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As the first region in America, New England offers a locus in which
to better understand the emergence of poetic voices closely
identified with the experience of their surroundings. Tracking
these voices in the verse of four seminal poets over the course of
roughly one hundred years allows for a thorough survey of common
links as to how speakers respond to historical shifts as well as
how they view the landscape in the context of a shared literary
tradition.Though scholars have explored the relationship between
the work of these four poets and the New England region, the primal
lyric tension that ultimately defines the voices that readers have
come to identify as "Dickinson" or "Lowell" warrant closer
investigation. No study has yet to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to
read the speakers of this verse in the context of historical
changes in their surroundings. This post-structural reading allows
for arguably the closest consideration as to how voices take shape
in the New England region based upon how the various speakers view
the landscape they inhabit through a version of Emerson's
perspective via his paradoxically "transparent eyeball" an
invisible presence that remains in the foreground because of
rhetoric that describes it. For these speakers, history as well as
literary tradition serves as such rhetorical covering, which in
part offers a new way of considering how they come to sound like
they come from "New England" by their visual experience of the
environment.In connecting what has become rather standard
post-structural theory to the practical relevance of local New
England history, this book strives to bridge a recurring divide in
literary study. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis to look specifically
at the poetic speakers in part makes such an interdisciplinary
examination possible. To "see New Englandly" ironically means to be
seen by the formative historical effects of New England. Cultural
movements shaping the experience of the speakers' surroundings thus
inform their conscious and unconscious desires as they in turn
project such desires onto the land. The paradox of Emersonian
vision especially central to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, wherein
transparency gets covered with textual awareness, comes to
exemplify this regional view taken by the speakers in the verse of
the other poets here as well. The connection of Emerson's
transparent eyeball in the New England landscape to the Lacanian
gaze offers a means to extend a fundamental trope for lyric vision
in the region. Such a critical and theoretical link especially in
Stevens's verse offers a revision of readings by scholars like
Harold Bloom and Richard Poirier who, though recognizing the
importance of Emerson's eyeball as a metaphor of visual priority,
have refrained from examining its full implications in a collective
body of American literature.The insights that follow such an
analysis perhaps make the strongest contribution to the existing
scholarship of New England poetry by broadening the scope of the
region and the reach of the historical effects that define it. The
site of the Lacanian b ance-defined as the gap between nature and
the symbolic-which ultimately defines the speakers' inherent
self-division, consistently charges the poetry with the greatest
tension, paradoxically linking speakers to New England by
threatening to disrupt their imaginative connection to their
surroundings. This recurring gap around which vision and rhetoric
move ultimately make the speakers of Stevens and the other three
poets more regional than any slight reference to pine trees, barns,
or graveyards.This is an important book for readers interested in
American poetry (especially the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell),
psychoanalysis and literature, deconstructive analyses of modern
poetry, and New England regional history.
As an Iranian American poet, Roger Sedarat fuses Western and
Eastern traditions to reinvent the classical Persian form of the
ghazal. For its humor as well as its spirituality, the poems in
this collection can perhaps best be described as "Wallace Stevens
meets Rumi." Perhaps most striking is the poet's use of the ancient
ghazal form in the tradition of the classical masters like Hafez
and Rumi to politically challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran's
continual crackdown on protesters. Not since the late Agha Shahid
Ali has a poet translated the letter as well as the spirit of this
form into English, using musicality and inventive rhyme to extend
the reach of the ghazal in a new language and tradition.
In his provocative, brave, and sometimes brutal first book of
poems,
Roger Sedarat directly addresses the possibility of political
change in
a nation that some in America consider part of "the axis of evil."
Iranian
on his father's side, Sedarat explores the effects of the Islamic
Revolution
of 1979--including censorship, execution, and pending war--on
the
country as well as on his understanding of his own origins.
Written in a style that is as sure-footed as it is experimental,
"Dear Regime:
Letters to the Islamic Republic "confronts the past and current
injustices
of the Iranian government while retaining a sense of respect and
admiration
for the country itself. Woven into this collection are the
author's vivid
descriptions of the landscape as well as the people of Iran.
Throughout,
Sedarat exhibits a keen appreciation for the literary tradition of
Iran, and in
making it new, attempts to preserve the culture of a country he
still claims as his own.
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