Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Mapping the Post-pastoral Extreme in Northern Appalachian Poetry.
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In his essay “Buckeye,” Scott Russell Sanders writes, “For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.” Following Sanders assertion of the poem as a “living map,” this paper considers the poetry of Northern Appalachia, specifically that which draws dramatic or “extreme” pastoral contrasts in its imagery—the coal fields and the rolling farm land, the steel mill and the green river valley, the strip mine and the mountains—as participating in this kind of place mapping. Several poets of the region bring our attention to these contrasts of the industrial ruins against the beauty of its natural landscape. The closed or half-closed mills, factory ruins, declining towns, and more recently, the oil and gas pipelines that snake up and down the hills, all provide imagistic counterpoints to the region’s natural beauty as well as symbolize what Leo Marx has called “the machine in the garden.” As such, renderings of these post-industrial and intra-industrial landscapes participate in what critic Terry Gifford has termed the post-pastoral. Within Gifford’s, Marx’s, and Sander’s critical frameworks, I consider poems by Richard Hague, Marc Harshman, Maggie Anderson, William Kelly Woolfitt, Michael Adams, Jim Daniels, and James Wright, and center my discussion around the ways in which these post-pastoral poems function as living maps unique to the Appalachian north, allowing readers to more fully understand and develop their sense of place within the region.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
William Scott Hanna is an Assistant Professor of English at West Liberty University outside of Wheeling, WV and is a proud, life-long resident of the Upper Ohio Valley.
Mapping the Post-pastoral Extreme in Northern Appalachian Poetry.
In his essay “Buckeye,” Scott Russell Sanders writes, “For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.” Following Sanders assertion of the poem as a “living map,” this paper considers the poetry of Northern Appalachia, specifically that which draws dramatic or “extreme” pastoral contrasts in its imagery—the coal fields and the rolling farm land, the steel mill and the green river valley, the strip mine and the mountains—as participating in this kind of place mapping. Several poets of the region bring our attention to these contrasts of the industrial ruins against the beauty of its natural landscape. The closed or half-closed mills, factory ruins, declining towns, and more recently, the oil and gas pipelines that snake up and down the hills, all provide imagistic counterpoints to the region’s natural beauty as well as symbolize what Leo Marx has called “the machine in the garden.” As such, renderings of these post-industrial and intra-industrial landscapes participate in what critic Terry Gifford has termed the post-pastoral. Within Gifford’s, Marx’s, and Sander’s critical frameworks, I consider poems by Richard Hague, Marc Harshman, Maggie Anderson, William Kelly Woolfitt, Michael Adams, Jim Daniels, and James Wright, and center my discussion around the ways in which these post-pastoral poems function as living maps unique to the Appalachian north, allowing readers to more fully understand and develop their sense of place within the region.
