–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.

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.

******************************

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.

OUR REBIRTH OF WRITING

–by Charles A. Taormina
Copyright © 2008 by Charles A. Taormina

Writers should wake up, if our arts are going to survive and renew the culture. Recently, an uninformed commentator lauded America’s Freedom of Press, touting that there are now over 195,000 books published each year in America. The commentator made no mention, however, that just a few years ago this amount was regularly around 60,000 books per year (1999).

The complete story is thornier. In those years 400,000 professional manuscripts were submitted annually to our publishing industry, while only some 60,000 books were printed (less than 15% !). That’s not Freedom of Press, that’s a restricted funnel for those with elite credentials or riches or media connections (labeled now by marketers as authors with national “platforms”). Today’s figures do not display a widening of editorial access; instead the difference is due mostly to one technological innovation: POD, Print-on-Demand publishing. The remaining 135,000 books are self-published or printed by new, smaller independent publishers—the heroes of today’s art world. (“78% of titles are brought out from a small press or self-publisher,” according to www.selfpublishingresources.com). I understand that because for decades I’ve been writing essays, book chapters, theater pieces, and lecturing in Washington, DC, to such as The World Future Society, that all of this is an indirect form of censorship. In one lecture, I mentioned “Those who control what gets published, also very directly control what is allowed to be known.”

Finally, I had to define the freedom further; for we now have Freedom of Press (with our First Amendment); what we don’t have is the Freedom of Communication, that is, the ability to connect that printed form to the mind of a reader, or in the case of working authors, to a wide, regular readership. Freedom of Communication is dangerous; it implies after all, Freedom of Thought. In a highly controlled society such as ours, true thinking is curtailed or “shaped.” Noam Chomsky calls it “Manufacturing Consent,” from a book and film of the same title, though the term was coined by Walter Lippmann. (If you think our media lacks censorship watch any local TV newscast, then compare with a BBC News sequence—the BBC’s like Radio Free Europe must’ve been for countries behind the Iron Curtain.) The method is simple, not so much by curtailing or altering news, rather skipping or avoiding certain news stories, truthful insights, and avoiding the printing and circulation of many authors’ books. Eliminate the vision. It’s a game of what’s missing here: variety, depth, certain issues, many voices, you!

My point, however, with the publishing statistics, these massive, wonderful, extraordinary numbers of 195,000 books per year—that’s 534 books per day!—(and with the size and grandeur of USA, why not?) is that we are in a verifiable arts renaissance in America. Specifically, this is a renaissance with book authoring and book publishing by a wide expanse of Americans at all levels. The focus, though, is again communication. How do we connect with the reader, or more importantly, with many active, sophisticated, regular readers? How?

It seems odd that within the midst of this expansion of book publishing, that at exactly the same time, many newspapers all over America are eliminating the book review sections. (“Book review column inches in newspapers have dropped by 20-50%,” www.selfpublishingresources.com.) More censorship? Some are so streamlined, that only national bestsellers or syndicated reviews appear (and really, does Stephen King need another book review ever?). This “irony” is such, I feel, that if any other American activity displayed such an upsurge, say sandlot baseball, neighborhood barbeques, hand sewing of clothing, even hip-hop festivals, the papers would be full of articles, reviews, columnists, and lists of resources to stay in touch. But books, no; they’re too dangerous. Let’s reduce the media pages (or as New York reviewers recently admitted vacantly, still publish book reviews, but few if any about “literary” tomes), dumb down the content and perhaps cut off at the source all this incessant scribbling! (To be fair, our own Akron Beacon Journal carries a regular Sunday Section of Books—same page amount as the other arts—plus weekly comments about local authors’ publications, even notes about author readings.) (more…)

–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.

Artwork: "Thanatos with Cigarette," acrylic on canvas, 50 x 68"
Copyright by John Sokol. Click here or on the above photo to visit John Sokol's website.

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

The following story is by one of Akron's greatly underacknowledged talents. Some who know John Sokol are surprised to know the extent of his accomplishments–which are many–because John Sokol is not exactly his own best megaphone, being entirely too modest, self-deprecating, and humble for his own good. No one will ever accuse him of being a publicity whore; he'll almost be offended if you dare to call him famous, and yet….

Photo: Artist/Author/Poet John Sokol. Copyright by George Lowe. Click here or on above photo to visit Sokol's website

His art has been featured in the most influential daily newspaper in France (Le Monde). Not only has his artwork been reproduced on the cover of a biography of Italo Calvino published by Oxford University Press (yes, THE Oxford University Press, in the U.K.), but his art has been reproduced on 50 book covers altogether, and his artwork is in permanent public and private collections and museums everywhere, including our own Akron Art Museum. His art hangs in the conference room of what is one of the most influential literary magazine in the U.S., The Georgia Review, which once published an extensive number of his famous "Word Portraits" between its pages, and which gave him a rave review for his debut chapbook of poems some years ago. His art has also graced the covers of many magazines, including such notable periodicals as The Faulkner Journal. (more…)

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

chriswhite@ragermedia.com

For the most part, I reject the notion that the best contemporary poems are lyrics to songs. And yet I also agree with Ezra Pound’s pronouncement that, just as music atrophies when it strays too far from its roots in dance, so poetry atrophies when it alienates itself too entirely from its roots in song. Pound also said, and I agree: “The poet who does not love music is a bad poet.” That said, I also think that poetry in print is a different art-form than performance poetry, and that both of these are different than rap music; but I also believe that notable exceptions abound, in all of those art-forms, of lines that certainly approach and/or exist in a state of excellent poetry. As a rule (and there are usually exceptions to every rule), art has always found a way to maximize its artfulness within its unique parameters, and these parameters change with technology and other changes within a culture. For instance, the development of photography altered the perception of what it means to be a painter. The invention of the piano made it possible for composers to do things that they couldn’t do with the harpsichord. Acting for film is different than acting for the stage, and the history of film follows the history of coming to terms with this fact. The art of poetry-in-print is different than the art of spoken poetry. Some of the most inventive use of language, despite what many people think, has come out of very good rap music in recent years; but this doesn’t mean that “page poetry” is the same thing as rap. Much of the best poetry written for the page features elements that acknowledge the visual fact of poetry being both a temporal and a spatial art. The prosodic element of “line break,” for instance, allows the poet to impose his principles of selection by determining where the line will break, rather than relying on the typesetter or printer to break the line at an arbitrary point. The unit of “line” works both with and against the natural syntactic unit of “the sentence,” creating interesting possibilities for tensions and resolutions.
(more…)

