April Poetry & Tributes
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by Bob Church |
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a retrospective review by David Matthews |
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Poet Laureate of Illinois Speaks to Word Catalyst Poets "All good art lies in risk. Discovering and pursuing that risk, with discipline and passion, ah, there's the rub." - Kevin Stein Editor's Note: I invited Kevin Stein, Poet Laureate of Illinois, to offer a few words of advice and encouragement to the poets among us in recognition of National Poetry Month. He was kind enough to offer the following. A Word of Encouragement Dosed with Writerly Reality
The trick for poets is to retain a balance between these extremes -- to remain open to possibility and yet to hold firm conviction. To believe they're right and at the same time believe they very well could be wrong. It's a kind of double-mindedness, the ability to hold conflicting notions in the head simultaneously. No matter how much one publishes, how many books or awards or kingly reviews, one must maintain this tension between utter belief and utter uncertainty in one's work. The writer drunk with the self interests us little and only as a symptom of aesthetic big-headedness. The writer without a sense of self interests us even less, too stricken with fear to risk anything. All good art lies in risk. Discovering and pursuing that risk, with discipline and passion, ah, there's the rub. Kevin Stein Kevin Stein has received numerous awards, most recently the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing. Previously, he has been awarded Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize, the 1998 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Stanley Hanks Chapbook Award, and four Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for his poetry - the most recent awarded in 2007 to his poem "In Human Hands." In addition, he has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and three such fellowships awarded by the Illinois Arts Council. Named 1989 Bradley University Professor of the Year for excellence in teaching, Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing Program at Bradley University, Peoria, IL. In December 2003, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich named Kevin Stein the state's fourth Poet Laureate. Stein assumes the position previously held by Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and Howard Austin. To read more about Kevin Stein's accomplishments as well as his work as Poet Laureate of Illinois please visit the following sites. Kevin Stein's Poetry
The same feeling washes over me as I read Sharon Olds' collection of poetry, Strike Sparks. Poems about her father, her children, and her own sexuality become mine - my father, my children, my sexuality awakened in her words. Past and present converge, memories are sparked, and moments relived. I am particularly drawn to Olds' father poems. Her words excavate my deepest feelings about my own father, who was an alcoholic and died at the age of forty-seven. As the oldest of his four daughters, and the only one who did not live close to him at the time of his unexpected death, I became overwhelmed with grief and guilt. Guilt that I wasn't with him when he died, that I did not spend the last few years of his life in the close father/daughter relationship we had shared in my younger years. True, those early years were shaping the way for my own bout of alcoholism, a seventeen-year bout spurred on by his death. But, I loved my father. And, I feared him. When I read Olds' poem "I Wanted to be There When My Father Died" the words leapt out at me, and I became conscious of my own love/hate feelings towards my father, feelings I would never admit to myself before reading this poem. The lines "I wanted to watch my father die/because I hated him. Oh, I loved him," (75) and "but I had feared him so, his lying as if dead on the/couch had seemed to pummel me, an Eve/he took and pressed back into clay," (75) touched places deep inside me I did not want disturbed. Suddenly, I saw my own father, passed out on our living room couch, gray cigarette ash filling the trough between his closed fingers. And I am afraid to disturb the sleeping giant by brushing his hand clean. "Waste Sonata" brings all these feelings home for me and is one of my favorite poems in the book, for it is in this poem that Sharon Olds writes full circle of the love/hate feelings we both share towards our fathers. And, it is this poem that lets me know it is okay to have these feelings, that I am not alone. Olds was with her father when he died and the poems she writes of those moments leading up to his death somehow ease my guilt of not being present when my own father died. Perhaps it is the images of those moments, so poignantly written, disturbing and heart wrenching, that make me understand I could not have survived the experience. These are the poems that convey for me the ultimate love of a daughter for her father, a love caught between dutiful acts and repulsive images, of caring for the dying. In the poems "The Ferryer" and "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead" I again appreciate that I am