The places of contemporary American poetry

"The Places of Contemporary American Poetry" provides an exploration of a variety of creative relationships which contemporary American poets have established with place, suggesting that the critical application of place studies in American poetry can be broadened beyond an ecocritical approach. Chapter One, "Placing Contemporary American Poetry," offers a brief background of the field, examining the historical relationship between poetry and place and reviewing the contributions to place studies made in the fields of phenomenology, human geography, and ecocriticism. Chapter Two, "Transcending Place: Charles Wright and 'The Things That Must Fall Away' " traces how Wright's attraction to place has been overshadowed throughout his poetic career by a desire to transcend the physical world altogether. Chapter Three, "Coyote, Aunt Leaf, and Bear: Immanent Mythologies in the Poetry of Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder," explores how Oliver and Snyder integrate mythic figures of emplacement into their work as models for an intersubjective relationship between the self and the environment. Chapter Four, "Native Lands: Reclaiming Place in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz and Sherman Alexie," analyzes how the poetic relationship to place has been complicated by the Native experience in the United States. Finally, Chapter Five, "I Love This Hairy City: Frank O'Hara's Urban Poetics," considers the legacy of the "city poet" Frank O'Hara, whose urban emplacement offers an alternative to the notion that the city is not an "authentic" environment for emplaced poetry. This study does not offer a homogenizing theory with which to study place in American poetry but instead explores a broad continuum of the complex, sometimes contradictory, ways that contemporary American poets conceptualize place.