Introduction: the Problem With Names
Ecological writing is now a genre of it’s own. Any Google search of the term produces a dozen results of journals publishing exclusively writing which only concerns Ecology. Technology has influenced writers to the extent that instead of writerly issues common to all people, the writers of this genre seem to express a desire to not only write about the impeding problems common to natural environments on a global scale, but also a deep desire to remove themselves from society. Even the television programs of this type emphasize living off-grid, self-sustainability or place odd emphasis on ambiguous ideas like freedom. I don’t have any quarrel with such writers, it’s just there seems to be a problem with names. Eco-writing isn’t called “nature writing” anymore, though sometimes Appalachian writing tends to draw this label. To be published as a writer in one of these journals, it takes more than just using nature as the setting for the work. Before we ever thought about acid rain or global warming and had the scientists to bring it to our attention, even before we thought about methods of farming used by our ancestors to help us live more economically within our means, the self and its relation to society was a fairly common issue writers seemed to be engaging. It seems to me that in recent times, there has been a great push toward exclusivity and identity. However, the universal problem of the COVID 19 pandemic may have helped to undercut this, though it is too early to predict how this will truly influence writing.
When I began to study poetry in a formal, university program, my writers of choice were all post-war writers who lived into the early 21st century. The whole point of this group has been a thrust of the attention inward as a conscious decision to reflect on current events and the place of the individual in history. The post-war poets who were themselves military veterans or people who served in a related capacity, gave us a poetry of inwardness that was able to adjust itself to whatever situation the writer happened to be experiencing. The mindset driven inward does not matter if the poet exists as some pristine example of cultural norms. The poets of inwardness, historically, are just as mixed as the rest of us today. Still, we can only speak for ourselves. It does not matter if we read about anything controversial or poems that are just as inward that are purely about nature-consciousness.. Dylan Thomas’s “The Force That Through the Green Fuse, Drives the Flower,” Galway Kinnell’s “Flower-herding on Mount Monadnock” or James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” are classic examples of an eco-consciousness that did not sell itself as such when they were originally published. These poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the American movement few actually consider as being representative of this type of thinking. All American poetry at and after the turn-of-the-century, exemplify an eco-poetry because they center on inwardness of the self in relation to society and turning from the ways of thinking during the Industrial Age that did not work for humanity. They turned toward a more personal, yet universal vision of the self as part of the natural environment. These poets remind us that it is not Science that is the great evil, but mankind’s irresponsible use of Science that has contributed to the great evil’s of the age. If there is to be a genre designated as we have seen in many journals that have taken up the moniker, ‘journal of Eco-Writing,’ they must first consider the history of American poetry they exclude simply because these words were not used as descriptions in the very beginning of poetry in America. Terms have always been a problem, though they have never stalled the effort to understand groups. However, once the terms are understood in a better historical perspective which is inclusive of those writing from generation to generation, a better definition and clearer understanding can be reached of what eco-writing really is.
