{"id":9380,"date":"2016-12-14T09:40:58","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T13:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9380"},"modified":"2016-12-14T09:53:17","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T13:53:17","slug":"where-poets-lives-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9380","title":{"rendered":"Where poets’ lives matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Irish media, the death of poet John Montague<\/a> was a major event. As far as I can tell, the American media have not mentioned it, though there is an American connection.<\/p>\n

Ten of Montague’s books were published by the Wake Forest University Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The editors were Dillon Johnston (who founded the WFU press in 1975) and Guinn Batten. Johnston and Batten — old friends of mine — had a very strong interest in Irish poetry and Irish literature, and the WFU press for years was a key publisher of Irish poetry. Johnston wrote Irish Poetry After Joyce<\/em> (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), which was the first book I ever helped edit. Guinn Batten now teaches at Washington University and is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism<\/em> (Duke University Press, 2012). I met John Montague many years ago at an event at Wake Forest.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, Irish culture still very much looks up to its poets. Its billionaires (if any), not so much.<\/p>\n

From Montague’sThe Great Cloak<\/em> (1978):<\/p>\n

At the end of a manuscript
\nI was studying, a secret message.
\nA star, a honeycomb, a seashell,
\nThe stately glory of a peacock’s tail
\nSpiralled colour across the page
\nTo end with a space between a lean I
\nAnd a warm and open-armed You.<\/p>\n

An hour later, you were at the door;
\nI learned the word that the space was for.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Irish media, the death of poet John Montague was a major event. As far as I can tell, the American media have not mentioned it, though there is an American connection. Ten of Montague’s books were published by the Wake Forest University Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The editors were Dillon Johnston (who … Continue reading “Where poets’ lives matter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9380"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9386,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions\/9386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}