–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.

–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.

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 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…)

–by James Reiss

Now that I will be (anachronistically)! an Akronistic novelist, the author of Façade for a Penny Arcade to be published by Rager Media next year (2008), I might as well go public and admit that I’ve had ties with northeast Ohio for decades. Although I’m a New Yorker who, after graduate work in Chicago and California in 1965, came to Miami University to scoff, I stayed not quite to pray, but to feast, on the Midwest’s embarrassment of riches.

Not too many of you know that Rita Dove was one of my students. She arrived at Miami during the waning of what used to be called The Psychedelic Sixties. She was my star poet in at least two undergraduate creative writing classes. From the get-go I recall her multicolored fingernails, polished to a T, as she sat in my cube of an office on the third floor of Upham Hall. She had stopped by not to talk about the intricacies of the sestina but, rather, about a boyfriend who had dumped her. During the course of 20-or-so minutes she let herself have a good cry. I of course listened, trying not to offer platitudinous advice like, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over him” or “The road of true love never did run smooth!” In fact, I believe that she wrote a poem about (more…)

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Most people around here have heard of the very distinguished NEOUCOM, an acronym (Akronym?) which stands for Northeast Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and is a consortium of The University of Akron, Kent State, Youngstown State, and Cleveland State.

Now there's a sequel, and it's called NEOMFA; which stands for Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (in Creative Writing), and is a consortium comprised of the same four member universities as NEOUCOM. (more…)

Photo: Outside of E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Center. Courtesy of Rager Media.

Baptist Confessional, a collection of poems by University of Akron Professor Thomas Dukes was chosen as the 2005 winner of the Bluestem Poetry Award, an annual competition by Emporia State University's Bluestem Press, and is now available.

From Bluestem's website:

The Bluestem Poetry Award Competition began in 1989. Each year, a poet of national distinction serving as our judge chooses a winner from a pool of submitted manuscripts. Both established and undiscovered writers enter their work in the competition.

Click here to see more about The Bluestem Poetry Award.

Thomas Dukes has published poems widely in distinguished national journals including Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the venerable national poetry digest which dates back to the early 20th century, and which is perhaps most famous as the magazine which made T.S. Eliot famous overnight, when, at the urging of Ezra Pound, Poetry reluctantly published "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." More recently, Chicago-based Poetry has become famous for being endowed $100 million from a wealthy benefactor, in an interesting turn of fate. (more…)

Most of us in Akron have heard of Rita Dove. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that many people in Akron DIDN'T know who Rita Dove is. For those who don't, Ms. Dove, graduate of Buchtel High School in Akron, was named Poet Laureate of the United States for 1993 and 1994, and was awarded the Pulitzer for a book of poems, called Thomas and Beulah, which was set in Akron, OH.

What a lot of people in Akron don't know is that the Quaker-Oats-silos-turned-hotel-turned-dorms has been immortalized in a famous poem by Dove, called "Silos."

"Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky's
shabby blue, they were always too white and
suddenly there…"

Click here to read the whole poem by Rita Dove on Questia

There's also a haunting poem in that same book by Rita Dove called "Quaker Oats," and a poem about the beach at Summit Lake, 1921.

Where the "Y-bridge" stands now–(officially called the All-American Bridge)–once stood the North Hill Viaduct, which is the subject of the Dove poem "Under the Viaduct, 1932."

"Under the Viaduct, 1932," by Rita Dove

"He avoided the empty millyards,
the households towering
next to the curb…

Click here to read the rest of "Under the Viaduct, 1932." (PDF)

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

THE AKROCENTRIC is published by Rager Media, a nationally distributed publisher of critically acclaimed books of poetry and fiction.