Pub Crawl

A Poem of Philadelphia

This is Ernest Yates’s twelfth volume of poems and the ninth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Part Melville, part Joyce, part Bash travel diary and part Barthesian semiotics, this account of a poet’s journey through the wilderness of postindustrial Philadelphia is much, much more a search for freedom, God, love, community, and home; a meditation on the city’s and nation’s history and on the poet’s own life; a tentative definition of poetic form; and an argument concerning the relationship between poetry and life. Emerson and Stevens?but also Brooks, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Lorde?would be smiling.