Geography of Poets

by Edward Field

Over two-hundred American writers are represented according to region and including expatriot poets, revealing the diversity and mixture of influences producing contemporary poetry from ethnic to issue orientation

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1979

About the author

EDWARD FIELD was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Lynbrook, L.I., where he played cello in the Field Family Trio which had a weekly radio program on WGBB Freeport. He served in WWII in the 8th Air Force as a navigator in heavy bombers, and flew 25 missions over Germany. He began writing poetry during World War II, after a Red Cross worker handed him an anthology of poetry. But it was not until 1963 that his first book, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, won the Lamont Award and was published. In 1992, he received a Lambda Award for Counting Myself Lucky, Selected Poems 1963-1992. Other honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, a Prix de Rome, and an Academy Award for the documentary film “To Be Alive,” for which he wrote the narration. In 1979, he edited the anthology, A Geography of Poets, and in 1992 with Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler, brought out a sequel, A New Geography of Poets. He and his partner Neil Derrick, long-time residents of Greenwich Village, have written a best-selling historical novel about the Village, The Villagers. His most recent book is his literary memoirs, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era. After the Fall, Poems Old and New, will be published by the U. of Pittsburgh Press in October, 2007.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

still have my copy. dividing poets into regions can be confusing but great collection of poets.

[Dianne · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you have the time to leaf through and leaf through and leaf through to find familiar poems or those that are new and delightful, a great resource. Editor Edward Field has a weird idea of representative poems lets just say. A lot of sexual, bathroom, literal filth and ugliness plays a huge part a very disproportionate part one could hope in this 'collection'. Happy to have found some good ones, puzzled at all the ones I was sorry I even started. Lets don't let Edward pick any more . . . lol

[Sasha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it is just me, but the first poem the book fell open to was entitled "My Penis", and it just got progressively worse from there.

[Stan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed my world when I first read it in 1979. Until I read this book, poetry was dead and ancient more suited for a classroom than on the bookshelf of a young teen. This book was revelation. It woke my senses to what poetry could be, a living expression of oneself and one's world. The poems were fresh vibrant and often a little blue in terms of content radical seething with sex and drugs and rebellion. As I reread this book, it did not seem to be as radical and shocking to me as a young teen, yet it was still compelling to read some of these poems. I did feel some sense of lost as I read that somehow I had became more jaded or maybe society had become jaded. It is still a good introduction to modern poetry.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

have had this book for years, and always find new revelations in it.