SING WHAT

About the Book

This is Ernest Yates’s seventeenth volume of poems, and the fourteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets. So the city is a human habitat, a shared home. Still it’s impossible to know Philadelphia’s hundred neighborhoods; impossible as well to know their significance. What dreams, what flimsy speculations the imagination conceives―of itself and of its place―as it ponders this unknowable scene, this physical realm, this body of the city. By itself the physical detail speaks a dreary idiom, harsh and flat; but the wonder of its mystery may give rise to melody, a tuneful song of the possible. For whatever else it is, whatever it may be, over and over again the city proves it is there. Dreaming, we know it is there.

About the Author

Born in Ancon, Panama, and raised in New Orleans, Ernest Yates obtained a doctorate in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He has lived and worked in the Philadelphia area for fifty years. Mr. Yates has published poetry in dozens of literary magazines and journals, and has won the Grand Prize of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, among other poetry awards. For further information, please consult Mr. Yates’s website― ernestyates.com