Difficult Ornaments Florida and the Poets : Florida and the Poets - Ange Mlinko

Difficult Ornaments Florida and the Poets

Florida and the Poets

By: Ange Mlinko

Hardcover | 2 October 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover


$104.95

or 4 interest-free payments of $26.24 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 10 to 15 business days

When will this arrive by?
Enter delivery postcode to estimate

This is a book about the works that six twentieth-century American poets created in and about the state of Florida--or, in one case, refused to create. Those poets who nourished their muse on Florida''s landscape, history, and myths in turn helped perpetuate those myths: they keep an idea of Florida alive in the cultural imagination and in the language. They were not regional poets, because they did not live here permanently. But they do contribute to a psychogeography: theirs is a Florida that one can access from anywhere in the world through the pages of their books. It so happens that these poets compose a chain of personal friendship and influence: Marianne Moore was friendly with Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop was friendly with Moore, James Merrill was friendly with Bishop, and socialized frequently with Harry Mathews when both had houses in Key West. Only Riding, who rose to prominence in the 1920s, gave up poetry around 1941, and moved to Wabasso in 1943 to live an isolated existence, stands apart. And yet there are correspondences to be drawn between her work and Merrill''s, for instance. The word "ornament" is used by both biologists and literary critics to describe the extras of beauty; but whether it is the encumbrance of a peacock''s tail or the profusion of metaphor, ornaments are also seen as "difficult." What is it about "difficult ornaments" that make poems surprising, distinctive, and enduring? And does a proximity to the tropics-nature''s own laboratory-compel poets to reach for invention and experiment? Does Florida contribute to an "evolution" of poetics? That''s what this book explores.
Industry Reviews
"Difficult Ornaments brilliantly reveals how the lush Floridian landscape inspired six twentieth-century American poets. Subtly and discerningly, Mlinko examines the peacock character of the state and of poetry alike, in order to clarify the often-overlooked power of poetic ornament." -- David Caplan, Southern Methodist University "This attractively personal meditation on poetry and place, by one of the most subtle and discerning readers of poetry around, is actually a treatise on style--to be specific, a celebration of the extravagant, 'proliferal,' peacock style that Stevens and poets like Bishop and Merrill cultivated in the coral soil of a half-real, half-imagined Florida. In the process they created an unlikely American tradition that Ange Mlinko has defined and introduced us to here." -- Langdon Hammer, Yale University "'The state with the prettiest name,' as Bishop dubbed Florida indelibly, is also a state of mind in which profusion and extravagance flourish, and it has found a proponent, midrashic and scholarly, in Ange Mlinko's commentary, equally ludic and intense. Like her poems, these essays are trellises for vines dense with blossoms, creating their own patterns by means of lightning transition, serendipity, resurrected etymologies, and other percipient or witty trouvailles--all rooted in rich, 'venereal soil,' in Stevens's term. The vines, the lines, the motifs of her poets interlace like rhymes in a mazy troubadour form, mazy and florabundant. At times one suspects the subject is not Floridian but American poetry itself." -- Stephen Yenser, Author of The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), Stone Fruit (2016), and Blue Guide (2006)

More in General Literary Studies

Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus
The Voynich Manuscript - Raymond Clemens

RRP $82.95

$55.00

34%
OFF
The Prince : Penguin Pocket Hardbacks - Niccolo Machiavelli
Introduction to Medieval Europe 300-1500 : 4th Edition - Peter Hoppenbrouwers
The Bookseller at the End of the World - Ruth Shaw
On Writing : A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King

RRP $22.99

$21.90

Aristophanes : Wasps - Craig  Jendza

RRP $140.00

$104.90

25%
OFF
Classical Receptions and Impact of Xena : Warrior Princess - Amanda  Potter
Strabo : Understanding Classics - Dr Jessica  Lightfoot
The Odyssey : (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - Homer
Meanjin Vol 83, No 4 - Esther Anatolitis

RRP $24.99

$24.50

Jane Austen at Home : A Biography - Lucy Worsley

RRP $26.99

$25.75

Moby Dick : Collins Classics - Herman Melville
How to Read a Book : A Touchstone book - Charles Van Doren

RRP $34.99

$25.00

29%
OFF