Publishing poetry has drastically changed since the 1980s. That was the time in which I became more politically aware as a student and began to write. In the 1990s during college, no one ever spoke in judgment of the workshop for creative writing. The teaching poet was a long-range goal of the educational program itself meant to edify student character through exposure and study of diverse, writerly types. The purpose of our efforts was to improve skills and intellect through conscious rigor in research and writing. In “To the Roots: An Interview with Galway Kinnell” he says
To some degree or another we have all been rendered into what you might call “technological beings.” We are part of a technological society consecrated to controlling, using and disposing of the natural. This is a part of the consciousness we all have. Poetry simply can’t spring from out of that consciousness, therefore writing is more difficult. But if poetry has any function, it is to return oneself and perhaps even others to a sense of their natural beings. (Boyers 251)
The teaching of poetry for us, seemed like a natural, unquestioned transition. I say “us,” because most students in our classes entered those courses with a lack of awareness of the political aspects of the workshop teaching vocation. At least those political aspects pertaining to the questioning of the quality and character of the writing produced and the nature of the program. I came away from this experience without completing the program. After teaching in the public education system for twelve years and publishing poetry and nonfiction prose for the past two and one-half years, I have a different perspective on the relationship between poet and society. The idea of the teaching poet is not as important to me as it once was. In one sense a great levelling of the publishing industry has taken place. There are perhaps more than half as many electronic and print journals publishing emerging and established writers than five to ten years ago. In the 2018 Duotrope’s, “Duotrope by the Numbers” section, the website lists 7,073 collectively listed publication markets. On the same site, listed in statistics for genre sections, there are listed 3, 546 markets for poetry. The internet has made the process of submissions cost-effective and efficient. Many journals do not charge a reading fee and more and more are notifying writers sooner than the four to six month waiting period required for editorial decisions. Donald Hall published “Poetry and Ambition” in Kenyon Review in 1983. In this important essay, he said that at that time there were ten times more publishing opportunities for ambitious writers trying to break into print. Four decades now separate my essay from each of the above sources; approximately forty-five years. Since the invention of the internet, this number has multiplied dramatically. The thing that he attacks in that critical and important essay is the quality of poetry being published. Regardless of this somewhat detached and indifferent attitude, the political dimension of writing through inwardness to achieve self-definition is an idea I feel central to writing in a global sense. Whether or not there exist techniques or attributes of poetry of this quality remains a debatable idea. If there exists a moral mission of writing, that mission and ideology exist in a humanistic sense and risk cultural exclusivity when making certain claims through critical writing. Formalist poetics, for example, or writing advocating cultural exclusivity. Historically, Cleanth Brooks risks at times a similar mistake when he tells us the purpose of literature is to edify through a moral mission of religion. Here we risk losing objectivity and become propagandists.
A poet must be conscious of his writing and background. Education compels reflection upon a wide survey of both past and current writing. The poet’s intuition and artistic goals remain equally relevant. I was educated in high school and college primarily to utilize the methods of the New Critics in research and explication of poetry. College life, socially as well as professionally, exposes one to multiple approaches to life and literature. The multiple reading approaches for critical writing and research began to expand in the 1980s and were further developed in the 1990s. I enjoy reading and learning about new ideas. When I was in college, I found so much of interest that it actually delayed progress and hindered focus because I seemed to be always reading across disciplines and genres. Having been born in a different time and with strong, cultural pluralist, union values, it is from part of that sense and spirit that I came to write. I previously refer to this as ‘traditional, liberal conservative, democrat,’ though all politically loaded language begs oxymoronic interpretations. I was raised in a working-class, moderately pluralistic community in Mason County, West Virginia, however, I do not share the old, Southern Agrarian vision of the Fugitive poets. Many people today don’t even realize who they were or what their significance is even today. W.D. Snodgrass writes in “Finding a Poem” that
the only reality which a man can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being, though he only know that self through its interactions with the world around it. If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejoices this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will be his words. (In Radical Pursuit 32)
I realize that literary works do not exist in a vacuum. We are all influenced by cultural and political events and ideas, though I distrust literary theories and thoughts that become infused with ideological agendas—political or social propaganda. For myself, poetry will always exist as a document of human experience, though primarily as a work of art.
I have no political agenda as a poet, scholar or educator. I don’t even really claim to be an Appalachian poet, though I admire the work of Fred Chappel, Robert Morgan, Irene McKinney, James Dickey and those considered Appalachian poets. I have recently been included in an anthology on contemporary, Appalachian nature writing, though consistent with our age, the editors have struggled finding an adequate title to reflect the identity of this region. I am a white, single, heterosexual, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, liberal, democrat. I am a cultural pluralist in terms of general social orientation. Regardless of whether you’re a teaching poet or someone writing on your own, eventually the practice of writing will enter the public arena. Answering the question of the relationship between poet and society, Robert Penn Warren writes in “Poetry and Selfhood” that poetry is
a sovereign antidote, for passivity. For the basic fact about poetry is that which demands participation, from the secret physical echo in muscle and nerve that identifies us with the medium, to the imaginative enactment that stirs the deepest recesses where life-will and values reside. Beyond that, it nourishes our life-will in the process of testing our values. (Democracy and Poetry 89-90)
This entering or “emerging,” is inevitably political because of the varied nature and background of the reading and writing population. More-so, the American university is in and of itself a political machine with its own norms, culture and hierarchical structure and influences. For the poet, the university remains the primary influence because of its educational role of preserving past intellectual achievements and the mission of nurturing innovative knowledge through technology and debate. The study of literature is even more susceptible to such technological influence even today. The location of the forums for the publication of research and informed opinions may have shifted with the invention and adaptation of the internet, though issues remain just as politically volatile as they were fifty to one hundred years ago.
