Janet McCann: "The Bookstore on Broadway, in Albany: AWP Conference 1999"

Since many of the readers who regularly visit “One Poet’s Notes” are preparing to attend the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference in New York City later this week, the appropriate selection as VPR Poem of the Week seems to be “The Bookstore on Broadway, in Albany: AWP Conference 1999” by Janet McCann, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Janet McCann’s collections of poetry include Looking for Buddha in the Barbed Wire Garden (Avisson Press, 1996) and Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press, 2005). She also has edited a number of anthologies of poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Kansas Quarterly, McCall’s, New Letters, New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Parnassus, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Janet McCann is a professor in the English Department at Texas A & M University.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Frank O'Hara and Jackson Pollock

The previous post to “One Poet’s Notes” celebrated Derek Walcott’s birthday by looking back at sixty years of poetry since his first publication of poems in 1948. In that same year, Jackson Pollock produced a series of groundbreaking paintings that involved an innovative technique eventually known as action painting. Pollock’s group of paintings transformed the world of art, and his work influenced a number of contributions in various facets of American culture, including contemporary poetry.

In my literature and creative writing courses over the years I frequently have emphasized the interconnectedness of movements in various art forms, especially the links existing between poetry and painting. Particularly in the twentieth century, American poets often have associated their writings with the works of artists, and as a result at times a kind of dialogue has developed. Recently, I wrote as part of a post about William Carlos Williams’ “The Great Figure,” the poem that inspired a famous painting by Charles Demuth. In another post I described the monologue of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” during which John Ashbery addresses the artwork and the artist Parmigianino that inspired his poem. Likewise, I repeatedly have expressed my respect for ekphrastic poetry, whether individual pieces written by my students and other poets or more formal full-length collections, such as in my review of Michelangelo’s Seizure by Steve Gehrke.

Therefore, readers will not be surprised to find my thoughts today focusing on another example of the relationship between poetry and painting or poets and painters. On this birthday of Jackson Pollock (born in Cody, Wyoming on January 28, 1912), I’m reminded of Frank O’Hara’s appreciation for Pollock’s paintings. From the beginning of Pollock’s experimentation in the late 1940s—dripping paint on an unstretched canvas positioned across his floor (perhaps inspired by Indian sandpainting) and scraping the covered surface with odd instruments, sticks, or knives—Frank O’Hara appeared fascinated by the technique, which both Pollock and O’Hara viewed as a process toward freedom from restraint or convention.

Pollock’s action painting, containing dark arcs of paint or lines of spattered drops lengthening like beaded chains, embraced spontaneity and imitated coincidence much the way many of O’Hara’s action composition poems narrating events as they may have happened attempted to speak to their readers with a seemingly natural, unfiltered voice relating personal observations or experiences.

Indeed, the post-World War II timing of Jackson Pollock’s move toward Abstract Expressionism, as critics eventually chose to label the style, reflected a sense of physical liberation and emotional release that might have influenced much of the war-weary nation. In addition, Pollock’s paintings may have hinted at the opening of poetry as witnessed throughout the following decade not only among the New York School of poets, but also in the form of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the looser use of language in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, then continuing its influence through poetry published during the rest of the century’s second half.

Speaking of Pollock and the other artists he knew well at the time, and whom he acknowledged as influences, O’Hara once commented: “It was a liberal education on top of an academic one.” In an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, O’Hara elaborated that at the time “painters were the only ones interested in any kind of experimental poetry and the general literary scene was not. Oh, we were published in certain magazines and so on, but nobody was really very enthusiastic except the painters.”

David Lehman includes in The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, his excellent examination of the time period and its artistic atmosphere: “O’Hara felt that the painters were the heroes of a modern artistic revolution.” Lehman specifically remarks upon O’Hara’s 1959 monograph about Jackson Pollock and his paintings: “As with all his critical writings, the style of O’Hara’s Pollock monograph is poetic rather than analytical, animated by ardor rather than cool detachment, and full of a phrasemaker’s panache.” Later in the book, Lehman correctly categorizes the connections between Pollock’s action paintings and O’Hara’s poetry:

The artist’s vocation required a struggle to attain “the state of spiritual clarity,” O’Hara wrote in his monograph on Jackson Pollock. “Only when he is in this state is the artist’s ‘action’ significant purely and simply of itself.” It was in this sense that O’Hara’s own work is the closest thing in poetry to Action Painting. O’Hara’s cult of the artist is a Romantic notion taken to an extreme: the idea that the most crucial element in a poem is not the isolated text, nor its relation to either the world it describes or the reader it addresses, but rather the figure of the poet as creator, who has made a “monumental and agonizing” effort to achieve spiritual grace. The effort, and not the poem it yields, is what is “monumental.”

Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1948, pictured above, provides an early example of his action painting in which the artist’s physical act of composition—the uninhibited tossing of droplets or splashing lines of paint and the smearing with sticks, trowels, or knives—becomes almost as significant as the ultimate image the artist produces. Similarly, the asides and digressions that characterize some of Frank O’Hara’s more memorable poems display the poet’s act of composition and sometimes become as interesting as the purported subject of the piece. An appropriate example may be encountered in the following poem that O’Hara wrote concerning Pollock’s large painting and that once again ties together the two figures:

DIGRESSION ON NUMBER 1, 1948

I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Miro, and I see the sea by Leger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner,
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.

In an ironic twist, the two individuals are connected in death as well. Both men died in alcohol related automobile accidents on Long Island, New York—Jackson Pollock crashed into a tree while driving intoxicated near his home in the Springs section of the Hamptons during the summer of 1956, and an inebriated Frank O’Hara was struck by a speeding jeep while walking late at night on the dark beach at Fire Island in the summer of 1966. O’Hara had included notice of Pollock’s death in one of his action composition poems, “A Step Away from Them,” written in 1956, which also noted the recent passing of other friends in the arts, eccentric poet-playwright V.R. “Bunny” Lang (a founder of the Poets’ Theatre) and musician-librettist John Latouche: “Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” In August of 1956 Jackson Pollock was buried at the Green River Cemetery in Springs, where Frank O’Hara also was buried ten years later in July of 1966.

Derek Walcott: Sixty Years of Poetry

On this date (January 23) in 1930 Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia of the West Indies. Raised in the West Indian culture with its native language exhibiting the French and English influences on the island history, Derek Walcott, educated by his schoolteacher mother, also was taught English as a second language, and he became fascinated by its traditional literature. Consequently, Walcott developed a passion for poetry and playwriting, and eventually he authored his own works written mostly in the adopted language.

Sixty years ago, at the age of eighteen, Derek Walcott released his first volume of poetry, a self-published collection titled 25 Poems (1948), which he funded with assistance from his twin brother, Roddy. At about the same time, he and his brother began a theater group, the St. Lucia Arts Guild, with which they were able to produce some plays Derek Walcott had written in verse. Indeed, much of Walcott’s early promise and measure of success were most evident in his contributions to the theater concerning characters and plots derived from experiences, observations, or histories of the islands he knew so well. Perhaps the peak of this phase in Walcott’s career was achieved when Dream on Monkey Mountain, his drama about colonialism in the Caribbean, won an Obie Award in 1971.

Nevertheless, as might be indicated by his reliance on verse in many of the nearly two-dozen plays he has written, Derek Walcott’s great strength lies in the lyrically eloquent language and richly vivid imagery mostly associated with his poetry. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Walcott released a series of impressive poetry collections, including The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), The Gulf and Other Poems (1969), Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979).

However, one might be right in suggesting Walcott’s poetic work reached its maturity with volumes published in the 1980s and 1990s: The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Midsummer (1984), The Arkansas Testament (1987), Omeros (1990), and The Bounty (1997). Some critics even would claim the period of poetic development achieved its highest level in Omeros, Walcott’s epic book-length poem, which may have led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature soon after its publication, receiving the honor in 1992.

Yet, I would argue for regarding those works that have followed, especially The Bounty and The Prodigal (2004), as examples demonstrating a continuing excellence still witnessed in his poetry. As I remarked last year in my review of The Prodigal: “Derek Walcott’s poetry has always been an ambitious art—with admirable works usually unsuitable as anthology pieces—that requires of readers great patience and long undivided deliberation, but which ultimately rewards readers with its lyricism and inventive language investigating important themes.”

