num_pages: 174
description: Life's first question, and one left imperfectly answered throughout the days of most of us, is who am I?, with its corollaries, how did I get here? and what am I supposed to do now? A Childhood in the Milky Way is one man's approach to these mysteries. The answer, I am a poet, leads David Brendan Hopes into an exploration of what it means, in America, at the end of the twentieth century, to be a poet, to be a professional provider of visionary alternative to established reality. Furthermore, A Childhood in the Milky Way investigates what sort of poet it could have been who arose from the Industrial-soon to be post-Industrial-ethnically jumbled, socially troubled, aesthetically impoverished milieu of Akron, Ohio, in the late 50s and 60s, when the last thing on anybody's mind was poetry, and well-nigh the first thing was the compulsion not to be conspicuous. This book follows the way by which the author, conspicuous by nature, almost succeeds in disappearing into imaginary worlds of peculiar beauty, and behind the curtain of homegrown religious mysticism. Funny and dramatic by turns, A Childhood in the Milky Way delivers a view of a special childhood in one corner, at least, of that galaxy, where the going is rough and the people by turns rough, naive, fanciful, full of inarticulate desire, sometimes haunted by the voices of angels and of bards.
language: English
title: A Childhood in the Milky Way: Becoming a Poet in Ohio
titlecomplete: A Childhood in the Milky Way: Becoming a Poet in Ohio (Ohio History and Culture)
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Univ of Akron Pr