would something like Sanders' America in verse be viewed as a biogrqaphy of
America?
tom bell
----- Original Message -----
From: "ALI ALIZADEH" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 8:02 PM
Subject: Re: biographical poetry
> Edward Lucie-Smith, being a biographer as well as a poet, has some very
detailed and
> convincing portraits of historical figures, e.g. 'Caravaggio Dying'. My
favourite
> biographical poetry has to be Dorothy Porter's Akhenaten which makes me
wonder; why
> aren't there more historical poems? I don't mean just the
'poet-assumes-the-voice-of-
> a-historic-figure-for-novelty-value' but more, well yeah, a totally
researched
> biographical poem. I mean, the possibilities are endless; and the
publishers are
> bound to be interested. Why couldn't 'The True Histroy of Kelly Gang' have
been
> written in poetry?
>
> Ali
>
> ---- Original Message ----
> From: David McCooey
> Date: Thu 11/8/01 12:27
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: biographical poetry
>
> Hi,
>
> Some of you might remember me (hi Jill!, hi Pam!). I used to be on
> this list a couple of years ago. I'm back and enjoying it very much.
> Anyway, after a few weeks of lurking I thought it time to participate.
> I'm currently writing an essay on biographical poetry. It
> seems to me that very little has been made of this. Discussion of the
> autobiographical in poetry is, of course, ubiquitous. There are less
> poems that are biographical and fewer that could be described as
> 'biographical essays in verse'. A few random examples are FT Prince's
> marvellous poem on Rupert Brooke or Mary Jo Salter's on Robert Frost
> or Bruce Beaver's on Rilke (a metapoetic link here).
> Elegies, obviously, are biographical, and there's something
> of a sub-genre in work that deals with family history and parents:
> Anne Stevenson's Correspondences, Jon Stallworthy's A Familiar Tree,
> Michael Hofmann's poems about his father in Acrimony and so on and
> on. Poems such as the latter are clearly also autobiographical -
> intersubjective, we might say.
> At the other end of the scale we have clerihews and (ahem)
> double dactyls. And there are some wacky poems for kids mixing nation
> building, education and verse, such as A Book of Americans.
> Enough already...I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is
> interested in biographical poetry and (there is a good deal of
> self-interest in this bit) if they have any favourite biographical
> poems that may not be well known.
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
> --
>
> ________________
> Dr David McCooey
> Lecturer in Literary Studies
> Honours Co-ordinator
> School of Literary and Communication Studies
> Deakin University
> Geelong
> Victoria
> Australia 3217
>
> ph: 61 3 5227 1331
> fax: 61 3 5227 2484
> [log in to unmask]
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