLangston Hughes, \"The South\" \u003cbr\u003eRita Dove, \"Reverie in Open Air\"\u003cbr\u003eNatasha Trethewey, \"Pastoral\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTAR HEEL AND PALMETTO \u003cbr\u003eFrancis Scott Key, \"Defence of Fort McHenry\" \u003cbr\u003eA. R. Ammons, \"Easter Morning\" \u003cbr\u003eLucille Clifton, \"at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989\" \u003cbr\u003eKathryn Stripling Byer, \"Night Fishing\" \u003cbr\u003eAtsuro Riley, \"Diorama\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eCRITTERS \u003cbr\u003eSidney Lanier, \"The Mocking Bird\"\u003cbr\u003eMadison Cawein, \"The Whippoorwill\"\u003cbr\u003eDonald Justice, \"Southern Gothic\"\u003cbr\u003eJames Dickey, \"The Heaven of Animals\"\u003cbr\u003eHenry Taylor, \"Riding Lesson\"\u003cbr\u003eMichael Collier, \"Turkey Vultures\"\u003cbr\u003eWilliam Logan, \"Zero Hour\"\u003cbr\u003eNatasha Trethewey, \"Flounder\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eVOLUNTEERS AND BLUEGRASS \u003cbr\u003eFrancis Orray Ticknor, \"Little Giffen\" \u003cbr\u003eNikki Giovanni, \"Knoxville, Tennessee\" \u003cbr\u003eJames Seay, \"Audubon Drive, Memphis\" \u003cbr\u003eMaurice Manning, \"Sad and Alone\" \u003cbr\u003eBobby C. Roger, \"Jerry Lee Lewis Plays 'That Lucky Old Sun' at Bad Bob’s Vapors Club, Memphis, Tennessee\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWARTIME \u003cbr\u003eHerman Melville, \"Shiloh\" \u003cbr\u003eHenry Timrod, \"Charleston\" \u003cbr\u003eMargaret Junkin Preston, “Under the Shade of the Trees” \u003cbr\u003eJames Dickey, \"Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek\" \u003cbr\u003eCharles Wright, \"My Own Little Civil War\" \u003cbr\u003eNatasha Trethewey, \"Elegy for the Native Guards\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBAYOUS AND THE LONE STAR \u003cbr\u003eWalt Whitman, \"I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing\"  \u003cbr\u003eDave Smith, \"Drycleaners\" \u003cbr\u003eW. S. Di Piero, \"Fat Tuesday\" \u003cbr\u003eNaomi Shihab Nye, \"Going for Peaches, Fredericksburg, Texas\" \u003cbr\u003eAi, \"The Singers\" \u003cbr\u003eSandra Cisneros, \"You Bring Out the Mexican in Me\" \u003cbr\u003eRay Gonzalez, \"Rattlesnakes Hammered on the Wall\" \u003cbr\u003eAndrei Codrescu, \"Virgin Mule\" \u003cbr\u003eYusef Komunyakaa, \"Immolatus\" \u003cbr\u003eAdam Zagajewski, \"Houston, 6 p.m.\" \u003cbr\u003eDavid Biespiel, \"To Sylvester from Terminal B\" \u003cbr\u003eGreg Glazner, The Animal Intelligences\" \u003cbr\u003eKevin Young, \"Ode to Boudin\" \u003cbr\u003eHenry Hughes, \"Since the City Turned Blue\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eA CLOUD OF WITNESSES \u003cbr\u003eSidney Lanier, \"A Ballad of Trees and the Master\" \u003cbr\u003ePaul Laurence Dunbar, \"Sympathy\"\u003cbr\u003eEdgar Allan Poe, \"Sonnet: To Silence\" \u003cbr\u003eRobert Penn Warren, \"Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A.\" \u003cbr\u003eWendell Berry, \"Manifestor: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front\"\u003cbr\u003eEtheridge Knight, \"The Warden Said to Me the Other Day\" \u003cbr\u003eSonia Sanchez, \"I Have Walked a Long Time\" \u003cbr\u003eC. D. Wright, \"Remarks on Color\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eYELLOWHAMMER, MAGNOLIA, AND THE NATURAL STATE \u003cbr\u003eLangston Hughes, \"Birmingham Sunday\" \u003cbr\u003eEtheridge Knight, \"The Idea of Ancestry\" \u003cbr\u003eAndrew Hudgins, \"Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women\" \u003cbr\u003eRodney Jones, \"Sweep\" \u003cbr\u003eC. D. Wright, \"The Ozark Odes\" \u003cbr\u003eFleda Brown, \"The Farthest North Southern Town\" \u003cbr\u003eFrank Stanford, \"The Gospel Bird\" \u003cbr\u003eStanley Plumly, \"Four Hundred Mourners\" \u003cbr\u003eNatasha Trethewey, \"Providence\" \u003cbr\u003eGeoffrey Brock, \"Trip Hop\" \u003cbr\u003eHonoree Jeffers, \"Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Her Cousin \u003cbr\u003eLady Elizabeth Murray, c. 1779\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBEAUS AND BELLES \u003cbr\u003eLangston Hughes, \"Song for a Dark Girl\" \u003cbr\u003eJohn Crowe Ransom, \"Piazza Piece\" \u003cbr\u003eEleanor Ross Taylor, \"Pause, In Flight\" \u003cbr\u003eDavid Huddle, \"Burned Man\" \u003cbr\u003eC. D. Wright, \"Everything Good Between Men and Women\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eMOUNTAINS AND THE OLD DOMINION \u003cbr\u003eMuriel Rukeyser, \"The Soul and Body of John Brown\" \u003cbr\u003eCharles Wright, \"A Short History of the Shadow\" \u003cbr\u003eGregory Orr, \"Virginia Backyard: July\" \u003cbr\u003eBob Hicok, \"In the Loop\" \u003cbr\u003eMaggie Anderson, \"Sonnet for Her Labor\" \u003cbr\u003eDavid Huddle, \"Roanoke Pastorale\" \u003cbr\u003eWendy Willis, \"More Notes on the Theory of American Degeneracy\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSUNSHINE AND PEACHES \u003cbr\u003eWalt Whitman, \"Orange Buds by Mail from Florida\" \u003cbr\u003eWallace Stevens, \"The Idea of Order at Key West\" \u003cbr\u003eJan Toomer, \"Georgia Dusk\" \u003cbr\u003eAmy Clampitt, \"Discovery\" \u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Bishop, \"Florida\" \u003cbr\u003eDavid Bottoms, \"Under the Vulture Tree\" \u003cbr\u003eDebora Greger, \"My First Mermaid\" \u003cbr\u003eCampbell McGrath, \"Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-mart on New Year’s Day\" \u003cbr\u003eJoe Bolton, \"Tropical Courtyard\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eDESTINATIONS