A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Poetry

What Endures

By Pablo Tanguay

June 7, 2011 In a career that spans forty-five years and includes twenty-some books of poetry and every major poetry prize, from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award, Charles Wright has kept his thematic lens remarkably focused. A typical poem begins with the speaker in his backyard, describing the landscape or the memory of a landscape, and the resulting metaphor then ignites a philosophical meditation, often concerning theological matters. For most poets, such thematic or stylistic repetition over the course of half a century would lead to unbearably boring poems. But Wright is in a class almost alone for his ability to make fresh, wildly inventive metaphors from the stuff of the everyday, natural world.

Dudes, Locked in a Dudely Power Struggle

By Margaret Renkl

June 3, 2011 “Anything So Utterly Destroyed” by Elizabeth McClellan, a Gallatin-based poet and University of Memphis law student, has been nominated for a 2011 Rhysling Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. The Rhysling is a prize given to the best science-fiction, fantasy, or horror poem published during the previous year.

Rock the Revolution

By Margaret Renkl

June 1, 2011 At thirteen, an age when many kids are developing the musical preferences they will carry with them for a lifetime, Khaled Mattawa emigrated to the U.S., eventually graduating from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and going on to graduate studies in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Now an acclaimed poet, Mattawa left his native Libya after Muammar Qaddafi seized power, but he carried Libya’s music with him.

For the Fallen

By Margaret Renkl

May 31, 2011 Last night in commemoration of Memorial Day, PBS closed The News Hour with a feature on Sewanee poet Wyatt Prunty, whose poem “The Returning Dead” was inspired by the program’s nightly “honor roll” of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The program first aired in 2006.) Prunty is no stranger to combat—he served in Vietnam—though he claims no heroics: “I was a nearsighted gunnery officer, and I don’t think I hurt anyone,” he explains in an introduction to his reading of the poem. It begins this way:

"a background in music"

By Evie Shockley

May 27, 2011 Evie Shockley is the author of the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks; she also co-edits jubilat. Schockley’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Callaloo, The Southern Review, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Harvard Review, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Born and raised in Nashville, she currently teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

A Way to Break Out of Jail

By Margaret Renkl

April 15, 2011 In an interview in the Southern Literary Review, Vanderbilt poet Kate Daniels explains her seemingly unlikely kinship with another great poet associated with the Vanderbilt English Department:

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