The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral

by Joshua Corey (editor), G.C. Waldrep (Editor)

This nearly 600-page anthology brings together seminal work in the genre of the pastoral as it has evolved into the 21st century. The book's sections on New Transcendentalisms, Textual Ecologies, Local Powers, and the Necropastoral indicate the range of work being represented. Featuring some of the most provocative and innovative poets of the current moment, this anthology has been curated not only with an eye to an exhilarating reading experience, but to the literature and creative writing classrooms as well. An accompanying web site with a teachers' guide will make this volume especially valuable for students and teachers.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

576 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Joshua Corey is a novelist, poet, translator, and essayist. A professor of English and creative writing at Lake Forest College, he lives in Evanston, Illinois with his family.

https://joshuacorey.substack.com/

Reviews

[Kent V.]

Some of my favorite poems after first readthrough:
The Vowels Pass By in English, by Brenda Hillman
No Blue Morpho, by Oni Buchanan
Tuned Droves, by Eric Baus
The Song of Stunted Hawks, by Eric Baus
A Surface. A Shore or Semi-transparency of Glass, by Nathan Hauke
from "Lucinda: A Revision," by John Beer
The Phosphorescence of Thought, by Peter O'Leary
from "Concordat Proviso Ascendant," by Christopher Dewdney
Grid Erectile, by Christopher Dewdney
Acorn Duly Crushed, by Heather Christle
Bark Beetle, by Jody Gladding
Red-Shouldered Hawks, by Jack Collom
The End of Another Creature, by Susan Briante
Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache, by Juliana Spahr
from "Mercury Vectors: A Romance," by Catherine Wagner
White Footed Mouse, by Jane Sprague
Arcadia, or, Anachronism: A Necropastoral Effigy, by Joyelle McSweeney
Macbeth for Everyone, by Chris Green

[Emlen]

(Always hard to decide when to move a book of poems to the "read" shelf; I certainly haven't read every poem in here, but I've read a lot, and I'm putting it down for a while.)

I was torn between two and three stars, honestly, but I'm trying not to blame it for not being exactly what I wanted. There are a lot of good poems in here -- some of my favorites were John Beer's "Lucinda: A Revision," Heather Christle's "Acorn Duly Crushed" ("Dear stupid forest." A pretty great opening line.), and Karen Rigby's "Autobiography as Panamanian Botanical Index." But there was a sort of sameness throughout that bothered me, and that I think is related to the way the book wasn't what I really wanted it to be. Because "pastoral," for this collection, seems just to mean "nature poetry." A lot of different approaches to romanticizing and not-romanticizing nature, many of them successful; but there are so many more things that are part of the pastoral tradition! Where are the dialogues (a little bit of this in John Beer, but nowhere else that I saw)? Where's the unrequited love? Where are the songs and song-contests and poems-within-poems (isn't this poetry supposed to be "postmodern"?)? Most of all, where are the pastores? I didn't find any shepherds, goatherds, cowherds, mowers, or other rural laborers anywhere in the collection.

Again, there's some very good poetry in here, and I don't mean to imply that everyone should have been writing about Corydon and Tityrus playing their pipes in Faunus' grove or whatever. But it seems like, in such a large collection, only a disappointingly narrow range of the aspects of "pastoral" were explored.

[Tom]

I have been and will be reading this big book for awhile. It is waking me up. I'm meeting many good poets I never knew before. And thinking of different ways a poem can be in on around & about the earth.