Geography Lesson

In the poems of Geography Lesson Ernest Yates chronicles the sights and sounds of Philadelphia. In doing so, he envisions a community that accommodates the dreams of a diverse citi zenry, and suggests how the city itself-concrete, glass, steel- is built of those dreams.

Ernest Yates has written poetry based on the streets of Philadelphia for over forty years. He has won the Grand Prize of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, as well as other poetry awards, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals. In Geography Lesson Yates depicts Philadelphia as, on the one hand, representative of all modern cities, a place where most people in the 21st century live and pursue their separate paths. On the other hand, as presented in this volume, Philadelphia has a unique history and character, composites of all the separate paths chosen by its citizens. Yates turns Philadelphia into a map or cityscape of these individual desires. It is as though he is driven to traverse every square block of Philadelphia, and engage every citizen, in order to finish constructing and populating his imagined city. Yates relies on syncopated, jazz-like rhythms, and collage-like fragmentations and abrupt shifts, to capture the city's dynamism. As Yates traces his crooked path through the streets of Philadelphia, his verse forms recall those of itinerant Buddhist poets, such as Bashô in 17th-century Japan, and especially the rivers and mountains poets of T'ang and pre-T'ang dynasty China.