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.
Ernest Yates Book order






- 2019
- 2016
Turnings
- 102 pages
- 4 hours of reading
This is Ernest Yates?s ninth volume of poems, and the sixth volume in an ongoing cycle based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Yates?s turns through city streets recall the wilderness wanderings of Bashô in 17th-century Japan, and especially the wanderings of the rivers and mountains poets of the T?ang and pre-T?ang dynasties of China. Receptive to his terrain as they were to theirs, Yates relies on syncopated rhythms, fragmentation, and abrupt rhetorical turns to capture his responses to that terrain. A portrait of Philadelphia emerges?its diverse citizenry, streetscape, and history, as these are revealed in phenomena of the streets themselves.
- 2016
Relatively 4th Street
- 104 pages
- 4 hours of reading
This is the eighth volume of poems in which Ernest Yates records impressions of Philadelphia, his home town. In this volume Yates makes poems out of the sights and sounds of a single street--a street that is neither exceptional among countless other city streets, nor typical of them. Yet by the poet's responses to 4th Street, we are made to feel its mystery, and its wonder.
- 2015
Ragged Footsteps, Brushed Drums
- 106 pages
- 4 hours of reading
- 2015
Similar to many modern post-industrial cities, Philadelphia is nevertheless distinguished by a unique population, history, and architecture. This is the sixth book of poems in which Ernest Yates records his impressions of the city. Like the itinerant Buddhist-inspired poets of ancient China and Japan, Mr. Yates attempts to capture the wildness and mystery of his terrain, and re-create it as an imaginative realm located somewhere between the dust of sidewalks and the glitter of stars.
- 2014
this companion volume to Geography Lesson, Ernest Yates continues his cycle of poems based on the streets of his home town, Philadelphia. In Evening of the First Day, those streets serve as anchor to the wandering poets dreams of community and home.
- 2013
Geography Lesson
- 108 pages
- 4 hours of reading
In the poems of Geography Lesson Ernest Yates chronicles the sights and sounds of Philadelphia. In doing so, he envisions a community that accommodates the dreams of a diverse citi zenry, and suggests how the city itself concrete, glass, steel is built of those dreams.