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This book draws on the works and lives of six poets, illustrating how the state of Florida inspired twentieth-century poets to new subject matter and forms, expanding and deepening the American experiment in English-language poetry.
List of contents
- Preface
- 1: Introduction: Biological Ornament, Difficult Ornament
- 2: Wallace Stevens: Green Cocoanut Ice Cream
- 3: Marianne Moore: Piracy and Unicorn Horns
- 4: Elizabeth Bishop: A Queer Antique Musical Instrument Floating in the Sea
- 5: James Merrill: Silver Springs and Manatee Kisses
- 6: Harry Mathews: Cool Gales
- 7: Epilogue: Laura (Riding) Jackson
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
About the author
Ange Mlinko is Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Florida. She is the former poetry editor of the Nation, and her work has appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and many other journals. She has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the poetry editor of the University of Florida's literary journal, Subtropics.
Summary
This book draws on the works and lives of six poets, illustrating how the state of Florida inspired twentieth-century poets to new subject matter and forms, expanding and deepening the American experiment in English-language poetry.
Additional text
'The state with the prettiest name,' as Bishop dubbed Florida indelibly, is also a state of mind in which profusion and extravagance flourish, and it has found a proponent, midrashic and scholarly, in Ange Mlinko's commentary, equally ludic and intense. Like her poems, these essays are trellises for vines dense with blossoms, creating their own patterns by means of lightning transition, serendipity, resurrected etymologies, and other percipient or witty trouvailles--all rooted in rich, 'venereal soil,' in Stevens's term. The vines, the lines, the motifs of her poets interlace like rhymes in a mazy troubadour form, mazy and florabundant. At times one suspects the subject is not Floridian but American poetry itself.