Every college English major knows the primary location of research and debate in literary studies exists in textual studies and professional journals. In a class on materials and methods of college English, students once learned that there were, even in the 1990s, over one hundred textual studies written and published on the life and works of James Joyce. Examples from the recent historical past are as follows; Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Field or The American Scholar and numerous others. At present, most university English departments have their own websites. Just as well, each teaching professional has the capability of establishing and maintaining their own blog where they often conduct communications about course subject assignments or exchange professional opinions on academic issues. The political aspects of my writing are fairly tame and common compared to most other writers. I envision my work as an offering in the spirit of the mysteries and uncertainties of life to like-minded people. As Rita Dove writes in The Language of Life, “…writing a poem for me means putting a name to a face, to memories. It means calling up emotions that I don’t quite have a handle on, and beginning to understand them a little better by writing about them. But it also means reaching out and connecting with someone else” (124). While a certain degree of argument remains inevitable for every publication of this type, my intentions remain in accord with Mrs. Dove’s quote. My purpose in writing a creative dissertation was for the clarification of my own thought and to seek the thoughts of other people who think about similar literary issues.
In his essay, “Leaping into Political Poetry,” Robert Bly says:
When a poet succeeds in driving partway inward, he often develops new energy that carries him through the polished husk of the inner psyche that deflects most citizens and poets. Once inside the psyche he can speak of inward and political things with the same assurance. We can make a statement then that would not have been accepted. (Talking All Morning 98)
Inwardness is ancient, it is not a new, human phenomena. I have approached the problem with the awareness that self-reflection is what produces good poetry about human emotion and the social life of communities. Donald Hall says “Only when the poem turns wholly away from the petty ego, only when its internal structure fully serves art’s delicious purposes, may it serve to reveal and envision” (“Poetry and Ambition” 5). The idea remains no easy task. The sensitive issue for the poet concerns resisting didacticism as I believe a poet should attempt to find the right words for his time. For myself, writing poetry that illustrates a moral lesson isn’t really what I’m after even though some of the work is moral or addresses similar themes. Not all poetry of inwardness is associative in its technique. If we take Wilbur seriously when he says in “Poetry and Happiness,” that the poet’s task is not to let anything be excluded by one’s sensibility, then everything is valid and meaningful (Claims for Poetry 476 ). This reanimates in a sense, much of what some poets may consider unimportant or inappropriate material. However, political poetry must not be forced. The work should develop just as naturally as any other subject or theme.
Thomas McGrath has written a wonderful essay about poetry and the role of language called, “Language, Power and Dream” published in 1980. In that essay, he says a poet can risk too much reform of language and formal qualities. When this happens, poetry becomes a project for a single style of writing. This narrows perception in numerous, negative ways; too objective, isolated material, lacks inwardness or has a dullness of quality. All the poet has to do is ‘find his or her true relationship to things’ (Claims 289). Relativizing another person’s style or appropriating the language, obstructs the inward path toward authentic expression. People naturally seek models, though the most effective means lies beyond them after learning from them. In this way, the political poem evokes a poet’s own, authentic voice and language. As McGrath says, “Do Not Bandage These Wounds!” (Claims 292). The hidden wound becomes, metaphorically, the true means of seeing the self in the other person, of connecting with society after being driven in, perhaps alienated or isolated, though only through expression will their true worth be known. Only through sharing the work with a community beyond oneself will this sense of acceptance, catharsis or purpose become felt and acknowledged.
