–by Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media

I would like to qualify a purposely provocative attitude that I am prone to take about the legendary American poet William Carlos Williams. I admit that, at his best, he has written some beautiful poems, including "To Elsie" ("The pure products of America go crazy") and "Danse Russe", to give two examples. I am going to invoke Ezra Pound here: but I want to state first, for the record, a thing or two about my general opinions regarding Pound. I probably repeat myself when I point out that Pound's own warnings about "the supreme weeder" being needed if the garden of the muses is to flourish. I think immediately of the way Pound lopped off large parts of Eliot's "The Wasteland" to make it a much stronger poem (I have always associated it in my strange mind with Whitman's image "tied to the surgeon's table,/What is removed drops horribly in a pail…"). And yet Pound's own admonishment against neglecting the task of weeding applies no more appropriately to the work of Pound himself, who was alternative profound, innovative, and full of unrestrained verbosity punctuated with long passages of half-crazed rantings on the most tangential subjects, a reflection of his lifelong affliction with manic behavior and a chronically short attention span.

And yet Pound's critical writings are essential reading for anyone who calls himself a creative writer in the 21st Century. I am skeptical of poets who call themselves professionals, and yet haven't read the major critical works of Pound. To me, this is something like a composer for the keyboard being unfamiliar with the piano sonatas of Beethoven (The New Testament of piano literature) and Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier (The Old Testament of piano literature. Incidentally: A klavier, or clavier, is a generic term for any hammer-based keyboard instrument, including the piano or the harpsichord).

Among Pound's most important achievements, I believe, are that he encapsulated and propounded some the most important aesthetic principles of his day and ours. He was not always the originator of the ideas–though he had no shortage of original ideas–but he was the one who most effectively brought them into focus for generations of English-speaking poets and writers. At his best, he was able to elucidate the most profound aesthetic insights in bursts of brilliant, spasmodic passages. The most impressive quality, to my mind, of Pound's best prose, is its ability to state that which is immediately obvious once considered, even if that obvious thing was not apparent before having it pointed out. In one of his cockiest moments, Pound makes such a series of observations, followed by the statement "and all of these things are very obvious." This, to me, is almost as cocky as Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." I believe that Pound derived some of his critical powers from the fact that he wrote such prose grudgingly, and out of perceived necessity, resentful of the fact that one would still need to write such rudimentary things about art as lately as The 20th Century. He would rather be writing poems himself, not writing essays in defense of basic principles which he thought ought to be assumed and widespread by then. And yet his words (the essays, not the poems–the poems aren't necessary for a contemporary poet to read, by and large) continue to be essential to anyone who aspires to be a writer of note.

Certainly Pound must have been irritated to think that one would need to insist upon the freedom of verse from rhymed forms several hundred years after Milton's introduction to "Paradise Lost" should have put the whole matter to rest forever. And yet, despite Milton, Whitman, and a handful of other notable practitioners, it was Pound that put the bullet between the eyes of the tyranny of rhymed forms forever. It's characteristic of Pound that he began to turn against his own original support for Vers Libre, or Free Verse, not long after he began to champion it, because he was horrified to see how sloppy free verse had already become in his day. For Pound, the notion of freeing oneself from rhyme only increases the poet's responsibility to master the prosody more intensively. For instance, without rhyme, one has no excuse not to pay much closer attention to word choice, or diction. Without a metronomic line, a poet must suddenly pay closer attention to the principle of line break, which now becomes an aesthetic decision which is completely independent of the meter. As Pound put it, poetry is not "bad prose broken into arbitrary line lengths." Well, not poetry that serious critics will ever respect, anyway.

Even though Pound is known for his obsessions with poetic traditions of the past, he was also the Archmodernist, and even in the cases when he attempted to rouse the dead with his incantations from defunct idioms, he also understood the need to "make it new." In other words, though one may resurrect that which has fallen out of use, it will never return in exactly its original form, nor should it. I think of the gawd-awful resurgence of clothing fashion from the 1980's that we're seeing now–it may be throwback gear, but these are updated versions of those looks.

But Ezra Pound also understood the importance of always knowing what's being written by one's contemporaries. In other words: if you're not reading poetry that's less than twenty years old, then how can you possibly discern what's on the cutting edge, and what's not? So the idea here is to maintain an ongoing relationship with the spirit of the past, but not at the expense of the relevancy and vibrancy of what's brewing around you in the present zeitgeist.