AND TENDER MERCIES \u003cbr\u003eMary McNeil Fenollosa, \"The Magnolia\" \u003cbr\u003eLangston Hughes, \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" \u003cbr\u003eDonald Justice, \"The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns\" \u003cbr\u003eTino Villanueva, \"Haciendo Apenas la Recoleccion\" \u003cbr\u003ePhillis Levin, \"Elegy for a Magnolia\" \u003cbr\u003eChristian Wiman, \"Rhymes for a Watertower\" \u003cbr\u003ePeter Campion, \"Danielle\" \u003cbr\u003eTerrance Hayes, \"The Blue Terrance\"\u003cb\u003eDAVID BIESPIEL\u003c\/b\u003e is a poet who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Houston, Texas, and educated at Boston University, University of Maryland, and Stanford University. He is the founder of the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, an independent literary studio, and he teaches creative writing at Oregon State University. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Stegner fellowship, and serves as a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Foreword\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo other region in America is as mythologized as the South. It can at times be a troubled narration. The South was founded on a scheme of brutal slavery, aggrieved by civil war, glorified by a false lost cause, and shackled to legalized racial segregation. A Southerner’s soul-searching has long been one of agitation and anguish, chagrin and disquiet, a harrowed and mortified and tormented weave.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Running boldly beneath that narrative, on the other hand, is a heartbeat of liberty and equity too: the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the White Sulphur Manifesto, the Underground Railroad and the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Letter from Birmingham Jail.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e These histories have now met a new, defining reality in the South, a phenomenon prevalent across the United states. The white baby-boom generation is nearing retirement and the new generation of Southerners is made up of a growing population of African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and people of all races, blended into a melting pot of accelerating economic change. This demographic shift is at the root of a renewed vibrancy in political life in the American South, and it is at the root of a renewed vibrancy in the poetry of the American South as well. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But the South’s self-mythologizing is not just restricted to economic and political history. Southern culture is American culture. Southerners are proud of inventing American music – jazz and the blues, bluegrass and the gospel, country and western and zydeco. Southerners are proud of inventing a diverse American cuisine – corn bread and shoofy and succotash, grits and chicken fried steak, BBQ, bourbon, and red-eye gravy.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When it comes to ruminating and swapping stories about the South, Southerners will bless and eulogize, fret and lionize, despair and glorify. As a Texan, I dearly love my home state with all its perplexing and incongruities. I consider my love, as Molly Ivins once put it, “a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e These dynamic renditions of the South evoke country swamps and suburban malls, lost byways and ten-lane freeways, rednecks and yuppies and snowbirds. Given the ease with which one can summon the totems of the South, and given the way that the culture and history of the South serves as an emotional lightning rod across the nation, at times unfairly, it’s worth asking what can be said about the South that hasn’t been said already?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e And yet: even if it seems that nothing new can be said, that’s precisely where poetry steps in. More to the point, poetry \u003ci\u003emust\u003c\/i\u003e step in because poetry’s calling is to say the new thing. It is the art of finding new words in new orders. It is poetic utterance that dramatizes afresh the inner consciousness and outer stories of our existence.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This ambition holds true for the poetry of the American South as well. Here I mean to empathize the \u003ci\u003eof\u003c\/i\u003e and not just the \u003ci\u003eSouth\u003c\/i\u003e in that formulation. This anthology begins with the hymns and rhythms of enslaved people who were shipped to this continent four hundred years ago against their will. Enslaved Africans brought with them the roots of American poetry and, as a consequence, there’s been an ingrained sensibility about the tragedy of human bondage in Southern literature; as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e If these essential poems of enslaved Africans, which date back to the eighteenth century, present a profound moral stance on subjugation and deliverance, the poetry written b nineteenth–century Southern poets is marked by piousness baked into inflated nostalgia. These are voices that burn for the doomed Confederacy, pine for antebellum mush, and are filled to the brim with patriotic crap.","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303075533029,"sku":"NP9780375712449","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375712449.jpg?v=1767734911","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/poems-of-the-american-south-isbn-9780375712449","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}