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Chris Ellery
2661 Yale Avenue
San Angelo, Texas 76904
915.942.2252 ext. 228
cellery@angelo.edu
Chris Ellery is a poet and professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo. He is the author of two volumes of poetry and the co-translator of a book of Syrian short stories. He is a former Fulbright lecturer in American literature at the University of Aleppo in Syria. In 2005, his “Bimaristan Arghun” received the Betsy Colquitt Award as best poem of the year published in descant, the Texas Christian University literary journal.
Presentation
Poetry and Value
Values guide human attitudes and behavior. Because values are inherently important to a person’s identity, poetry derives its power to affect a reader (or listener) from its ability to engage the reader’s (or listener’s) complex network of values. Thus, the meaning of a poem is rooted in the value or values conflicts that the poem expresses and reflects. A poem frames a values conflict and, through its language, either subverts or asserts particular individual, cultural, or human values. When a reader encounters a poem, his or her value system, in effect, passes through the text and emerges either affirmed or changed in some way. This presentation demonstrates the relationship between meaning and value in poetry by closely examining Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” and Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Each of these poems subverts a familiar cultural, if not human, value. They challenge readers to suspend their own impressionistic interpretations based on their personal values in order to discover meaning in the language the poet chooses to frame the values conflict. When the value expressed by the poem and the reader’s own values conflict, the encounter between poem and reader can be deeply significant.