This is why I think that William Carlos Williams gets way too much play. He's freakin' dead for crying out loud. Why does he need to be read so extensively, and yet someone like, say, T.R. Hummer, a contemporary practitioner who makes Williams look like an awkward amateur by comparison, labors in relative obscurity? Donald Hall, I grudgingly admit, has written some spectacular poems. But he also writes a bunch of very boring and forgettable poems, and after all of his awards and acclaim, does his work really need to take up space where the work of a lesser-known, but equally or more accomplished poet could use some ink?

So to me it's about making way for the talented, though underexposed young, and talented-but-overlooked old. The appointment of Ted Kooser as U.S. Poet Laureate is one such cause celebre. In the person of Kooser, we've got a poet who has operated on the perimeter of poetic culture, constantly risking obscurity. He didn't go the common route of creative writing at a university. Like Wallace Stevens (insurance exec) William Carlos Williams (physician), and T.S. Eliot (bank teller), Kooser joins the ranks of great American poets whose day jobs are decidedly unpoetic. Much has been said about Kooser being a poet of "the great plains" region, which has irritated me to no end, as it implies that he's some kind of podunk eccentric prairie sage, and such assessments run the risk of minimizing his accomplishments, and "ghettoizing" his work as some having some kind of limited and hyperlocal appeal; when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort. Personally, if the reason he was named U.S. Poet Laureate has anything to do with the fact that he lives in prairie land, therefore making the selection of Poet Laureate more geographically representative, then fine, whatever. I just hope that people will see past the political considerations to know that Kooser does, very much, deserve the title of Poet Laureate. The appointment of Kooser and Charles Simic to that post has done more for my faith in the future of poetry than anything else I can think of in recent times. Now it's time for Akron's own (but New Orleans-born) Elton Glaser to be named U.S. Poet Laureate. If Glaser is not named Poet Laureate within the next five years, I will be surprised. If he's not named Poet Laureate within the next TEN years, I will be downright shocked, and extremely disappointed in the poetic establishment.

–By Christopher D. White

Legendary journalist and Pulitzer Prize co-winner Abe Zaidan near Akron, in November, 2007. Photo by Christopher D. White.

Notable Manuscripts in Circulation:
Abe Zaidan's history of the Civic Theatre, and his first foray into fiction.

Abe Zaidan is a legend: not just in Akron, having been a veteran reporter and editor/columnist for The Akron Beacon Journal for many years, or in Cleveland, where he worked for The Plain Dealer for years–but nationally, too. Zaidan has written hundreds of articles for The Washington Post and most of our nation's other major daily newspapers. His collected political writings, introduced by the esteemed Dr. John C. Green of the Bliss Institute, was recently published by The University of Akron Press. Many people also don't know that he shares a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Kent State shootings.

Zaidan now has two worthy book projects in search of a publisher. One is primarily of local interest, because it's a history of The Civic Theatre, and it features a lot of stories about The Civic's quirky history as a venue that has always been on the edge of impending demise. It also features previously unpublished photos that would be of great interest to a lot of Akronites and former Akronites, regardless of the fact that its appeal is likely to be limited to those who would take an interest in things that are decidedly Akrocentric. But as many of us know, there is a rather significant market for Akrocentrica. Even though there are less than a quarter of a million people residing inside the city limits of Akron, our metro area is at least twice that number, depending on whose estimates you pay attention to, and our country is peopled with pockets of Akron expats who had to leave their beloved Motherland to seek a more gainful future. But Akronites tend maintain a high level of attachment to Rubber City, for one reason or another, even when they're forced to leave — or even when that attachment is of the dysfunctional love-hate variety, because they've been hurt by a town that tends to piss on its best products, and/or piss them off.

The Clevelandcentric publisher Gray and Co. apparently passed on The Civic Theatre history because it was too Akrocentric. I find that to be remarkable, considering how many books from Gray and Co. one will find in Akron, and I think that Gray and Co., of all places, ought to know the value of a book like this, if only in this area.