Robert Bly discusses the idea of association in poetry as a way to reach that greater audience. This activity need not take the form of intertextuality, though often does. He aligns this with an ancient method more closely focused on the inward qualities of human existence. Long ago, the deeper romanticism and spiritual movements encouraged cultural pluralism, an openness to the differences among theological and philosophical ideas of all cultures which also influenced freeing up of form in poetry. In association as a poetic device, ideas and things are likened or contrasted to clarify or complicate a central issue of the given work. In “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” he says this method has been used to identify or resolve ideas and emotions with those of a most resolute orientation in making a spiritual leap from objective catalog and subjectivity, toward a humanly felt inwardness (Leaping Poetry). “Association” in poetry has something in common with drawing on a poet’s knowledge; history, math, science, politics, spirituality or economics—all the content of the individual, human consciousness as well as the unconscious. This is very different from the idea of Joycean stream-of-consciousness or the automatic writing of French surrealists where everything or anything goes into the work. The important point is that this association is more intuitively shaped and selective.
“Association,” if in fact we can call it a technique, exists not as mere listing or juxtaposition. Bly describes this quality as the accumulation of leaps of association so that they open the inward poem toward common ideas, rather than implode toward utter subjectivity (“Looking for Dragon Smoke”). Part of the problem of intertextuality always concerns accessibility. Will the allusions present be read as allusions by the intended audience of the work? The intertext within this type of poetry, blend the general allusion with a more personally involved material which may not find accessibility without the use of foot-notes. Caution should be taken because in this sense, poetry risks becoming a postmodern, philological gadget. Theodore Roethke was able to associate in a way that made his poetry commonly accessible, yet emotively suggestive.
T.S. Eliot’s description of the “objective correlative” stands as one of the most ambivalent concepts in the art of poetry also founded on the idea of associative technique. I say ‘ambivalent,’ because this theory was for Eliot, not merely a theory but a method for creating poetry. Eliot defines his idea in his now classic essay from 1920 entitled, “Hamlet and His Problems.” He says:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correleative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Sacred Wood 58)
According to Bly, Eliot’s concept of association was no different than that of which he was writing about, though he claims that Eliot and Pound were no great innovators of the idea. The intuitive approach utilized in Bly’s poetics, as well as many of the poets in Claims for Poetry, was also something advocated in the later work of Eliot. In “The Music of Poetry,” he makes an almost passing remark that the “…poem comes before the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something…” (Major British Writers 858). Poetry being a purely expressive medium, Eliot even expands his idea to include all art. For poetry to achieve its final cause of gestalt or the evocation of a sense of catharsis in the reader, the material of poetry must find a sense of some inherent correlation between objects, experience or a situation, though most importantly, this correlative must take place within the reader’s consciousness. This deliberate formula is successful, says the practitioner, when the work ‘terminates in sensory experience,’ and rather than stating the emotion, it is merely “evoked.” In Levertov or those writing an intrinsic form, it is ‘discovered’ in a sense, in nature, and thus, organic.
Despite this difference in approaches to poetic process, Eliot’s deliberately conscious or formulaic, and the Claims for Poetry poet’s more intuitive throughout, there must be something said of the sheer fact of poetic experience, which I believe is a deeper and more profound experience than is often believed. Something must also be said of why such associations exist when they are found because at some point, even in the intuitive modes, human consciousness will enter and execute a judgment—possibly multiple times. Eliot writes in “Hamlet and His Problems” that the
intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known…the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. (Sacred Wood 59)
This intensity of human experience, commonly termed “immediacy,” is what the poet sometimes attempts to capture and form into a work of art through poetic process. A work need not be intense so as to illustrate association. The emotions and associations however, remain shaped, consciously shaped after the intuitive aspect expels its energy in producing the bulk of material being formed. This judicious process after the fact is mostly a conscious, though poetic act. Still, we are also aware that the poet can ‘re-enter,’ so-to-speak, the state of mind through which they used to create the beginning of the work, the rough draft. It is in this condition that the poet returns to the work multiple times and makes new decisions about any aspect of the work in question: the poet revises. Regardless of how conscious or arbitrary this entire process seems, that initial experience and state of mind are forever connected and a part of each other. Being able to perceive the initial experience is part of what makes the poet a poet. There is always the essence of poetic experience at the core of what a poet feels. This thrall of life, of mystery and genuine wonder of the universe drives the creative spirit. As this type of spirit thrives, I would say that the poetry takes on the nature and character of a Post-Romantic, lyric subjectivist work.
