The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry

by Jake Adam York

The Architecture of Address traces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets--including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell--occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge’s Prize, A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008), and Persons Unknown, forthcoming as an Editor's Selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010).

His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

Reviews

[Jake Adam]

This book evolved from my dissertation. Apparently someone likes it, though I still don't know why anyone would read it.