–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.

–By Donald Mace Williams

In early June I went to the West Chester Poetry Conference for the first time. It was probably the last time, too, but that's not the fault of the conference. The problem is that most of the readers and speakers underplayed their points in the academic fashion, dropping their voices at punchlines rather than raising them like night-show hosts. I got tired of saying, "Of his what?" or, "The whale said what?" to whatever younger person was sitting next to me at a reading and laughing heartily at what had been said, along with everyone else in the audience except me.

The person next to me always was a younger one, and that may be an encouraging sign for the future of traditional poetry. True, the person could hardly help being younger. At seventy-eight, I was, I imagine, the second oldest participant in the conference, not including Richard Wilbur, who gave the keynote address, and I didn't happen to sit next to my one likely senior, a tall, somewhat stooped man with hat, coat, tie, and sculptured beard whom I kept seeing in the halls. But when I looked around the audience I didn't notice the domination of gray that I see in the congregation when I go to church at home. Though this isn't saying a lot, formal poetry may have a brighter future than formal religion.

This gathering, held for four days at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, does attract mainly writers, readers, and critics of formal poetry, meaning poetry that has meter and sometimes rhyme. It tends to attract them powerfully. The conference has been going on since 1995, and on the van that shuttled some of us between the Holiday Inn and the campus I talked with a young Tennessee poet, Wilmer Mills, who attended the first one and has missed only a couple since then. One of this year's faculty members, Catherine Tufariello, told me she had attended the last ten conferences, generally as a student. It was she who, after I had written her a fan letter about her poems a few months ago, suggested that I go to the conference. I hadn't known it existed, and I tried to prepare myself for it by imagining the qualities that could have kept attracting her, one of America's finest poets, year after year as a mere student.

From what I saw, the main quality, aside from the emphasis on traditional poetic forms, is the crackle of knowledge, ability, and, surprisingly, enthusiasm that fills the rooms and halls. These people, and I mean the students as well as the faculty members, are the kind who catch passing references to Auden's "Musée des beaux arts" or Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"; who can give you the name for a kind of sonnet that has a six-line extension; who talk casually about dactyls, feminine endings, and caesuras; and who yet, at a reading of Ogden Nash's popular verse, laugh so hard they practically slap their thighs. I think most of the students and faculty members were academics, but only because they couldn't make a living as poets. (I also met, though, an investor in property, a retired actuary, and two public relations people.) So the tone, thank God, was enthusiastic first, analytical second.

This conference was to poetry as a convention of Libertarians is to politics. It gave members of a largely disregarded minority the chance to assert their convictions, with confidence and a hint of defiance, to a sympathetic audience. Much of what the poets at the conference write is not only formal but intelligible, and, in fact, the subject of this year's conference was "Exploring Form and Narrative." How many serious poems published in literary magazines these days exhibit form or tell a clear story? "We try to avoid rhyme altogether," says one editor's entry in Poet's Market. "No rhyming, pornography, violent language, 'Hallmark' verse, political poems, or overtly religious poetry," says another. Pity the Shakespeare or Donne or, hell, the Yeats trying to get published today. But rejections breed solidarity, even though I heard no outright bitterness on that subject at the conference.

The first agenda item after I arrived was one that, it seemed to me, influenced everything that happened afterward. Richard Wilbur, eighty-seven and still turning out exemplary poems for The New Yorker, gave the keynote address after being introduced by Dana Gioia, co-founder of these conferences, as the greatest living American poet, a poet of joy, love, hope, and reconciliation. I had never seen Wilbur, and when he walked onstage, I thought for a moment that this man must be a second introducer. His face was big and composed, like that of a small-town family doctor of seventy, and his hair was still brown. He dressed, stood, and talked as if he did not know he was the dean of American poets. He was wearing an orange sweater that negotiated the fairly sharp outthrust of his middle with fabric to spare and also had room for the considerable width of his shoulders. He moved a little stiffly, but nothing else suggested his age.

In a strong but quiet baritone, sounding final r's as if he lived in Iowa instead of Massachusetts, Wilbur told about Robert Frost's complimenting him on his poem "The Puritans." When Wilbur, in reply, started to say something about the meaning of the poem, Frost told him, "If you're going to explain it, I won't like it as well." Wilbur read (but did not explain) that poem to the West Chester audience, and he also read several of his translations of Latin riddles—read each of them twice, in fact, giving the answer after the first time through and then reading the riddle again. He read "A Measuring Worm," published recently in The New Yorker, in which he sees the worm's humps as omegas that warn us of the ends of things. The poem observes that the worm gets into that shape because he doesn't have real legs. That's something Wilbur said he checked out.