The other Zaidan book is a novel called Moose, about a newspaper editor by the name of Frank Moosey (A.K.A Moose), who thoroughly enjoys the life of a newspaper man — until the paper is run into the ground by corporate outsiders with no knowledge of the newspaper business and a ruthless obsession with the bottom line.

For all of the accolades that he has received over the years, Zaidan says that he feels more strongly about this novel than anything he's ever written up to this point. This is a very personal piece; he has put his heart into it, and it shows. Those who know Zaidan as the veteran journalist will see an interesting new side to him.

What will be fascinating to average readers is the insider's look into what the newsroom is really like (well, maybe not so much nowadays); but any notion that one might have about reporters being angelic and upstanding do-gooders may be a little shocked to read about the sort of shenanigans and tomfoolery that transpire behind the news-print curtain. The level and frequency of banal and childish behavior that goes on makes it a fun and fascinating read. There's also quite a bit of profanity and tasteless humor, which is refreshing to read about in our overly sanitized age. I can't be the only one who wants to puke when I think that school children nowadays are routinely expected to bring hand sanitizer with them as part of their school supplies (no offense to GOJO — who no doubt sheds no tears over this clean-hands policy). This is a fascinating novel that ought to be picked up by an agent for representation to publishers, because there's no doubt that a lot of people would love to get an insider's view into the newsroom. There's no shortage of, say, "Inside So-and-so State Prison" documentaries and "real stories" from emergency rooms and crime labs, but not much about what it's like to work in mass media.

Click here for information about becoming a member of "The Marquee Club" and helping to support the "Jewel on Main Street." This site also has more information about Civic Theatre, which was built in 1929, and which underwent a major renovation in 2002.

Click here for more about Abe Zaidan's book PORTRAITS OF POWER: OHIO AND NATIONAL POLITICS, 1964-1994. This book is part of the University of Akron Press's Series on Ohio Politics. Though the University of Akron Press does publish quite a few titles of local interest, quite a few of its offerings are of national interest, including the Akron Series in Poetry, which is a well known national poetry book series.

Artwork: "Barack Obama as A More Perfect Union," copyright by John Sokol.

This striking ink-on-Bristol drawing of Barack Obama, by Ohio native John Sokol, is made entirely out of words by Barack Obama. T-shirts with this image are available for sale. Click here for more about this portrait.

Ted Kooser chose a poem about marbles for his American Life in Poetry Column, which seems timely because I just learned, (thanks to Michael Cohill and Brian Graham, of Akron's own American Toy Marble Museum) as some other Akronites just learned for the first time, that Akron is the birthplace of the modern toy industry, and that the first toy marbles, as we know them today, were produced here in Rubber City.

–Christopher D. White

American Life in Poetry: Column 163

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I have always enjoyed poems that celebrate the small pleasures of life. Here Max Mendelsohn, age 12, of Weston, Massachusetts, tells us of the joy he finds in playing with marbles.

Ode to Marbles

I love the sound of marbles
scattered on the worn wooden floor,
like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek.
I love the sight of white marbles,
blue marbles,
green marbles, black,
new marbles, old marbles,
iridescent marbles,
with glass-ribboned swirls,
dancing round and round.
I love the feel of marbles,
cool, smooth,
rolling freely in my palm,
like smooth-sided stars
that light up the worn world.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2004 by The Children's Art Foundation. Reprinted from "Stone Soup", May/June, 2004, by permission of the publisher, www.stonesoup.com. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

–By Rae Hallstrom

Photo: William Greenway. Courtesy of Rae Hallstrom

A drizzle, and temperatures dipping below 50 degrees, and even a detour around blocked-off Back-Massillon Road did not put a damper on the 5th Annual Wayne College Writers Workshop and Awards Ceremony held in Orrville on Saturday April 12th.

As Keynote Speaker, poet Will Greenway revealed he'd collected 300 rejection slips in 10 years and no one seemed a bit surprised that he'd pulled them out of a drawer to count one afternoon. That's a roomful of writers for you. Most of us had done the same, but did we have 300? Accruing 300 rejections suddenly seemed doable. Send them out, send them out, send them all out and wait for them to return like homing pigeons feeling peckish.

