Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

The essays collected in Said-Songs range from the personal to the scholarly and explore the hybrid territory in between, where a creative writer considers literary craft and how it influences the generative imagination. Jesse Graves examines the writings of the people and about the places that have most shaped his own poetry, including several studies on his
hometown literary hero,
the Knoxville-born winner of the Pulitzer Prize, James Agee. In the volume’s opening essay, Lyric: A Personal History, readers encounter an emerging poet deeply immersed in the history of lyric and narrative poems and gain a view into how these literary traditions shape the writing and revising of his first poetry collection, the award-winning Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Appalachia and its writers hold the central focus of this collection, but Graves cultivates a space in which poets with voices and styles as diverse as John Ashbery, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Adam Zagajewski receive fresh critical attention. These represent the writers, or the connections between writers, that Graves could not stop thinking about and felt compelled to try to understand through the steady concentration of analysis. Every writer’s journey is also the journey of a reader and Graves invites us to join his ongoing exploration of books, music, and the literary imagination. The essays and interviews gathered in Said-Songs trace the evolution of a poet’s sensibility from the early days of a rural eastern Tennessee childhood to the maturing voice of the writer.