Research Catalog

Title

Ecstatic émigré : an ethics of practice / Claudia Keelan.

Author

Keelan, Claudia, 1959-

Publication

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2018]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

168 pages; 21 cm

Summary

"Most think of an emigré as one who leaves her native land to find home in another. Claudia Keelan, in essays both personal and critical, enlists poetic company for her journey, engaging both canonical and common figures, from Gertrude Stein to a prophetic Las Vegas cab driver named Caesar. Mapping her own peripatetic evolution in poetry and her nomadic life, she also engages with Christian and Buddhist doctrines on the virtues of dispossession. Ecstatic Emigré pays homage to poets from Thoreau and Whitman to Alice Notley, all of whom share a commitment to living and writing in the moment. Keelan asks the same questions about the growth of flowers or the meaning of bioluminescence as she does about the poetics of John Cage or George Oppen. Her originality is grounded by the ways in which she connects poetic principles with the spiritual concepts of via negativa demonstrated both in St. John of the Cross and Mahayana Buddhism. In addition, her essays demonstrate an activist spirit and share a commitment to the passive resistance demonstrated in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s concept of the "beloved community" and philosopher Simone Weil's dedication to "exile.""--

Series Statement

Poets on poetry

Uniform Title

• Essays. Selections
• Poets on poetry.

Alternative Title

Essays.

Subjects

• LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
• POETRY / General
• Poetics

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Prologue: reading and writing spiritual utility -- Preliminaries -- Apology -- A concrete memoir -- From without sovereignty -- "It might have begun differently" -- Revising the parade: again the poetry of witness -- Reclaiming paradise -- A hinge-history: Robinson Jeffers and Brenda Hillman -- A garden is a frame structure -- From erasing names, multiplying alliances (Salt Lake City via Memphis via Las Vegas) -- Snow in America (Boston) -- Nearing cradle -- Native stranger -- Lessons of the whirlwind -- The citizen stranger -- The instant -- Interview for The Range of the Possible, conducted by Tod Marshall (The Secularist and Utopic) -- Interview for Barrow Street, conducted by Derek Pollard (Utopic and The Devotion Field) -- The poet on the poem: For My Lost Original: Elegy Is a Seeking in "Everybody's Autobiography" (Missing Her) -- Interview for Omnidawn Press, conducted by Rusty Morrison (Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz) -- Poetics statement for poetry society of America, "In their own words" (O, Heart) -- Interview with Thomas Barkman for Barrow Street (O, Heart).

Call Number

JFD 18-1893

ISBN

• 9780472037193
• 0472037196

LCCN

2018011952

OCLC

1028584969

Author

Keelan, Claudia, 1959- author.

Title

Ecstatic émigré : an ethics of practice / Claudia Keelan.

Publisher

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2018]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Poets on poetry

Poets on poetry.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references.

Research Call Number

JFD 18-1893