Transcultural Spiritual Practices in American Poetry since 1960 : The Blest Words in Their Best Order

Anna Schmidt explores how American poets have drawn on a diverse set of religious symbols, myths, and rituals in their poetry to present ethical and moral visions of social justice, environmental sustainability, and cross-cultural community.

The study begins in 1963 with Robert Bly’s claim that American poetry had failed society due to its cultural insularity and lack of spiritual life, and it investigates how poets after him sought to transform readers’ consciousnesses and, ideally, American society, by writing socially engaged and spiritually attentive poetry. Chapters discuss Bly and James Wright’s deep image translations of foreign poets, Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo’s indigenous and feminist deep image poems, Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Thylias Moss’s liberation theology, Li-Young Lee and Lucille Clifton’s metaphysics of love, bell hooks and Jane Hirshfield’s Buddhism and environmentalism, and Elizabeth Woody and Melissa Kwasny’s environmental justice poetics. The book demonstrates how these poets’ integration of spiritual and social concerns with their beliefs about poetry constitutes what Anna Schmidt calls, “transcultural spiritual practices.” The term “transcultural” describes both the poets’ visions and the comparative methodology of each chapter, and the analysis engages with literary studies, religious studies, ethnic studies, and environmental studies to tell a multifaceted story of contemporary American poetry. For too long, the stories of these poets and their work have been told separately along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. To put these poets into transcultural conversation through their spiritual worldviews makes a new, holistic literary history of American poetry possible.