But the good news, as Greenway told it, was that his rate of acceptance had grown over those 10 years from what may have been something like ours, yes ours, to a remarkable 1 in 6. Like batting averages, even the best poets cannot expect a publishing home run every time they post a submission. And if the numbers weren't enough, he entertained us with a rejection slip poem that had the opposite effect of what might be conjectured by anyone but a creative writer—the sour thing actually sweetened the mood. I believe I heard laughter, some of it my own.

Photo: Amy Freels, Vice President and Production Manager of Rager Media and Production Coordinator at The University of Akron Press. Courtesy of Rae Hallstrom.

Not that anyone likes to see a manuscript bounce back, the perennial wallflower, dateless on a Saturday night, and no corsage. But it helps to learn that you have something in common with a keynote speaker at a writing conference. It helps to know how quickly he turns his manuscripts around—the same day. So sending out 3 poems a year to one journal doesn't cut it? Oh. Say it again, so it sinks in. Oh. Oh no. Better known as the a-ha! moment with no anti-depressant in sight.

Greenway began writing poems at the age of 20, but thinks of himself as a late bloomer, and says he came to poetry through the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary. He's written some lyrics of his own, and currently performs in an Irish/Celtic band called Brady's Leap, named after a rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike that features a Howard Johnson's and also coincidentally matches the last name of the band's bodhrán player, Phil Brady. Bodhrán, you ask? Yes, bodhrán, an instrument that had me shaking my head until I checked Wikipedia and found it listed as an Irish frame drum, one that reminds me of a tambourine, but lacking the tacky-retro-hippie-reminiscent metal shakers around the rim. Will Greenway plays guitar. Other members of the band are Steve Reese on violin and banjo, Kelly Bancroft on lead vocals, Istvan Homner on the mandolin, and Jim Andrews, the bassist and perhaps the band's only physicist. All of them sing. Check out the band at www.bradysleap.com.

With a Ph.D. in Modern Literature from Tulane University in New Orleans—the accent as clear as blues are muddy—and as the Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University with his 9th full-length book forthcoming from the University of Akron Press's Akron Series in Poetry, Will Greenway, winner of the 2004 Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award is no slouch. Yet he, too, has opened the envelope with the rejection in it, and tells the rest of us to take heart.

Photo: Dr. Susanna Horn in Ohio. Courtesy of Rae Hallstrom.

Preceding the keynote speech we'd had a full plate of writing workshops, including Publishing 101 with Amy Freels who represented both the University of Akron Press and Rager Media; Poetry Writing with keynote speaker Will Greenway; Keeping a Travel Journal with Doris Larson, who also taught Writing Memoir: Honoring the Women in our Lives; and then there was The Short Story: Developing Character and Place given by Sarah Willis; and finally, Pen and Plate: Culinary Journalism with Laura Taxel.

Photo: Laura Taxel at the Wayne College Writer's Conference in Ohio

As Sarah Willis said, a good short story is like a braid. There's a 1st character and a 2nd character and a 3rd character. A lot of short stories fail because they only give you one character, and the braid won't hold together. And then the rubber band at the bottom, that's the oh! moment, the heartbeat. It's all there, she says, in the first 250 words. She's talking set-up, and tone, and voice. Sarah Willis teaches at John Carroll University and Hiram College when she's not writing.

Photo: Sarah Willis at the Wayne College Writer's Conference. Courtesy of Rae Hallstrom.

Amy Freels told us that book editors like to see that submitting poets and fiction writers have been published in literary journals, so don't forget to include those credits. Freels thinks of herself as a poet and book designer, and says she's happy spending most of her time making books for now, rather than writing.

Food writer Laura Taxel makes her living hand-to-mouth and loves it. Memoir writer Doris Larson asked for a column when an editor wanted her to do another piece, and she got it. But the most interesting part of the day may have been when each of the writers told us what they are reading now, for their own pleasure.

Both Laura Taxel and Sarah Willis are reading Bridge of Sighs, a novel set in Venice, by Richard Russo.

Doris Larson is reading 1,000 Places to See Before you Die by Patricia Schultz.

Photo: Doris Larson. Courtesy of Rae Hallstrom.

Will Greenway is getting around to Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and once again Greenway helps the rest of us feel like we're OK, even if we don't read every great book within months of its publication date.

Amy Freels is reading The Girl who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Strange as this Weather has Been by Ann Pancake, and perhaps more but I failed to write fast enough.