In my attempt at self-definition through poetry, I have written several poems that I would describe as more political than others. If I reviewed my published work, the following political themes would be noted; the holocaust, racism, economics, destructive power, work, spirituality and many others. As soon as I began to look through my material it was almost as if I had found the political aspects of writing as pervasive as other interests. R.P. Warren writes in “Poetry and Selfhood” that the poet’s work
may seem…merely personal, but more often than not the poem he produces brings to focus and embodies issues and conflicts that permeate circumambient society, with the result that the poem itself evokes mysterious echoes in the selves of those who are drawn to it, thus providing a dialectic in the social process. The “made thing” becomes, then, the struggle toward the achieving of the self, and that mark of human struggle, the human signature, gives the aesthetic organization its numinousness. It is what makes us feel that the “made thing” nods mysteriously at us, at the deepest personal inward self. (Democracy and Poetry 69)
This is also what Bly talks about with the image of the great, sweeping arm in his essay “What the Image Can Do” (Claims for Poetry). Poems either gesture toward the object, the self, or they gesture outward toward humanity.
Denise Levertov’s essay, “On the Edge of Darkness: What is Political Poetry?” sets forth six traits of this theme in the writing of poetry. The political poem is ‘timeless and natural,’ because she links its evolution to the epic poem, which in any culture is a major statement of identity and purpose. The skepticism which many impose on political or social material in poetry is a fallacious attitude, a modern one, mostly caused by the use of the term “confessional poetry,” and because of this, a poem should not always find it’s limitation as a private expression of emotion. Donald Hall writes in “Poetry and Ambition” that
The poet must develop past this silliness, to the stage where the poem is altered for its own sake, to make it better art, not for the sake of its maker’s feelings but because decent art is the goal. Then the poem lives at some distance from its creator’s little daily emotions; it can take on its own character in the mysterious place of satisfying shapes and shapely utterance. (Poetry and Ambition 4)
Political poetry in the United States is most often written by anyone affected by anything relevant to life and the life of social interaction. Sometimes political poetry suffers in quality because poets rely too often on the emotive element alone, a pathos of message, or a statement to justify the work. This can add to the quality of “concreteness,” only when each element achieves equally good quality. Poetry can affect the course of political understanding, reaching people who may otherwise never read about a given issue or another way of thinking about something. To be political, a poem must express a poetic emotion—the same qualities as any other poetry.
The only political stance I take, aside from personal, democratic, cultural pluralism, would characterize an openness towards literary ideas. A poetics should inspire one to set forth thoughts which illustrate quality of consciousness and clarify artistic goals. A poet’s realizations, however different, should involve reflection through some meaningful mode of self-conscious discourse. Seamus Heaney writes in “Feeling Into Words,” that poetry is an act of discovery and recovery, a
…revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. (Longman 2844)
Critical writing and research that refuses the amorphous political machinery of certain forms of Postmodernism is a beginning toward a rejection of such destructive forces of power and influence. Poetry and discourse should exist as modes which deepen and develop human understanding. This does not necessarily mean that art should serve a moral purpose, even though a certain morality remains inevitable within institutions advocating the advancement of science and research. This is how culture critic, Theodore Adorno voiced the issue in “On Lyric Poetry and Society”: “Only by virtue of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyrical language represent language’s intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of ends” (Notes to Literature 53). In centuries past there have existed literary periods where such tendencies of going inward do not appear to be what this process describes, yet it is by this very alien nature of the work in its visionary state that it is ever finally understood as relevant to its psychological counterpart. Some of the popular literary periods in English and American history which represent such inward poetic processes, though produce work illustrating process include the Age of Johnson poets, American Modernists, American Post-moderns and the process writers of the 1980s, both LANGUAGE poets of the New York School and international writers who were preoccupied with “Blurred Genres” cited by cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz as well as the now late anthologizing by Cole Swenson called “Hybrid Poetry” of the past twenty-five years. Every form of this mental activity is an act of recovery. The choice of writers to represent their work in the form of process through various differences of style depend upon the degree to which a writer subverts, experiments and conforms the given material to create the work. The reason we have so hesitating a stance today as readers of poetry or literature is not political sympathy, it is caused by the fact that given the wide range of writing and reading approaches, we also realize the same differences exist within the individual and that this and not the former is the reason for their existence when they appear as “difficult,” hybrid, “process writing” or traditional. A poet’s intelligence actively engaged with the present or past literary ideas so as to form discourse in today’s environment is the very resistance of meaninglessness and relativistic apathy. Regardless of the political indifferences of our age, the existence of a given work should not be ‘art for art’s sake,’ even though it is quite easy to reduce poetry or all art to this neutral condition. Emotion and thought inspire one to write, therefore motive should involve an equal amount of thought and reason.
