"The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry" now available

The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry, by Robert Bray, is now available from Monongahela Books, illustrated, annotated, 71 pages. $12.

Here is a short excerpt:

"The one midwestern difference everyone notices, and more often than not negatively remarks, is the landscape itself. On the long interstate haul across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, the cars often seem to drive themselves, the passengers staring like zombies at the nothingness of the agricultural plains. Yet to an inhabitant this very openness is place, and openness is, paradoxically, an aesthetic refuge for many midwestern poets who still feel (in James McGowan's memorable phrase) the 'metaphysical prickle' of the prairie landscape. Midwestern poetry of place treats the landscape as a standpoint. As William Stafford puts it, 'Everything we own / has brought us here: from here we speak.' Stafford's advice is to 'have a place, be what that place requires,' and I would not underestimate the midwestern poet's abilty to blazon this as a motto with which to answer, in perennial words and images, the vagaries of fashion and taste and the generally bland homogeneity of American national culture."