"I do think," he said, "that when we write poems we ought to get the science right."

About another poem he read, he said the original title was just "Blackberries," with the words "For Amelia"—his granddaughter—inserted below the title. But somebody at The New Yorker called him and said sorry, the magazine didn't use dedications. Wilbur had the solution to that problem: just move the dedication up into the title. That was how the poem came to be known as "Blackberries for Amelia."

When, in his readings, Wilbur botched a word or two, he always went back to the beginning rather than bulling ahead, and I noticed later that other poets on the various programs did the same thing—whether emulating the master or just displaying a similar zeal for formal integrity, I don't know.

It didn't seem like age but only like a poet's absentmindedness when, sometimes, Wilbur lost his place in the stack of papers he was reading from. Once, after much shuffling of pages failed to produce what he wanted, he opened his book and said, "I'm going to be stubborn and look it up in the index." He couldn't find it there, either. "Damnation," he said, and read something else instead. He talked and read for about an hour to an audience of probably 350, a nearly full house, in the Swope Music Building. The public was admitted to the reading, and I saw a fair number of chests not identified with the name tags that the 280 participants in the conference were given.

To a question, Wilbur said he avoids getting personal in his translations. "I feel that I have failed if there is too much of a presence of me," he said. To another question, about his position among poets of his time, he said it wasn't for him to say. But he said he would give a high position to the late Elizabeth Bishop.

After his reading, Lori Laitman, a composer-pianist, and Randall Scarlata, a baritone, performed the premiere of Laitman's song "A Wild Sostenuto," a setting of Wilbur's poem "For C." The ideas in this poem are not the simplest Wilbur ever expressed, and though the singer pronounced the words clearly, I doubt that anyone unfamiliar with the poem could have followed it by ear alone, much less understood its subtleties. But at the end, when Wilbur was sitting in the audience and the singer bowed in his direction, Wilbur raised a hand in appreciation of what he had heard.

I supposed that Wilbur, like any other famous guest speaker his age, would fly home the morning after his reading. No; he stayed the whole four days, attending readings and sitting unobtrusively at a lunch table of friends and strangers in the dining hall where the conference provided chicken wraps and pasta salad. I happened to sit a few rows behind him at the last night of readings, and I watched his responses. He applauded four of the five poetry readings, but not the one that included poems with the words "sh*#," "di&%," and "f&*#%@%." At each occurrence of those words, about half the audience laughed, female voices predominating. That was one of the few times I was disappointed in the people attending the conference—not, I think, because I'm a prude but because the words were pretty clearly used for shock value alone. Maybe the laughter was the nervous kind. Wilbur did not laugh, though, and at the end of that poet's reading his big hands stayed on his knees for the only time that evening.

The conference filled our days from 8:15 in the morning till 10 at night with panels, workshops, and readings. When we had a few minutes between events, some of us browsed through the poetry collections that speakers and students had on display in the campus bookstore. I was glad to find a mini-chapbook of Rhina P. Espaillat's wonderfully warm poems to add to the book of hers I had at home, and I got her to sign it for me. Though she didn't read poems at this conference, her perceptive remarks in a panel on Wilbur were for me one of the high points of the conference.

At a panel on "Ekfrasis," which to poets these days means not just any formal description but specifically a work of art in one medium commenting on or imitating a work in another medium—and which, I would have liked to tell the panelists, is usually spelled ecphrasis and is accented on the first syllable rather than the second—Meredith Bergmann illustrated the specialized definition by showing slides of her sculpture of the poet Countee Cullen. She also showed, to laughter but maybe not as an example of ecphrasis, a sculpture she had done for this conference: a wastebasket with hands crumpling poems into it.

Humor did keep cropping up. A panel on doggerel included remarks on Ogden Nash by Marilyn Taylor, who read samples of his verse and said she had a name for the rambling form of his poems: "shaggy doggerel." Remarking that it was his prosody that made Nash distinctive, she said his poems therefore "deserve to be analyzed."

"Will that spoil the fun?" she asked. "Sure. But that's what literary scholarship is all about." That brought the loudest burst of applause and laughter I heard during the conference.

Another laugh, decidedly sympathetic, came at a morning session of notable readings by five women poets, sponsored by the online journal "Mezzo Cammin," when Jehanne Dubrow looked around at the other readers and remarked how characteristic it was that all five, not being men, had their watches out on the table, making sure they didn't cut into another reader's time. At a session in which he introduced Lewis Turco, winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Award for books on prosody, Thomas Cable mentioned an unusual form—a sonnet followed by a line of trimeter, a heroic couplet, a second trimeter rhyming with the first, and another heroic couplet. Anybody know what it's called? he asked in the tone of one hoping to impart a secret . "A caudate sonnet," a voice from the back of the auditorium replied. "Damn!" said Cable (The answerer was R. S. Gwynn.)

