Argument And Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry

by Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly is one of his generation's important poets. He was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939, and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio. Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Davison said of his work, "Plumly's rich, dense poems give off a special fragrance, the incense of the English Romantic movement mingling with forest odors from the Old Northwest Territory between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes."

This volume collects fifteen of Plumly's essays on poetry and art, including the seminal "Chapter and Verse," "Sentimental Forms," and "The Abrupt Edge." Meditating on poems by Keats, Stevens, James Wright, Plath, and Matthews, on Emily Bronte’s prose, and paintings by Whistler, Plumly returns again and again to essential the impulses, occasions, and places out of which art arises and the forms by which imagination gives it shape.

About Stanley Plumly's

"Reading Stanley Plumly is like having someone whisper unceasingly in your ear, humming of light, trees, sleep, snow."
- The New York Times Book Review

"Plumly&'s landscapes, for all their underpinnings in concrete detail, seem at times like sets in a Fellini softly falling snow, birds, suicides, and blossoming red roses, with flashes of insight that burn the retinas and leave an afterimage even more surreal."
- Kirkus Reviews

"The voice of [his] poems reveals a plaintiveness without sentimentality, weaving poignant stories that transcend mere narrative."
- The Boston Review

Genres: Poetry

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

On May 23, 1939, Stanley Plumly was born to Herman and Esther Plumly in Barnesville, Ohio. Following Stanley's birth, the family moved from farm work to carpentry jobs and back to farm work in Virginia and Ohio. Plumly graduated from Wilmington College, a small work-study school in Ohio, in 1962. While he was in college, his writing talents were recognized and encouraged by the playwright-poet-teacher Joel Climenhaga. Plumly received his MA from Ohio University in 1968 and did course work toward a PhD at the same school.

The writer's father, who died at the age of fifty-six of a heart attack brought on by his chronic alcoholism, dominates the poet's work: "I can hardly think of a poem I've written that at some point in its history did not implicate, or figure, my father" (Iowa Review, Fall 1973). His mother also figures prominently as the silent, helpless witness of her husband's self-destruction.

Plumly's books of poetry include Old Heart (W. W. Norton, 2007); The Marriage in the Trees (Ecco Press, 1997); Boy on the Step (1989); Summer Celestial (1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977), which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Giraffe (1973); In the Outer Dark (1970), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (W. W. Norton, 2008); Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (Other Press, 2003).

He edited the Ohio Review from 1970 to 1975 and the Iowa Review from 1976 to 1978. He has taught at numerous institutions including Louisiana State University, Ohio University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Houston, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1978 and 1979.

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (Plumly's father died while the poet was in Europe on this grant in 1973), an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, he is Maryland's poet laureate.

Reviews

[Jane]

For me, a difficult read with moments of illumination. Very esoteric comments on the creation of poetry. It was borrowed from interlibrary loan, and if I had had more time, I could have read it at a more leisurely pace. Nevertheless, it is helpful for a writers' workshop.