Most think of an émigré as one who leaves her native land to find home in another. Claudia Keelan, in essays both personal and critical, enlists poetic company for her journey, engaging both canonical and common figures, from Gertrude Stein to a prophetic Las Vegas cab driver named Caesar. Mapping her own peripatetic evolution in poetry and her nomadic life, she also engages with Christian and Buddhist doctrines on the virtues of dispossession. ? Ecstatic Émigré pays homage to poets from Thoreau and Whitman to Alice Notley, all of whom share a commitment to living and writing in the moment. Keelan asks the same questions about the growth of flowers or the meaning of bioluminescence as she does about the poetics of John Cage or George Oppen. Her originality is grounded by the ways in which she connects poetic principles with the spiritual concepts of via negativa demonstrated both in St. John of the Cross and Mahayana Buddhism. In addition, her essays demonstrate an activist spirit and share a commitment to the passive resistance demonstrated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of the “beloved community” and philosopher Simone Weil’s dedication to “exile.”

Ecstatic Émigré: An Ethics of Practice (Poets On Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Keelan, Claudia

Essays & Correspondence

University of Michigan Press

If God is not available, then what is? In this collection of "coming of age" poems, Claudia Keelan attempts to answer that question by testing the limits of influence on one writer's notions of self and God. Those influences, or teachers, are as varied as literature, family, and organized religion. Through many voices, The Secularist shapes new poetic forms through which God may be glimpsed.

Secularist (Contemporary Poetry Series)

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Features poetry by Claudia Keelan, Ray Gonzalez, Tracy Philpot, Michelle Mitchell-Foust, Sarah Fox, Lisa Fishman, et al.

Elixir #2

GONZALEZ, RAY

Philpot, Tracy

Elixir Press

Poetry. "At the center of this fabulous tale of the human heart a tale at once historical, scientific, musical, literary is a wrenched lyric cry, the cry of a particular woman in a particular place, the place uncharted, the woman floating between the remembered ecstasies of youth and the unforeseen rigors of age: I break my heart all by myself. Like the tutelary spirits she conjures—Bronte, Dickinson, Bowles—, Claudia Keelan prefers the heart broken, and the extravagant, multi-voiced drama of O, HEART is itself the evidence that, once broken, the heart is never alone."—James Longenbach

O, Heart

Barrow Street Press

Poetry. "WE STEP INTO THE SEA collects over three decades of work by one of the most singular voices in contemporary American poetry. It tells the story of a lyric poet who both probes and sheds the self in search of a 'we,' not to belong to, but rather, to care for, to serve: 'I will hold us safely together, / we will consider the falling whole.' In these poems of passive resistance and active celebration, we are given a panoramic view of a poet who insists that experimentation is an ethical imperative, one that will help us forge a kingdom of compassion that runs counter to empire. From her home in the desert, Keelan sees an alternative beauty that resists 'the beauty of human enterprise, its folly, from above / Greening a desert.' She sees instead 'the glory of the red rocks,' and in this gift of a book, she shows us this glory at the very moment when we most need to see it for ourselves."--Sasha Steensen

We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems

Truth of My Songs is a translation of poems written by the women troubadours, known as trobairitz, whose poems disappeared after the Albigensian crusade of 1129. Together, the poems present a profound argument―for and against―the notion of fin’ amor, the pure or fine notion of love, invented by their male counterparts. Tragic, raucous, vulgar, silly, and strange, the poems of the trobairitz prove that women’s history has been recorded since the first woman raised her voice and lifted a pen.

Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz

Omnidawn

Keelan’s experiments with parts of speech, punctuation and line are experiments dedicated to finding what life has been left out or erased in dominant culture’s acceptance of conventional language modes. Utopic sings the blues for those unacknowledged.

Utopic

Alice James Books

The experimental and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E influence is clear, yet The Devotion Field offers, in a number of urban elegies, more narrative and personal (though still political) detail than has been Keelan’s habit. Full of cultural and social critique, the poems concern themselves with the artifice of language, the art of being and the art of art, the fragmentation and continuous flux of contemporary life. She employs trademark techniques: stream-of--consciousness, free association and associative leaps, in addition to a new emphasis on melody and musical phrasing.AntiqueShe brought the teapot because it was broken& broken still valuable,A thing not available to her otherwise.On its restored surface a pastoralFlickered once. Too late.She was not honest but she was a poetMending the broken valuable . . .“What absolute nonsense!” cried the Earthworm.“NothingIs ever all right in the end and well you know it.”Poor Earthworm, Ladybug whispered,Loving all that is disasterBellydown breathing with it everafter.“Claudia Keelan’s The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, ‘dog food and soil,’ ‘dust and bits of paper,’ flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. ‘Into the possibilities of the next page, / Or more nearly, another day.’ The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.”—John AshberyClaudia Keelan is the author of three previous prize--winning collections of poetry. She teaches in the MFA and Ph.D. programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the editor of Interim.

The Devotion Field

In poems performed via scat singing, via documentary, poems devoted to the sui generis, Missing Her redefines the elegy as a seeking statement.

Missing Her (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

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Books by Keelan, Claudia