Guns and Boyhood in America: A Memoir of Growing Up in the 50s (Poets on Poetry)

In this honest and compelling collection of autobiographical essays, poet Jonathan Holden writes about sex, baseball, and summer camp; about parents who keep their distance; about the mistakes of adolescence; and about the national romance with guns. Most of all, however, he writes about the realities of having a twin brother who is gay and the excruciating pains he took to avoid being mistaken "for a fairy." Illustrating his points with his own poems, Holden creates a book that is not only a critique of homophobia (his gay problem and ours) but a wider questioning of American cultural values. We live in Sparta rather than Athens, Holden says, where the terror of homosexuality compels boys to lead distorted lives. Striking a low-keyed but insistent note of social criticism against the militarized, anti-poetic place where we live--one that so often seems to be a great, crass high school with overindulged appetites for sex and aggression, instead of a place where learning or the inner life can honestly thrive--Holden questions the ethos of this place where most boys consider such arts as dance or piano too dangerous to practice. His challenge to the American machismo ethic and its aesthetic correlative uncovers fascinating questions about the gender assumptions we have regarding sports and the arts.In Guns and Boyhood in America, Jonathan Holden succeeds in creating an eloquent rendering of the dramas and dilemmas of an American boyhood in prose and poetry, while allowing us to overhear a finely worded lover's quarrel with America. Jonathan Holden is the author of poetry collections including Against Paradise, American Gothic, and most recently The Sublime, recipient of the 1995 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Currently he is University Distinguished Professor and Poet-in-Residence, Kansas State University.

Guns and Boyhood in America: A Memoir of Growing Up in the 50s (Poets On Poetry)

Biographies & Memoirs

Holden, Jonathan

Arts & Literature

University of Michigan Press

The poets describes his childhood and adolescence, focusing on the conflict he felt growing up straight with a twin brother who is gay

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Univ of Michigan Pr

The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Stafford's Poetry

History & Criticism

Univ Pr of Kansas

University Press of Kansas

Are we witnessing the death of American poetry? Many critics have charged as much, pointing to a poetry that is increasingly marginal, specialized, and cloistered. Challenging such doomsayers, Jonathan Holden offers a hopeful appraisal of the current state of American poetry. Examining the reasons behind the loss of readership and diminished status of poetry in America, Holden blames the advent of modernism and the institutionalization of the modernist tradition in university English departments. Although in many ways the American university's overwhelming support of poetry has left the art more vigorous than ever, it has also encouraged a mass production of mediocre verse.
Holden contends that the best postwar American poets have shed the elitist vestiges of modernism and have enlarged both the capabilities of poetry and its appeal to a general audience by incorporating subject matter formerly confined to other genres. In discussing contemporary poems Holden illustrates how American poetry, by including a more diverse subject matter, can assert some just claim to a wider audience―a literate audience of nonspecialists.

The Fate of American Poetry

Univ of Georgia Pr

Are we witnessing the death of American poetry? Many critics have charged as much, pointing to a poetry that is increasingly marginal, specialized and cloistered.

American Gothic: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry

Univ of Missouri Pr

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Books by Holden, Jonathan