SOURCE: "The Oriental Connection: Zen and Representations of the Midwest in the Collected Poems of Lucien Stryk," in Midamerica XIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, edited by David D. Anderson, Midwestern Press, 1986, pp. 107-15.

In the following essay, Guillory examines the Zen-like awareness of the midwestern poems of Lucien Stryk.

In 1967 Lucien Stryk edited Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, and in his Introduction to that anthology he underscores the aesthetic and poetic possibilities inherent in the Midwestern experience. Although many critics have denigrated the region for being flat and "colorless," Stryk insists that the Midwest can be "rich, complicated, thrilling" (Heartland xiv). In the poetry he chooses for that anthology and, more importantly, in his own work, Stryk dramatizes again and again that the Midwest is

made up of the stuff of poetry. And once those living in it begin to see...