Dean John Kristofco and Writing Coordinator Dr. Susannah Horn once again pulled off a wonderful conference, with organizational skills to match their creative ones.

Click here to see a list of award winners from the high school, college, and regional writing contests, visit the Wayne College website at www.wayne.uakron.edu. The 1st annual Wayne College Writer of the Year award went to the naturalist, David Kline, author of Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal (1990) and Scratching the Woodchuck: Nature on an Amish Farm (1997).

–By David Young, Oberlin College Press/FIELD Magazine

Come help us celebrate spring this coming Sunday, April 13, at 8 p.m. in the FAVA Gallery in downtown Oberlin (Located at the New Union Center for the Arts), when we will feature two fine writers, Carol Moldaw and Edan Lepucki.

Some of you will know Carol's work through the distinguished volume of poems, THE LIGHTNING FIELD, which won the FIELD Poetry Prize in 2002. What you may not know is that she has just published a novel, THE WIDENING. Both of these books will be for sale after the reading, and we hope that Carol will let us sample both in her choices for reading.

Edan Lepucki is the current Writer in Residence at Oberlin this semester, teaching the freshman fiction writing class. Some of you will remember her from her student days and some will have gotten acquainted with her over the past few months. She's an exhilarating short story writer who has begun publishing in excellent places (she's also working on a novel) and we're delighted to be able to feature her with Carol.

We'll have our usual book raffle and socializing afterwards. This is the final reading of the year and we do hope you'll be able to join us for it.

Click here to read the poem "Lou Reed in Istanbul" by Carol Moldaw in THE BLUE MOON REVIEW…

…and plush labyrinthian

women who glide up
from the foot of the bed,
who hide their emotions
even from the moon…

Click here to read the story "Animals," by Edan Lepucki, in Story Quarterly Magazine.

"EVERY TIME HIS WIFE, Alice, goes out at night without him, Mr. Blackburn can’t help but wait for her return. Tonight’s no different. He’d like to be awake when his wife gets home, but he’s tired, and waiting up would be embarrassing, like he’s her dad or something. Tonight he gets into bed real early without even bothering to read. He prays, twice, that Alice makes it back safely. He quickly imagines something awful, something unimaginable, and then his wife’s funeral (all those yellow roses), and the strained visits from her weepy parents a year from tonight. . ."

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By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media.

Most poetry is unreadable–some because it's just badly written, and some because, even if expertly written, are just plain boring. But this has always been the case, as you'll see if you investigate the archives of our nation's best litmags. Try reading the other poems in the issue of Poetry magazine where T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was first published, and you'll see what I mean. Eliot's poem is a case of one poet stumbling upon writing an eternally relevant and excellent poem. He went on to write a handful of other excellent poems, and then proceeded to churn out a lot of worthless drivel for the rest of his life, including a horrible and over-rated, though historically important poem called "The Waste Land," a poem whose best lines were written by Shakespeare, not Eliot. Granted, "The Waste Land" was greatly improved by Ezra Pound's liberal editing, as the surviving manuscripts show, and it has exerted enormous influence on poetry for many decades, but it's an example of a poem that just doesn't matter much nowadays. Prufrock, on the other hand, remains one of the greatest poems ever written.

For me, the poetry of A.R. Ammons fits into the category of hopelessly boring, even when it's well written. Never mind that Ammons won the National Book Award and has been put on a pedestal in American Letters, his poems are almost universally dull. The poet Jean Valentine
once wrote an essay on Ammons' poetry which is useful for understanding this, though I can't recall the name of the essay off the top of my head.

Speaking of Jean Valentine: here's an enlightening case study of the politics of publishing. In an interview, Valentine was once asked about how she had a hard time breaking into the litmags for years, and what it was that finally made her fortunes change. She said that the answer was simple. One day her manuscript was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and that she had no problem getting into the litmags after that. Many of the litmags pay lip service to being dedicated to showcasing the best writing around. But there's a guild mentality with the mags, part of which likely arises from the fact that poets and writers who wish to work in academia are desperate to publish in magazines with the best reputations in their field, so understanding this makes the publishing of lesser-quality poems by serious poets a little more excusable in my estimation. After all, can I really hold it against people for trying to secure a professional future for themselves? So though I find it aesthetically distasteful to read many of the poems in the quality mags that seem to be written by tone-deaf poets, many of the poems which cater to the most current literary fashions and trends, I am more tolerant of this than when I was a young poet and contentiously contemptuous of all this brazen hand-wringing.