Each night, five faculty members read from their own work. These were businesslike sessions. Michael Peich, the conference director, would barely more than name the first reader in his overall introduction. The first reader would stride onstage as Peich strode off, and at the end of each fifteen-minute segment the reader would say "And our next reader is So- and-So" and, striding offstage, would meet that reader striding on. The emphasis was on what the poets read, not on who they were.

The poets read in a variety of styles. Dick Allen barked into the microphone, making the speakers—and my hearing aids—reverberate. Dana Gioia gave an old-time oratorical performance, gesturing, changing tempo, dropping and raising his voice. Catherine Tufariello smiled a little as she quietly read some of the most moving poems of the conference. Robert Shaw looked down at his text the whole time he was reading. A.E. Stallings, doing a not unfriendly send-up of Edna St. Vincent Millay, got in character by wrapping what looked to me like a fox fur around her neck and, at the end, giving an exaggeratedly cute curtsy to the audience.

There were so many highlights to the conference that I, never having attended even a creative-writing course, much less one in which most of the "students" were accomplished poets, continually felt awed, humbled, or even intimidated. But the most warming and informative event of all, for me, was the continuing master class I took under Dick Davis, a Yorkshireman who heads the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. His translations of medieval Persian poems, when he read from them during the last reading of the conference, drew probably the loudest and most sustained applause of that session. (Wilbur was among the hearty applauders, I noticed.) In the master class, which was like a graduate seminar in that the seven students sat at a table while the "professor" held forth at the head, Davis passed out photocopied selections from six centuries of poems in English, all of them designed to show the twists and turns of "Meter and Rhythm," "Shapes and Meanings," or "Discourse and Diction." His insights, tossed off in a modest mumble that I didn't always understand (though the other, much younger students did), amounted to an intensive three-day education in sensibility, but to me, the most delightful and valuable product of the sessions was Davis's enthusiasm. Here was a man in his sixties, a revered poet, translator, and scholar, who kept saying about this poem or that poet, from Elizabethan times to Frost and beyond, "It is such a fantastic poem," "He's a terrific poet," "He's one of my, I think, top five [about Edwin Muir]," "A marvelous poet," "Beautiful poems." I never heard that kind of editorializing in graduate school, and I think many of my professors would have looked askance at it, but to me, it is what literary scholarship is all about: conveying love of literature and showing what it is about a work that makes it deserving of love.

At the end of the conference, I sought out Catherine Tufariello so I could thank her for having recommended it to me. "This was the literary experience of a lifetime," I told her, and I don't think, looking back, that I was gushing or speaking merely from the wide-eyed perspective of one who until then had been insulated from such electric events. After all, look at all the others who go back year after year for a metrical recharge. I'd like to go back, too, if only the West Chester people would start using closed captions.

Like most of those at West Chester, I write poetry sometimes, and I think that the conference, whether or not it will prove to have made me a better writer, has made me a more relaxed one. I get probably forty or fifty rejection slips for every acceptance. They frustrate me and make me bitter at editors who turn down what I have sweated over. But the poems my fellow students read during Davis's workshop were so fine that I look upon rejection in a better spirit. A hundred or more other students from the conference may be writing poems of the same quality as those I heard. I almost feel sorry for editors, having to choose.

–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. . ."

###

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.

American Life in Poetry: Column 153

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

In this endearing short poem by Californian Trish Dugger, we can imagine "what if?" What if we had been given "a baker's dozen of hearts?" I imagine many more and various love poems would be written. Here Ms. Dugger, Poet Laureate of the City of Encinitas, makes fine use of the one patched but good heart she has.

Spare Parts

We barge out of the womb
with two of them: eyes, ears,

arms, hands, legs, feet.
Only one heart. Not a good

plan. God should know we
need at least a dozen,

a baker's dozen of hearts.
They break like Easter eggs

hidden in the grass,
stepped on and smashed.

My own heart is patched,
bandaged, taped, barely

the same shape it once was
when it beat fast for you.