Gary D. Wilson shares a table with Pamela Sue Rogers in a Cuyahoga Falls bookstore.

Last month, critically acclaimed Rager Media novelist Gary D. Wilson made his first sojourn to Akron, and he did a couple of low-key readings at area bookstores, including a signing at the Borders Superstore near Chapel Hill Mall. It was there that we had the pleasure of meeting and sharing a table with a very pleasant children’s author by the name of Pamela Sue Rogers, whose book, which is available on Amazon (just search the name Pamela Sue Rogers) features some lovely illustrations by Deborah Chapman. The book, God's Creatures: Freddie the Firefly: Unexpected Voyage, is the sort of book that parents can get behind, reinforcing some core values without being “preachy.” (more…)

–by Andrea Hall, Rager Media

Miami University, named for the Miami Tribe, has had a long running joke about being in Ohio, rather than Florida. However, the perceptions of the University, and what it has to offer, are no joke. Robert Frost once hailed Miami's campus as one of the most beautiful places he'd ever been. Other notable authors to grace the campus in recent years are Nikki Giovanni and Gregory Maguire. Now Libby Jacobs adds her name to the list.

Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society at Miami, hosted the event. Set in the cozy Bachelor Reading Room, the overflowing bookcases and overstuffed chairs were the perfect setting for the fall afternoon reading. As the crowd gathered, all were anxious to hear short stories from the collection titled Wolf Note. Since Libby is not only an author, but also a noted playwright and director, the audience expected something a little bit different. They were not let down.

The stories shared by Libby showed her impeccable attention to detail. In writing her pieces, she looked at them from every angle, and was able to intertwine the words to create a reality in the minds of her listeners. One of the most interesting aspects of the reading was hearing a completely different version of Flannery O'Connor's "The Good Country People". The surprising news was hearing that Libby's version of the story was written before she had even read Flannery O'Connor's story, serving to show how only a few details can inspire an amazing, and completely different, story.

In addition to reading from her work, Libby shared with the audience her own struggles and triumphs in the publishing world. She gave advice to young writers, also answering their questions about her own work. One of the most inspiring thoughts to come away from the reading with was that one can move from one aspect of the arts to another. Libby not only produced plays for the Weathervane Theater, but she also sponsors the annual New Words Poetry contest at the Akron Art Museum. After having her first book of short stories published, Libby is now at work on a novel. Her ability to move from one genre to another is increasingly unique in the publishing world today.

On that fall afternoon, Libby Jacobs transformed not only the room with her words, but transported the audience to the places in her stories, heaping on them the emotion of her characters, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned. To top it all off, we caught it all on tape.

–by Christopher D. White, editor-in-chief, Rager Media

Photo: Zen priest and punk rocker Brad Warner leafs through a copy of Out on the Autumn River: The Selected Poems of Du Mu, David Young and Jiann Lin's groundbreaking translation of poems by the 9th-Century master of the short lyric Du Mu.

According to Bob Ethington at the Akron-Summit County Public Library, there were about 150 people in attendance at the Brad Warner reading at the Main Library downtown Wednesday night. So this is yet another Main Event Series gig that has been an unqualified success, and it was exciting to see bookworms demonstrating their sincerity by braving the treacherous weather. Some clever soul once said—(and I wish I knew who first said this so that I could attribute credit): there are only three seasons in Ohio: rain, snow, and construction. Yeah, we get more than our fair share of unfair weather, but I still say it beats living in Tornado Alley or out in wildfireland, or anywhere on the West Coast that’s geologically immature and seismically ‘iffey.’

I won’t go into details about Warner’s books and/or the life of Brad Werner, which David Giffels explored in excellent detail the other day. I’m more interested in ruminating a little bit about why I think it’s an excellent thing that Brad Warner received such a warm homecoming welcome.

Click here to read the David Giffels story about Brad Warner.

But first here are a few notes and random impressions, beginning with a digression about my own offbeat religious background. I’m not a religious person, per se, but my mother used to take my brother, my two sisters, and me to a series of non-denominational "holy-roller" churches, and her then-husband was an atheist. I spent my summers with my father, who was unreligious through my early childhood, and who moved to Philadelphia when I was 8 and lived the Sufi life as a member of the M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen fellowship, with his 2nd wife, who studied the teachings of the Sufi teacher M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen. For those unfamiliar with Sufism, it’s a mystical and long-established offshoot of Islam that has been somewhat persecuted throughout its history because it accepts congregants from other faiths, and though most Sufis are Muslim, and say prayers in Arabic, they welcome people from other faiths to worship with them, and acknowledge and give blessings to many of the same figures in the Bible, including Jesus, David, etc.. So there’s a strong interfaith component to Sufism that profoundly impressed and influenced me. I don't currently claim a religion, but I know that my religious upbringing helped to develop my moral framework, and generally helped to make me a better person. There are motifs common to all of the major religious traditions. Christians and Muslims both pray to God. All of the major religious traditions emphasize that sacrifice and discipline make us more morally perfect. (more…)