not alone in the persistent dreams that haunted me for years after my father's death. Olds writes of a dream where her father returns to work three years after his death in "The Ferryer." His job is to transport people whom Olds brings to him "…simply someone/I want to get rid of, who makes me feel/ugly and afraid. I do not say/the way you did" (73). The painful truth of words unspoken but now written and therefore realized gives me courage to face my own unspoken truths. Another of my favorite poems in Strike Sparks is "I Go Back to May 1937" in which the poet imagines she goes back to the moment her parents met in college. Olds uses the date to place the reader in her moment, a moment she looks upon in hindsight, wanting desperately to stop the inevitable, yet knowing she cannot. She knows that "bad things" (44) are going to happen, and yet as she watches the young couple who will become her parents, she does not warn them. Why? Because she "wants to live" (44). I am reminded of the small cracked-leather suitcase I keep in my closet which contains letters my parents wrote to each other before their marriage in 1954. I read them, knowing what they could not, that bad things will happen. Like Sharon Olds, "I want to go up to them and say Stop,/don't do it - she's the wrong woman,/he's the wrong man, you are going to do things/you cannot imagine you will ever do" (44) but I know that even if I could, I wouldn't stop them - I, too, want to live. It is from this poem that the title of Olds' collection springs, and the final lines sum up the reason "…I say/Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it" (44). So many other poems in Strike Sparks touch me on some level, as mother, lover, and woman. Poems such as "The Moment the Two Worlds Meet" and "Bathing the New Born" take me back to the birth of my own children. "Little Things" and "Looking at Them Asleep" call up moments with my own son and daughter in their youth, and I find my heart whispering yes, yes in remembrance. I travel the path of our children's growth with Olds in "First Formal" and "The Pediatrician Retires." And, I relive memories of my own childhood and coming of age in the poems "My Father Snoring" and "The Moment." Sensual and passionate moments are more than imagined while reading this collection, they are felt. The poet uses such detail of intimacy in her poem "I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror" that I feel I am "…that/woman on all fours, her head/dangling, and suffused, her lean/haunches…going toward his body, she was clearly a human/animal" (51). But, instead of meeting my own eyes in the mirror, I gaze inside myself and see the woman I have become - a woman comfortable with her sexuality and not afraid of her passion. As Olds writes in the last lines of the poem, "I/belong here, this is mine, I am living out my/true life on this earth" (51). I realize I am no longer the awkward girl in "Adolescence" or the unsure young woman in "First." I am the woman in "Dear Heart," and "Full Summer." These poems are my mirror, and in them I see just how far I have come. To me, there is no greater confluence than that of a writer and reader. When a poet's words have the power to touch a reader so deeply as to bring about an awakening, a deeper understanding and acceptance of oneself, then something happens. Memories sparked converge time and space and a new awareness is born. Sharon Olds does exactly that with her poetry. Works Cited: Olds, Sharon. Strike
Sparks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Karen Heywood is a poet, playwright, and award-winning essayist living her dreams in Mid-Missouri. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Stephens College in Columbia, MO.with a BFA in Creative Writing in May 2007 at the age of 50. Karen currently teaches freshman English Comp at Stephens, but asks that you not hold that against her…she really is a nice person! Editor's Note: Karen Heywood's essay, written last year on Sharon Olds' poetry collection Strikes Sparks, won a Best Essay award at the Sigma Tau Delta conference last year (Sigma Tau Delta is the International English Honor Society for 4 year colleges). This essay has never been published before and I am honored that she chose Word Catalyst to share it with the world for the first time. Thank you, Karen! Nominations To Begin For 2008
Poet Laureate of The Blogosphere
March Poetry:
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All
poets tread a tightrope spread across twin pitfalls of humility
and arrogance. Fall to the side of humility, and poets drown
in despair, disbelief, and uncertainty. They doubt their every
aesthetic choice. They think they can do no right, so they write
safe, boring, and timid poems, as they lack the strength to take
great aesthetic risk. Of course, the result is more of the same
-- safe poems seize no one's attention by the throat -- and the
mewling continues. Fall to the side of arrogance, and poets suddenly
lose any self-censor. They thoughtlessly follow their every aesthetic
inclination, even those that begin to smell up the room. They
don't doubt what should be doubted. They think they can do no
wrong. They fall prey to unknowing self-parody, basking in the
blind light of belief.
