The Roundhouse Voices

This study analyzes contemporary American sports poetry, demonstrating that poems about sports express common attitudes and showing what the respective sports' poems say about American culture of the last fifty years. While placing particular emphasis on the hero in American sports poetry, the study proves that a considerable body of sports poetry exists in American culture and that it is worthy of serious analysis. The study opens with the analysis done so far on sports poetry, articulates methods of approach, and gives a brief history of sports poetry, beginning with victory chants around the tribal campfire. From Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" to Gibb's "Listening to the Ballgame," the body of the work is organized thematically by sport: baseball, football, basketball, women's sports, and minor sports such as golf, racquet sports, and boxing. The study concludes with a chapter on poems about fans and spectators and a summary of the study's arguments. Each section gives detailed readings of many poems.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Ralph Adamo -- Betty Adcock -- Claudia Emerson Andrews -- James Applewhite -- Alvin Aubert -- Gerald Barrax -- John Bensko -- Wendell Berry -- David Bottoms -- Cathy Smith Bowers -- Van K. Brock -- Jack Butler -- Turner Cassity -- Fred Chappell -- Stephen Corey -- Kate Daniels -- James Dickey -- R.H.W. Dillard -- Maudelle Driskell -- George Garrett -- Margaret Gibson -- R.S. Gwynn -- Jim Hall -- Andrew Hudgins -- T.R. Hummer -- Mark Jarman -- Rodney Jones -- Donald Justice -- Etheridge Knight -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Rick Lott -- Susan Ludvigson -- Everette Maddox -- Cleopatra Mathis -- Walter McDonald -- Jo McDougall -- Heather Ross Miller -- Jim Wayne Miller -- Vassar Miller -- William Mills -- Judson Mitcham -- Robert Morgan -- Delisa Mulkey -- Naomi Shihab Nye -- Brenda Marie Osbey -- Paula Rankin -- Pattiann Rogers -- Gibbons Ruark -- Larry Rubin -- James Seay -- Charlie Smith -- Dave Smith -- A.E. Stallings -- Frank Stanford -- Leon Stokesbury -- John Stone -- Henry Taylor -- Richard Tillinghast -- Ellen Bryant Voigt -- Alice Walker -- Robert Penn Warren -- John Warwick -- James Whitehead -- Miller Williams -- C.D. Wright -- Charles Wright -- Index of Titles

"There's a real flowering, I think, of southern poetry right now, ... assembling at the edges of everything. "This observation by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright reflects upon the continuing vibrancy and importance of the southern poetic tradition. Although the death of James Dickey in 1997 left southern poetry without a recognizably dominant voice, an array of other vibrant voices continue to be heard and recognized. Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets provides a glimpse of the many poets who promise to keep southern poetry vital into the twenty-first century.

Owning Our Voices offers a unique, first-hand account of working within the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition of extended voice work by Margaret Pikes, an acclaimed voice teacher and founder member of the Roy Hart Theatre. This dynamic publication fuses Pikes’ personal account of her own vocal journey as a woman within this, at times, male-dominated tradition, alongside an overview of her particular pedagogical approach to voice work, and is accompanied by digital footage of Pikes at work in the studio with artist-collaborators and written descriptions of scenarios for teaching. For the first time, Margaret Pikes’ uniquely holistic approach to developing the expressive voice through sounding, speech, song and movement has been documented in text and on film, offering readers an introduction to both the philosophy and the practice of Wolfsohn-Hart voice work. Owning Our Voices is a vital book for scholars and students of voice studies and practitioners of vocal performance: it represents a synthesis of a life’s work exploring the expressive potential of the human voice, illuminating an important lineage of vocal training, which remains influential to this day.

Red Dirt is the story of one man's quest for personal knowledge. It is a journey to discover the influences of his homeland on his upbringing, values, and relationships. But it is much, much more. Red Dirt is also the chronicle of an expedition along California's Landscape of Imagination. It is the story of a trip down Highway 49, the fabled roadway that slices through the heart of the Gold Country the Mother Lode, home of the 49ers, the land of dreams. It is the true story of the past, present, and future of one of the most important regions in American Western history. Red Dirt is about who we are and to what we aspire. Red Dirt is about us.

In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies—in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns—with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class. Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter—the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance. As we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.