This is not to say that one won't find some excellent poems in the most highly regarded literary journals. The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Parnassus, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, etc.. These are still the go-to places to find the best in up-and-coming literary talent. But Ezra Pound's pronouncement from about a century ago remains true to this day: "The supreme weeder is needed" if the the garden of the muses is to remain a garden. The assessment and re-assessment of what constitutes excellence in literature is an ongoing task. Often it's easy to know what's unquestionably without literary merit. Where it becomes more difficult is choosing what's essential reading, and discerning the difference between what's good and what's great. This part will always be debatable. But that which is unquestionably unimportant is usually fairly easy to determine.

Does this mean that we've got a glut of bad poets? No, I don't think so. We just have a glut of bad poems. If one, like Eliot or Wordsworth, manages to write only a handful of poems of everlasting importance, then she/he will have secured a place in literary history, and this is more than most can ever hope to accomplish. You'll still be well served by reading the litmags. You just can't take off your thinking cap and allow yourself to be convinced of the value of something just because an influential editor tells you that it's important, or because that author won the Pulitzer Prize, or anything like that. Reading the litmags, in fact, is a good exercise in applying your critical principles and impulses. Besides, the appreciation of literature is about more than always practicing one's principles of selection and assessment. I'm so happy to discover the occasionally exceptional poem that I'm willing to continue reading the little literary reviews, and to do my own weeding.

The ongoing question is not Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter." The real ongoing question is DOES it matter at any given time. Of course it always has the potential to matter, but the overabundance of bad literary work being passed off in the most influential literary sources can have a corrosive effect. Say someone who has never read the litmags picks up a copy of The Paris Review at a local bookstore, because someone told him that if we wants to see good contemporary poems being written today, that The Paris Review would be a good place to start. Well, if he reads a series of unremarkable poems in there, he might, understandably enough, think that contemporary poetry is suffering from a crisis of relevance and quality.

There are, however, poets that I return to when I'm looking to restore my faith in poetry–master practitioners from whom we can learn a lot about technique and aesthetic strategies, regardless of whether or not we may be tempted to imitate them. Wallace Stevens has this effect on me. I hope someone will punch me in the face if I ever write like Stevens, but I appreciate his poems and draw inspiration from them. But I would never send a new poet to his work, nor can I ever spend too much time at any given time reading his poems, as they are strange, dense, sometimes difficult, and I'm not sure that even he understands what he's doing all the time. But then, the poet Charles Simic once said that it took him years to understand that his poems are smarter than him.

My latest favorite discovery: Rae Hallstrom

I ran across the following poem by an award-winning Ohio writer whom I'd never heard of before. I was startled by the poem, which I found on Author's Den when I Googled her name. It was such an excellent poem, singularly accomplished, imaginative and very rich with sound-and-word-play. It's not a surprise, then, that's she's not a product of an MfA creative writing program. Excellent work comes out of the MfA programs on a regular basis, but sometimes poets working more in isolation are likely to develop a unique voice, and there's always the danger of being overly influenced by one's influences and writerly peers. Occasionally I will run across a poem that strikes me as being perfectly executed. It's not an easy task to pull off technical excellence while maintaining a confident and naturalistic tone the way this poem does. I come across native, untamed genius from time-to-time, and sometimes I see poems that demonstrate uninspired technical excellence, but it's a treat when you see the two of those elements combined. In an age when so many poets seem to have no ear for the music of language, this poem sings from beginning to end, starting with the dramatic assonance in the opening line: "Granite…dragged on flannel," the subtle alliterative soundplay in the third line "table…teeters on stilts, and followed up in the fourth line with the juxtaposition of soft, sustained, voice nasals (the letters 'n' and 'm') against the gently percussive interdental and glottal unvoiced and voiced stops (the letter "t" and "g"). This is a poem that will reward re-reading for those of us who like that kind of thing. I love the phrase "hot buttered nerves," which is just the sort of imaginative, playful, and surprising use of language which is often missing among our contemporary poets. And it's a good example to show that poetry can be excellent without being complex and inaccessible.