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) 2006 by Trish Dugger. Reprinted from "Magee Park Poets: Anthology 2007," No. 18, Friends of the Carlsbad City Library, 2006, by permission of Trish Dugger. 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

A Poem by Edward Byrne

Outside the Flood Walls

         For DeLane Ball

    I

This morning when the sun began to show itself
         above those uppermost ridges that scratch against

the smooth blue skies like black saw blades,
         we drove down from your home hidden among

the higher, densely wooded hills. Descending
         steep and winding roads, we arrived just as a fast

peel of dawn finished. Already, the early bustle
         of this city’s small business section had begun

as, at last, we passed through the thick brown dust
         of downtown construction towards these floodwalls

reaching far and tall beside the river’s narrow edge.
         You have lived here forty years, nearly your whole

life, often traveled much of the river’s length looking
         to discover lost inlets with rare waterlogged wrecks

or rotted out hulls left forever in sludge and filled
         with bilge. In these beloved mysteries, you tell me,

you have found a way to measure life’s change,
         loss come as part of the cost of taming the waters.

    II

Today, you’ve taken me for a tour of those remote
         ruins you’re sure will never lose their significance,

have shown me boats that, like the stored memories
         of old men, you say may have grown faulty with age,

but continue to give a precious glimpse into lives,
         times we will never witness. And now as afternoon

is ending, this stretch is littered with large barges
         drifting down river, each still searching its home port.

As those old boats slip slowly past the last grasp
         of evening light, overloaded cargo holds gracelessly

bear their burdens once more. Their massive bulks
         dragged steadily downstream by the slightest pull

of a late summer current, they eventually disappear
         in a flat distance brought on by faint haze of dusk,

and all along these marred banks lining the Ohio,
         darker stains of high-water lines, which yet mark

these great gray walls like still visible scars, again
         are starting to recede into nightfall’s first shadows.

###

About Edward Byrne:

Edward Byrne has had five collections of poetry published, most recently TIDAL AIR (Pecan Grove Press). A sixth book of poetry, SEEDED LIGHT, is forthcoming from Turning Point Books. He is a professor in the English Department at Valparaiso University, where he edits VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW.

Click here to visit Edward Byrne's Valparaiso Poetry Review blog, One Poet's Notes.

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

Sunday February 17, 8 p.m. in the FAVA Gallery at
the New Union Center for the Arts, downtown Oberlin

Is love in your heart this Valentine's day? If so, then apparently legendary poet David Young and his horde of black-hearted, albeit widely published, poet/hooligans would rip your heart out and feed it to Satan. Apparently their motive is to make a mockery of love, even going so far as to invite attendees to dress in black, and " join us for some irony, disillusionment, savage indignation and general nastiness." The most thoroughly horrible part of all this is that these are not a bunch of angsty weekend poetasters, but rational, thinking, accomplished and serious artists who should know better than to wear black and bark at the moon and to drag in such undelectable notions to the "literary event:" the morbid, funereal, discomfortingly formal look of the literary reading is supposed to be just taken for granted, and without irony. If these folks aren't careful, word may leak that they've enjoyed themselves at a literary event, and were relaxed and casual and inviting to visitors. I don't know, Oberliners…it seems to me that you're introducing dangerous components to the public expression of literature like "imagination" and "fun." Pretty risky. Dare I say subversive?

But seriously…this is my kind of poetic gig. I love literature, but as a rule, I detest "literary" events. Nothing personal, fellow literatteurs, I'm just saying…that when a literary event is long, boring, and is overly stuffy, those who aren't in that "loop" ain't likely to return. And there are few things that I like to hear less at a poetry reading than something along the lines of "The next five very long poems that I'm about to read…" and I want to be all like NOOOOOOO! Please! Please take mercy on my poor attention span.

Which is why I like to see literary people showing a sense of humor, bribing people with free, unpoisoned refreshments. Now that IS refreshing, as I'm sure these poison-pen poems will also be.

Top-notch poets at this event:

Pamela Alexander
Kazim Ali
Jessica Grim
Rebecca Newman
Lynn Powell
Ted Roland,
Ben Ryant,
Maya Silver

And, of course, David Young.

American Life in Poetry: Column 150

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

There's a world of great interest and significance right under our feet, but most of us don't think to look down. We spend most of our time peering off into the future, speculating on how we will deal with whatever is coming our way. Or dwelling on the past. Here Ed Ochester stops in the middle of life to look down.

What the Frost Casts Up

A crown of handmade nails, as though
there were a house here once, burned,
where we've gardened for fifteen years;
the ceramic top of an ancient fuse;
this spring the tiny head of a plastic doll–
not much compared to what they find
in England, where every now and then
a coin of the Roman emperors, Severus
or Constantius, works its way up, but
something, as though nothing we've
ever touched wants to stay in the earth,
the patient artifacts waiting, having been lost
or cast away, as though they couldn't bear
the parting, or because they are the only
messengers from lives that were important once,
waiting for the power of the frost
to move them to the mercy of our hands.

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) 2001 by Ed Ochester. Reprinted from "Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New" by Ed Ochester, Autumn House Press, 2007, by permission of the author and publisher. 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.