Great Tornado Plains Barnes Summary

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Jim Weaver McKown Barnes was born in 1933 and raised in Summerfield, Oklahoma. He is of Choctaw and Welsh descent. Before becoming an accomplished author and poet Barnes worked as a lumberjack after high school for ten years. He attended college at Southeastern Oklahoma State University where he earned his B.A. Later he went on to earn is M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Arkansas for Comparative Literature. From 1970 to 2003 Barnes was a Professor of Comparative Literature and Writer-in-Residence at Truman State University. He served as Distinguished Professor of English at Brigham Young University from 2003 to 2006. As of today he's Professor of Comparative Literature at Northeast Missouri State University. Barnes has accepted seven fellowships …show more content…

He received an Oklahoma Book Award for The Sawdust War (1993) and received an American Book Award for On Native Ground (1998, 2000). He was also a founding editor of the Chariton Review Press from 1975 throughout 2006. Over the years Barnes has published well over 500 poems and translations in over 100 journals. Some of his poems that have stuck out to me were Great Tornado Plains, Heartland, Three Songs from a Texas Oilfield …show more content…

He draws from the past to tell stories in his poems for us to read and hopefully hear. In Great Tornado Plains, he takes words from the ancient Roman and Greeks symbolize his meanings. He uses a pillar to symbolize and embody the past as he describes how the pillar looks by using Roman coin and mosaics from the Byzantine empire. He uses the term “fluted stone” to describe the look and texture of the “prairie acropolis” (Greek citadel). “Prairie” is used to show that the surrounding area is flat and separate from civilization in this time he is describing. He uses that symbolism he describes to give us a visual of what the pillar looks like as it crashes down. Barnes uses the aftermath as an term as well. He uses the word “artifacts” to describe a past that has already taken its place in time. Its as if he is saying that time makes artifacts of us all over the centuries. Barnes seems to be saying that the past is a beautiful thing in all its glory but even that can be overtaken by

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