Said-Songs

The essays collected in SAID-SONGS range from the personal to the scholarly and explore the hybrid territory in between, where a creative writer considers literary craft and how it influences the generative imagination. Jesse Graves examines the writings of the people and about the places that have most shaped his own poetry. In the essay, Lyric: A Personal History, readers encounter an emerging poet deeply immersed in the history of lyric and narrative poems and gain a view into how these literary traditions shape the writing and revising of his first poetry collection. Appalachia and its writers hold the central focus of this collection, but Graves cultivates a space in which poets with voices and styles as diverse as John Ashbery, Federico García Lorca, and Adam Zagajewski receive fresh critical attention. SAID-SONGS traces the evolution of a poet's sensibility from the early days of a rural eastern Tennessee childhood to the maturing voice of the writer.