Do Right By

Abstract

A collection of poems exploring the nature of landscapes as fundamentally cultural constructs. Written in the wake of New Formalism, the poems within Do Right By exemplify the notion that poetry is mathematical language, calculated and calculable. Inherited forms founded upon quantifiable rhythms mingle with new forms, all relayed by a speaker who discovers local history for the first time, engaging with the similarly inherited legacies of environmental change and white nationalism in what today is the Piedmont Southeast. Subject matter includes but is not limited to boyhood, twig knowledge, acts of cruelty, the afterlives of Confederate monuments, suburbanization and industrialization, barbeque restaurants, and fossil-hunting. Pastiches and parodies abound, participating in dialogues about the experiences and expectations of men with a cohort of male forebears, including both regional male authors such as Don West and major male poets like John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, W.B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Robert Duncan, A.R. Ammons, and David Bottoms, among others. While ten of the twenty-six short poems in Do Right By are inspired by common structures, such as the sonnet or ballad, sixteen are written in a close imitation of another work. Included are six footprint poems: a new form, invented for the collection, that involves filling the exact syllabic footprint of a pre-existing poem with new language. A central closet drama, “Vigil Strange,” about the life and death of a politicized childhood friendship, utilizes the performance-driven, monologic speech of the short poems toward a narrative turn within the collection as a whole. Created is a post-epic ecosystem that incorporates countless contemporary topics and contemporary rhythms, which each have historical precedents.