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Acknowledgments “An Audience”: An initial, much shorter version of this essay was published in the Hawaiian literary journal Manoa, but the piece grew over the years. In 2003 the final form of it was delivered as a keynote speech at Humanities Washington’s annual Humanities Awards Luncheon in Seattle; it is posted on their web site at http:// www.humanities.org. “Laughed Off: Canon, Kharakter, and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay” was originally published in The Kenyon Review, Winter 1994. “‘Sen-Sen,’ Censorship, Obscenity, Secrecy: Slapping the Face of the Body Politic”: An excerpted version of this essay appeared in the AWP Chronicle and the whole piece in New England Review, Fall 1991. “Inside the Avalanche” first appeared in What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 1995). “Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South” was previously published in The Southern Review, Winter 1996. “Revenge of the American Leviathan” was previously published in New England Review, Spring/Summer 1992. vii viii Acknowledgments “‘Christ, Start Again’: Robert Penn Warren, a Poet of the South?” was published in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren, edited by David Madden (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). “The Mechanical Muse”: The full essay was published under the title “Tutelary Instruments” in Fall 2003 in the electronic journal Blackbird, available on the web at http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu. A short version under the present title appeared in The Oxford American (Sixth Annual Music Issue, April 2003) and was chosen by Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead for inclusion in the anthology Best Music Writing for 2004 (New York: Da Capo, 2004). ...

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