Kenneth reads from his work in GAS 9.
Kenneth Lumpkin is an educator, writer, poet, musician, Freemason and activist. He has published four collections of poetry to date: "Gather the Ashes", 1984, winner of the Louis Ginsberg Memorial Fellowship from the Chaucer Guild, "Song of Ramapough: A Poetics of Place", 2016, "Love Lake", 2017 and "God Has Many Names and other poems", 2018 and "Slip of the Tongue", 2019. He teaches anthropology online through three New Jersey state universities and resides in London, Ontario with his wife, Kim and cat, Molly.
Song of Ramapough is a work that has some years behind it...38 as of this writing. It is a poetics of place. In this sense, it gets a lot of its direction and inspiration from Charles Olson's Maximus Poems and William Carlos Williams' Paterson. It was my intent when I started this project to write something that bespoke of the land, in this case, the Ramapo Mountain area of upper Bergen County, New Jersey and parts of Rockland and Orange Counties, New York. The idea was that it would be an environmental learning tool as well as a collection of poems. It is, in fact, one long poem to a particular place, the Ramapo Mountains. The personal hope was that if I got to know one distinct place on this planet intimately, I would also come to know the larger place, and therefore, the very Earth, itself.
Song of Ramapough is a work that has some years behind it...38 as of this writing. It is a poetics of place. In this sense, it gets a lot of its direction and inspiration from Charles Olson's Maximus Poems and William Carlos Williams' Paterson. It was my intent when I started this project to write something that bespoke of the land, in this case, the Ramapo Mountain area of upper Bergen County, New Jersey and parts of Rockland and Orange Counties, New York. The idea was that it would be an environmental learning tool as well as a collection of poems. It is, in fact, one long poem to a particular place, the Ramapo Mountains. The personal hope was that if I got to know one distinct place on this planet intimately, I would also come to know the larger place, and therefore, the very Earth, itself.
A sample from God Has Many Names
From Song of Ramapough