"Lathered," a poem by Rae Hallstrom

I am the granite of dry elbows dragged on flannel,
a porcupine with a cleaver,
a low table that teeters on stilts.
I am burnt toast, embers fuming for no good reason,
the pot that never boils.
You can taste me in the raspberry seeds
sucked from jam into a mouth ulcer,
feel me in the metal spatula of every step in tight underpants,
sense me in the snare drum in the bathroom.
I am not a walk in the park when the sky is blue.
Look for me in a cave of stomach acid,
in the cat locked in a closet after falling asleep on a shoe,
in a tangle of knots at the edge of hot buttered nerves.

Upcoming Rae Hallstrom event: Rae Hallstrom will be reading at Muggswigz in Canton on Friday, April 4, 2008, from 7-9 PM with several other poets.

About Rae Hallstrom:

Rae Hallstrom took home 3 awards last year in the Wayne College Regional Writing Contest. Her essay, "Grinded" won Third Place in the nonfiction category. Her short story "In the Cow Belt" and her poem "Apartment Complex" each received honorable mention. "The Tomato and the Dragon" appeared in the May 2006 issue of Releasing Times. Rae's horror story, "Tea for Two," might pass for a cozy in the mystery genre–none of that "in your face" blood or gore. "Tea for Two" debuted in January 2006, as the feature story in the 32nd issue of Outer Darkness. Rae's feature on dandelion wine appeared in Akron Life & Leisure in the May 2005 issue. Rae's poem "Floating into Tomorrow" appeared in 2002 in "Chances Are…, a Chrysalis Reader," published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Her poem inspired the cover art for the "Chances Are…" issue. "This Ancient Disappearing Act" won one of Ohio Poetry Day's First Prize awards and was published in the 2002 awards book. Another poem, The Elder, won a First Prize award in the 2000 Ohio Poetry Day competition. Her poem "Last Blush" found print in Volume 38 of Pudding Magazine. Her nonfiction essay, "The Age of Addiction," was published in "Rocking the Ages, a Chrysalis Reader," which was the foundation's millenium (2000) volume.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's "Ameriku" haiku blog.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's website.

Rager Media is a nationally distributed book publisher from Akron, Ohio.

American Life in Poetry: Column 157

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

From your school days you may remember A. E. Housman's poem that begins, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough." Here's a look at a blossoming cherry, done 120 years later, on site among the famous cherry trees of Washington, by D.C. poet Judith Harris.

In Your Absence

Not yet summer,
but unseasonable heat
pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,
in its sham, pink frills,
dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon
into more furtive winds,
I look up to see
a blizzard of petals
rushing the sky.

It is only April.
I can't stop my own life
from hurrying by.
The moon, already pacing.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is "The Bad Secret," Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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Photo: Author A.D. Adams and H. Geneva Forister

The Magnificent Mystery Book Discussion is a recently formed group
that meets at the Fairlawn-Bath Branch, of the Akron-Summit County
Public Library, under the direction of librarian Cathy Morgan. As a
special treat, Cathy arranged for mystery and fantasy author A. D.
Adams to speak at the group’s March meeting. A. D. is a Northeast
Ohio writer whose novels are the mystery “Death on Lake Ice” and the
fantasy “The Dragon Healer of Tone”. A. D.’s talk was quite
informative as he discussed the origins of the mystery novel, the
various types of mystery novels, and how he creates the characters
that populate his books. He impressed the group with his extensive
knowledge of various mystery authors and novels. In a
question-and-answer session, the topics ranged from how he chose the
location for “Death on Lake Ice” to how to obtain a copyright.

To learn more about the Magnificent Mystery Book Discussion Group,
call the Fairlawn-Bath Library at 330-666-4888. To learn more about
the works of A. D. Adams, go to www.freewebs.com/adabooks

–By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media

Most people don't know that in the professional poetry world, when you mention Akron, three things generally come to mind: Rita Dove, Elton Glaser, and The Akron Poetry Prize. Every year, hundreds of aspiring authors, many of them with MFA degrees in creative writing, and many of them widely published in the nation's most highly regarded literary magazines, will submit manuscripts of full-length collections of their poems to the Akron Poetry Prize.

