Essays: Benjamin Myers on Place, Education, and Poetry

I’ve been trying to recall when, or how, I first ran across the poetry of Benjamin Myers. I read his Elegy for Trains: Poems in early 2014, and if I can clear the cobwebs away from my memory, it may have been through a recommendation of a friend I met at a writing retreat in Texas. However it happened, Elegy for Trains put me on the road to becoming a Ben Myers reader.  

I know why I enjoy his poetry so much: I can’t read it without being reminded of my own family – my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, and cousins on both sides. Family is anchored in the idea of place, and I can’t think of family without thinking of my mother’s tribe of German and Cajuns in New Orleans and my father’s smaller but character-filled family in Shreveport. When I read Black Sunday: Poems by Myers, I found myself reading it two and three times simply because of my own family memories it evoked.

 

Myers, a professor of English and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, doesn’t only write poetry; he also writes about poetry, about education, and the idea of place. He’s collected his essays and article in Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education & Poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Sadbook Collections – Book 2 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Dead Sea Scrolls Trilogy – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Sonnet for Candlemas – Malcolm Guite.

 

“Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” poem by A.E. Housman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.