What about the rest of society? Cleanth Brooks said in “Poetry and Poeticality” that the “usual task of poetry, however, is not to blind us with light but to make us see, to give us the special kind of knowledge that only poetry can give, to make us more fully conscious of ourselves in relation to our world” (A Shaping Joy 92). This is perhaps a trait that all poetries now share. Robert Penn Warren describes three achievements of poetry when done well as a work of art. First, he says the form of a work represents the confrontation with life and its problems; the process through which one forms selfhood, one’s identity. Second, the work of art represents uniqueness made available to other people, though this uniqueness is not exhausted. Third, the work of art stands as a possibility of experience and when we engage the work with the correct educated understanding, the work provides a freshness and immediacy of experience that returns us to ourselves and in this way, communicates a sense of vision, fulfillment and affirmation of life (Democracy and Poetry 72.) These words still resonate with truth today. I hope these three achievements exist through my own work.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodore. Notes to Literature, Volume 1. Columbia University Press, 1991.
Dove, Rita. The Language of Life. Anchor, 1996. pp.
Bly, Robert. Talking All Morning. The University of Michigan Press, 1990.
---. “Leaping Up into Political Poetry: An Essay.” Talking, pp. 95-105.
---. “What the Image Can Do.” Hall, Claims, pp. 38-49.
---. “Looking for Dragon Smoke.” Seventies, no.1, spring 1972, pp. 3-8.
Duotrope. “Duotrope by the Numbers.” August 13, 2018. http://www.duotrope.com/about
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays. Dover, 1998.
---. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Sacred, pp. 27-33.
---. “Hamlet and His Problems.” Sacred, pp. 55-59.
---. “The Music of Poetry.” Great British Writers. Enlarged ed., edited by Elizabeth Drew, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959, pp. 851-859.
Hall, Donald, editor. Claims for Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
- - - . Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88. “Poetry and Ambition.” The University of Michigan Press, 1988. pp. 1-19.
Heaney, Seamus. “Feeling into Words.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature volume 2c: The Twentieth Century, edited by David Damrosch, Kevin Dettmar and Jennifer Wicke. Addison-Wesley, 1999. pp. 2844-2857.
Kinnell, Galway. “To the Roots; An Interview with Galway Kinnell.” James J. Makenzie, interviewer. Contemporary Poetry in America: Essays and Interviews edited by Robert Boyers, Shoken Books 1974. pp. 240-255.
McGrath, Thomas. “Language, Power and Dream.” Hall, Claims, pp. 286-295.
Sadoff, Ira. “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia.” The American Poetry Review January/February. 1990.
Thomas, Dylan. “Altar-wise by Owl-light” and “Windmills Turning Wrong Direction Underground.” Jones, Poems, pp. 116-121 and pp. 36-37.
Wilbur, Richard. “Poetry and Happiness.” Hall, Claims, pp. 469-489.
John Robinson is a mainstream, Appalachian-American poet from the Kanawha Valley in Mason County, West Virginia. His 168 literary works have appeared in 118 journals and presses throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Poland, Germany and China.
His first chapbook, June’s Fisher of Solitudes, will be published at Mountain State Press in 2024.
He is also a published printmaker with 101 art images and photographs appearing in forty journals, electronic and print, in the United States, Italy, Ireland and the United kingdom.
Recent Literary Work; The Wallace Stevens Journal, Mountain State Press, Origami Poets Project, Xavier Review, North Dakota Quarterly. Talking River Review, Revolution John and Language and Semiotic Studies.
