From heart to homeland: American poetry at FGCU
6 – minute read
American poetry stretches from the Colonial era through the modern age — from Anne Bradstreet, widely considered to be the first American poet, to Arthur Sze, the 25th and current U.S. poet laureate. Across centuries and styles, poets return again and again to the subject of love — romantic, tragic, familial, civic, national — as one of poetry’s most enduring subjects.
In honor of Valentine’s Day and the semiquincentennial, America’s 250th birthday, FGCU360 explores the long tradition of American love poetry and how it lives on in Florida Gulf Coast University classrooms.
The American poetic tradition
A professor in the Department of Language & Literature in FGCU’s College of Arts & Sciences, James Brock is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and the author of four volumes of poetry. He teaches creative writing and contemporary literature.
“Poets teach us what it is to be American — from Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman to Yusef Komunyakaa to Ada Limón to Allen Ginsberg to Naomi Shihab Nye to Layli Long Soldier — with contrary and vibrant voices,” Brock says.
His “Poetry of U.S. Literature & Culture” course asks students to read poems that continue to shape how Americans understand themselves and each other.
“I think that poetry can show us that we’re human before we are American, and our neighbors are human before they are our neighbors, and there is so much to learn from others,” says Lauren Brown, a former student of Brock. She graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in creative writing.
Another of his former students, Chanda Jamieson (’11, English), sees love as a force that shapes everything in the American poetic tradition — “the love we seek, the love we’ve lost,” and the ways abundance or absence mark a life. Poetry, she says, is often an attempt “to know who we are and the ways we love.”
Expressing love through verse
Brown’s path to creative writing wasn’t a straight road. When she was 9, her mother’s horse died and Brown wrote her a poem about the loss of the beloved pet. “It was a child’s vague attempt at understanding grief, but I guess that was good enough. She cried when she read it.”
Brown continued writing — about anything and everything — until age 13, when her dad died. “The idea of doing anything that would require me to sit still for even a moment was out of the question, so I stopped writing.”
Years passed. She went to college and started a career in healthcare but struggled to find contentment. Eventually, she decided to pursue her writing passion and enrolled at FGCU at 24.
“I spent so much of my life scared to write poetry because I couldn’t confront my grief, and I’ve learned that poetry is so much more than just giving a name to your inner turmoil,” Brown says. “Poetry has taught me how to slow down and sit with my feelings. When I write about grief, I’m writing about love without a home.
“Love’s influence on the American poetic tradition is shown in many ways, but I think it’s most notably shown through educators’ desire to pass on their knowledge of poetry and literature. That contagious, passionate love of their craft is what inspired me to pursue writing again.”
Preserving and understanding history
Jamieson, whose poetry has been featured by the Global City Review literary collective, is part of a multigenerational commercial fishing family with roots in Nova Scotia. After FGCU, she earned her master of fine arts in creative writing from Boston’s Emerson College, then returned to Fort Myers to run The Fisherman’s Daughter, an artisanal prepared food company based on heirloom family recipes and using regionally sourced ingredients like mullet and blue crab.
“Chanda’s poetry rests in those quiet, meditative spaces and her themes about family and place are especially evocative,” Brock says.
Jamieson’s path to poetry, much like her path to running a family business, is rooted in inheritance — stories passed down, places held close and people who shaped her. For her, food and poetry come from the same impulse: to preserve what matters.
“If I want the places of my youth to be here in 10 years’ time, I need folks to understand why they ever mattered to begin with,” says Jamieson.
Home on the range with American poetry
When American poets write about love at a national scale, that love is often situated in a particular place — think Robert Frost’s New England, Gary Snyder’s West, Natalie Diaz’s desert Southwest.
Jamieson says her love of Southwest Florida was shaped long before she had the language for it. Growing up, she learned to read landscape as a poem. “We absorb so many visual poems as children, or I did, at least, out on the water with my dad, pre-dawn, our boat tied to a mangrove, waiting for a cut of silver to split the shoreline,” she says. “I got comfortable with quiet, my imagination filling the space between me and the natural world.”
For many American poets, love of place is inseparable from love of people — especially in moments of tragedy or shared loss. Poetry often becomes a way for communities to remember, to mourn and to insist that suffering not be forgotten.
Brock recalls reading from his first book of poetry, “The Sunshine Mine Disaster,” at a 25‑year memorial for the 91 miners killed in a fire at the Sunshine Mine in Kellogg, Idaho. After the reading, two miners who had survived the fire approached him. One shook his hand and said simply, “We thought we had all been forgotten.”
Moments like that, Brock says, reveal why “we turn to poetry in such dark times. These are words that are not transactional, not self-serving and refuse to be easy platitudes.”
As the nation marks 250 years, American poems remind us that love has never been peripheral to the country’s literary imagination. It has been one of its most serious tools: a way to argue, grieve, remember, hope, love — and imagine what this country will be.