Knowing what is missing is an important first step.

Who was that traveler? And what did she signify to the poet?

Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other.

The poems of “Kingdom” are spirit-drawings, in the tradition of the Harmonists’ erstwhile Shaker acquaintances. On occasion they quote bits of Harmonist texts.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883.

Insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities.

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not.

The reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

“It is clear even to my own inexpert eye that the penned inscription “by Clement C. Moore, A.M.” is not written in Moore’s rather distinctive hand.”

A cane only appears once in Leaves of Grass, but it turns up in conjunction with another word that appears again and again in the poem: lean.

Forest Leaves is a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies.

The importance of clarity—of, as a white writer, being crystal clear about what I was saying, particularly in regard to indigenous languages and history—led me toward prose.

Sinéad Morrissey pays homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, considered through a jigsaw puzzle mapping North America.

Gunning Birds         She kept the Yankees from burning her homeby refusing to leave the bed, and when a few […]

Ammunition, Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak The men were paid extra: danger money. […]

  Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces   Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary] Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County […]

Written to mark the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, my poems operate within that lacuna, occupying the dissonant threshold between Whitman’s optimistic vision for America, “out of hopeful green stuff woven,” and my own personal history.

all source material is from the 17th century and appears in single quotes

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family.

Research has been at the core of my poetic work for the past 15 years—largely because it gives me the chance to pursue questions of language while I pursue a subject in the world at large that interests me.

I conceived of the series of poems as a lyric travelogue, in which, mile by mile, the speaker positions himself on a raft floating on the Duck River, or on its banks, or beneath its surface, or no more than a quarter of a mile from the river.

A Letter to Jefferson from Monticello Westward the course of empire makes its way. —Bishop George Berkeley                     I I climbed […]

  Last Words of the Dying VI Listen! This’llhurt someone! Do not disturbmy circles. You can get morewith a kind […]

“A garden of medicinal flowers…” “Cake!” Such answers help insofar as how many days were you a child? Or can […]

I first came across Thomas Harriot’s strange and wonderful account, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), in the large, sepia-toned Dover edition—”The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition”—on the shelves of the university bookstore.

Statement of poetic research One day I decided to rewrite the complete works of Emily Dickinson in “plain speech.” She […]

Statement of Poetic Research My first real awakening to the poetic pursuit that has filled the last ten years of […]

Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) I had been twice to Pondbefore I learned you hadnot only been there, but filmed it.Of course […]

Forgetfulness is like a songthat, freed from beat and measure, wanders Hart Crane When knowledge will cover the earthlike water covers […]

Caroline Remembers Her First Mistress, Darla Ford When I think on it, it is of joy I recall. And knowing […]

Plaque commemorating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sojourn on Schoolmaster Hill. Photograph courtesy of the author. Click to enlarge. A Walk in […]

Vanishing Point In the great valley between Hwando and Yazoo City,laborers tend opium poppies and cotton,Dying of yellow fever. But […]

1. Tracts Trace Fissure I pick up a fragile, aging photo, asking, “Who is this?” “No idea.” Names slip out […]

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product?

Wandering too is a technique of not looking, a practice of studied indirection. In that way it’s like revising—whether a poem or an entire collection—which is also a way of denying one’s loss of a past through an attempt to re-experience the sensations that accompany originary composition.

The pathways our contributors seek are divergent and take myriad forms. As Whitman would have preferred, they describe contradictory perspectives and incommensurable ontologies. And yet, they find common ground in the alternative mobilities they take to reach their destinations.

Far from signaling the diminution of interpretive ability or affective capacity, old age here is linked to critical acumen.

Poet Afaa M. Weaver explores his ancestors’ ability to maintain loving structures despite the pressures of slavery.

 Davis brings to poetics a newly enlivening framework of gesture, relation, and immediacy that boldly recasts how we read these poets, and with it the worldly work of poetry.  

(October 1830)

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

What Farrell lays out is a fascinating spectacle, a colonial practice of counting bodies that is perpetually collapsing and producing odd, indeterminate results, even as it consolidates its conceptual hold as a way of thinking about human communities.