Every year the contest is judged by a different nationally prominent poet. Rita Dove won't be the first U.S. Poet Laureate to have judged the Akron Poetry Prize, and she's not the first Pulitzer Prize winner to have judged the contest either. But this is the first time that she has agreed to judge it.

The winner of the Akron Poetry Prize gets a book deal with The University of Akron Press's Akron Series in Poetry, a national poetry series that's hot property in the creative writing world, where it has been for some years now, thanks to the careful guidance and hard work of the founding editor of the Akron Series, Elton Glaser, and others at the press, including Amy Freels, whose discerning eye for design has left its mark on many a volume in the press's catalog.

There are some local book series at the University of Akron press, but others, like the Akron Series in Poetry, are highly respected national book series that get their material from talented authors from here and abroad.

Manuscripts must be postmarked between May 15 and June 30, 2008, and there is a $25 entry fee.

For complete guidelines for the 2008 Akron Poetry Prize, click here.

The Magnificent Mystery Book Discussion Group meets on the fourth Monday, of the month, at 1:00 PM, at the Fairlawn-Bath Branch of the Akron-Summit County Public Library. A.D. Adams, author of “Death on Lake Ice” will be the guest at the March 24, 2008 meeting. This library is located at 3101 Smith Road, Akron, Ohio, 44333.

Details about A. D.’s novel can be found on his web site at www.freewebs.com/adabooks

Death on Lake Ice begins with reclusive but brilliant engineer Jacob Adami deciding to change his life and move to Mountain Top County. He takes the position of county engineer. He moves himself and his three cats into a home overlooking Lake Ice. On his first inspection trip as county engineer to a local spillway, he discovers the murdered body of the area’s leading citizen and largest landowner. Being new to the area, he meets the local people and learns of their lives. They, on the other hand, find him somewhat mysterious and cannot understand why a rich and powerful man would move to their mountains and take a low-paying engineering position. As Jacob gets to know the people and the circumstances of the murdered man, he slowly forms a theory of the crime.

–By Christopher D. White, Rager Media

Elton Glaser once again had a poem featured on the very prominent Poetry Daily today; the poem is called "Dwarf in the Shade of a Eucalyptus," and was originally published in the Winter, 2008 issue of the venerable Ohio-based litmag The Antioch Review.

For those familiar with Glaser's poetry, this one is a little shorter, but no less accomplished, than some of what you may be accustomed to seeing in the "Eltonic" mode. Some of Glaser's lines would be hard to better, as far as wit or evocative power are concerned, and there are a couple of these in this poem, including the following lines:

"But I remember the fishing boats at Portofino,
And the blue harbor, and the sea
Licking its lips over the cold suicides."

F'ing beautiful, I say, in its Eltonic way.

Here's a little bit of info. about, and a link to, the Poetry Daily site (poems.com), NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH POETRY.COM, which sponsors those crappy vanity contests:

"Our purpose is to make it easier for people to find poets and poetry they like and to help publishers bring news of their books, magazines, and journals to more people. Well over 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States alone each year, but they can be difficult to find, even in areas brimming with bookstores. The numerous journals presenting new poetry and poets can be even more elusive. We will lead you to them and, in the meantime, we give you a new poem to carry with you through your day and share with others."

Here's a little about The Antioch Review from their website:

"The Antioch Review, founded in 1941, is one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America. We publish fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. Authors published in our pages are consistently included in Best American anthologies and Pushcart Prizes."

Poets and writers tend to be familiar with The Antioch Review, but most average Ohioans have never heard of it, and don't know that Ohio is home to some of the most widely respected literary magazines in the U.S., including The Kenyon Review in Gambier, Ohio, the defunct-and-newly-resurrected Ohio Review, The Mid-American Review in Bowling Green, and FIELD, out of Oberlin Ohio. Not to mention that the world's leading monthly magazine for writers, Writer's Digest, is published from Cincinnati, and there are still no shortage of other quality mags for poets and fiction writers that I've no doubt neglected to mention, but to mention a couple more: Whiskey Island magazine at Cleveland State and Markk Kuhar's very attractive e-zine, Deep Cleveland. And of course we can't forget Akron's own newest litmag, Mary Biddinger and Jay Robinson's very fine Barn Owl Review, which debuted this year in NYC at the AWP conference with much success.