Where Do You Put the Horse? (Hardcover)

Author: Paul Metcalf

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (1986)

Paul Metcalf has in this collection of critical pieces put his stamp on the personal essay. Ranging from one page to twenty-six (the longest, a tribute to Charles Olson), his essays cover people, places, and things. In addition to being philosophical, poetic, informative, penetrating, and generally illuminating, his wide-ranging vignettes present us with a short index of Metcalf's reading and thinking as he shares with us his very personal responses to the novel (John Gardner, Melville, Hubert Seldby Jr., Paul Bowles), poetry (Simon J. Ortiz, Allen Ginsberg, Karl Young, Guy Davenport, Theodore Enslin, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley,) literature (Whitman, poets vs. novelists), drama (his play, An American Chronicle), linguistics, film (Melies, Griffith, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton), photography (Edward S. Curtis, Jacob A. Riis), art (contemporaries, the creative process), religion (the Puritans), philosophy (the Transcendentalists), history (the poet and history), anthropology (totem poles), nature and the land (the Northwest, the frontier, the North Atlantic), and such miscellaneous subjects as space, the "Me" generation, his daughter, and the insurance of a new Melville postage stamp.