Jill McDonough explores the pains–explicit and suppressed–suffusing early American culture.

New things are happening with the Stamp Act, and this volume should signal to a broad range of scholars that 1765 is a good year for deep thinking.

Women poets were under-recognized experts and artists in the forms associated with their homes and neighborhoods, the realms where they held power and influence.

Cohen looks at how readers forged social connections through poems—by reading them aloud, recopying them, buying and selling them.

When editorial work is done well, it prods you toward a new way of thinking about a text or set of texts without closing down other interpretive possibilities.

How did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

Anne was oppressed and it is difficult for me to write her. I don’t want to oppress her further and […]

Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you. —John Keats in a letter to his brother George living in Louisville, Kentucky, 1819.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere.

These poems and images are the result of a sort of excavation of my paternal grandmother’s well-worn Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (copyright 1950, and how!).

“In animadverting upon the acts of our ancestors, it is not to censure them as sinners above all others . . . ”

  AT ATKA In February at AtkaI stood on the black sandsbelow the trading postand watched my husbandfade up the […]

At this Point, a Confluence Less enterprising men would have left the beautiful ruin of a cityto moulder away and […]

Tricks a Girl Can Do Hannah Maynard (1834-1918) was a Canadian photographer whocreated surreal images after the death of her […]

On Finding the Earliest Known Poem by John Rollin Ridge, the First Native American Novelist I sometimes think that I […]

Prologue I had begun so many times.With snow, with leaves, with wind and rain,with a white initial A of sail,with […]

La felice victoria: Bartolomé de Flores’s A Newly Composed Work, Which Recounts the Happy Victory That God, in His Infinite […]

Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan speaks in Lucy Biederman’s poetry.

Creating a literary genealogy linking Occom and Wheatley could change conceptions of early American Indian and African American writing and missionary work

Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can “guide [her] steps” is thus more than just a metaphor for God’s ability to change a converted person’s life: it is an acknowledgment of the immense power that God’s virtuous character can have over a person’s body and soul.

“If you would learn the earth as it really is, learn it through its sacred places.”

In memory of the unnamed woman branded Y, sent in 1719 from Barbados to Kittery, Massachusetts, Province of Maine.

Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod

So, over this past weekend I was sweating over a long-overdue article [hi, Sean!] on Philip Freneau, the so-called “poet […]

How can acts of periodization produce historical frameworks commensurate to the vast trauma and shock of the Civil War?

Automatic Writing If, as the scholar claims, a photograph is a sudden death, if the historian’s citational practice is cousin […]

To Find You III         [O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu House, Abiquiu, NM; present day] Bushes of mulberry, rosemary, cherry;trees of filbert, plum, and […]

The Civil War was one great eruption of something immanent in human civilization: an ineradicable cycle of violence, a timeless struggle for democracy and freedom.

The actors who clawed their way to fame in the early decades of the American theater labored in an entrepreneurial industry that was far more reminiscent of prospecting for gold or financing merchant ships than it was of modern industrial production.

Dry Creek Valley On the second and third wires over the wireon which forks the zinfandel vine:barbed knotsand spirals of […]

By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

Wheatley does not write about race as a collective and embodied experience.

History and the Found Poem Debt We may never know the mystery of sleep.We don’t want to become machines. But […]

Between the lines, buried deep in the least likely passages, among small tidbits of oral lore, they can be heard but only faintly.

As Marrs makes clear, the career plot of transbellum authors reveals how periodization has distorted what we could know about the works of writers stranded for too long on one side of the Civil War divide.

Much made of little. Little made of knowledge. Knowledge made of scholarship. Scholarship made of textbooks. Textbooks made of terms. […]

Anne Bradstreet was a deeply ambitious poet who was far from surprised by the publication of her first book.

Three poems In God’s Altar: The Word and Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), the literary critic Richard Daly writes that, for […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“For a kick I clicked on the description and viewed the item. I couldn’t believe it.”

Thus, the poems examine both the social structures contributing to the accusations as well as the relationships between people that were wounded or destroyed by the suspicions, convictions, and executions.

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