Idaho Commission for Libraries

Idaho's Poetry: A Centennial Anthology (1988), edited by Ron McFarland and William Studebaker, collects works from over one hundred of the state's poets. It is arranged by period, beginning with native American poems from five of Idaho's tribes, moving to pioneer poetry, to poets of the new state between 1900-1940, to "the third generation" of 1940-1980, to contemporary poets.

Much of the literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West lies in narratives of landscape and personal experience.

By Ron McFarland

Of the twenty-eight books listed in the program for Tough Paradise: The Literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West, six are anthologies of some kind and of the remaining twenty two titles, twelve are narrated in the first person; that is, with the writer himself or herself speaking from personal experience. What are we to make of this apparent infatuation with the self? What happens in a text when the distinctions between subject and object are blurred? How does the first person, I, as speaker affect the reader?