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The Missouri Review

Author

Rodney Jones (2008)

Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones has published eight books of poetry, including Salvation Blues: 100 Poems (2007), Kingdom of the Instant: Poems (2004) and Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999). Salvation Blues won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007. Jones was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter I. B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award and a Harper Lee Award. Rodney Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. [2008]

CONTRIBUTIONS

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Interviews

Dec 01 2008

A Conversation with Rodney Jones

I grew up four miles outside of a town of six hundred, and by the time I was thirteen, I knew most of those people. My father knew all of them and others for miles around, men and women, black and white, and when he met a person he did not know, it was not long before he made a connection with someone that they both knew. In fact, most of the talk in the country was about people, and not just the living or the recently dead. There was a kind of web, a legending and a curiosity that enclosed us. I take that with me, and I imagine that the longer cultural habit does go back to Chaucer, but not just through books and not just through language.
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