Walcott’s best poetry often has focused on the inner conflict felt because of an apparent clash of cultural influences on his personal life and in his public work. In addition to the competing control of differing languages in both areas of his existence, Walcott has repeatedly shown a growing unease with his sense of place, geographically and emotionally. As I have written previously, Walcott sometimes displays concern, perhaps even guilt, developed over long stretches of separation from his beloved native island, as well as away from its inhabitants, for which he has maintained great affection and to whom he has continued to display devotion in his work over the decades. At times, Walcott also exhibits a split allegiance between the home where he was born and his position as a public figure in Western culture—a great writer in English, a celebrated speaker in Europe and the United States, a teacher at prominent universities associated with modern Western culture.

This dichotomy between two self-images may have been unavoidable, since both of Walcott’s grandfathers were white Europeans, while his grandmothers were islanders of African descent. Still, now as he approaches eighty and with the death of his twin, Walcott seems to be returning to his origins in recent poetry. As the title of The Prodigal suggested, and as I once observed about that collection of poems: “The poet, stunned by his brother’s passing and encouraged by his own aging, elects to exit the world he has adopted for decades so that he might revisit the site where he and his twin had spent delightful days together.” Indeed, in his work Walcott has returned to the location where, with his brother’s aid, he released his first poems composed sixty years ago, including the following piece from among those first works written in 1948:

PRELUDE

I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch
The variegated fists of clouds that gather over
The uncouth features of this, my prone island.

Meanwhile the steamers which divide horizons prove
Us lost;
In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;
Found in the blue reflection of eyes
That have known cities and think us here happy.

Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient,
So I, who have made one choice,
Discover that my boyhood has gone over.

And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette,
The turned doorhandle, the knife turning
In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public
Until I have learnt to suffer
In accurate iambics.

I go, of course, through all the isolated acts,
Make a holiday of situations,
Straighten my tie and fix important jaws,
And note the living images
Of flesh that saunter through the eye.

Until from all I turn to think how,
In the middle of the journey through my life,
O how I came upon you, my
Reluctant leopard of the slow eyes.

Interviewed by Charles H. Rowell in the Winter 1988 issue of Callaloo, Walcott spoke of “Prelude”: “I think I wrote that poem when I was probably sixteen or seventeen, somewhere during that time when I was very excited about my discovery, through several older people, of the poetry of W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas—physical books that I had, books whose print I liked. So the sense of separation, which very often people writing about my work define, is not that early. It comes a little later. In other words, by 1947 or 1948, when we were boys at college, we felt that we were part of the heritage of the British Empire—its language, its history, and so on. We were quite aware of the fact that the background of the Caribbean was a background of slavery. But my generation was not schizophrenic about the heritage of the Empire and the heritage of the Caribbean. It was a double rather than a split thing. In other words, we had an interior life, the life of education.”

Further, Walcott confides: “Later on in Another Life, I wrote about the divided child. But I think that that division, the slow perception of that division, came with a gradual sense of a loss of innocence about history.” Readers seeking to discover a sampling of Derek Walcott’s poetry and to examine his measured development as a poet over more than half a century might be advised to begin with his latest publication, Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was released in 2007.

Throughout his life, Derek Walcott also has been an accomplished artist, painting numerous watercolors depicting the radiant sunshine, the brilliant landscape, and the glaring scenery of the seas surrounding his native islands. As well, he has offered self-portraits, such as the image accompanying this post. Some of his paintings have graced the covers of his collections or been included among the poems in their pages. However, now at the age of seventy-eight, throughout his sixty years of poetry Derek Walcott has presented a magnificent, though progressively forming, portrait of his islands and of himself that could never fully be captured on a canvas.

Anne Wilson: "Taranto"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Anne Wilson’s “Taranto,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Today’s poem by Anne Wilson is inspired in part by the poetry, life, and death of Federico Garcia Lorca. Ninety years ago, in 1918, Lorca’s first book of poems, Impressions and Landscapes, was published. The release of that poetry began an impressive lifetime of work that was cut short in 1936 when Lorca was executed by fascist militia troops during the Spanish Civil War. His body was disposed in an unmarked mass grave. At Poetry Daily today, readers will find a couple of Lorca’s poems reprinted from the new bilingual edition of his 1930 volume, Poet in New York, translated by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman. The collection was written by Lorca during his nine months as a student at Columbia University.

Anne Wilson has had two collections of poetry: Solea (2004), which won the San Diego Book Award for poetry, and Recuerdos (2005), both released by Finishing Line Press. She also has published widely in literary journals, including Bitter Oleander, Cedar Hill Review, Comstock Review, Evansville Review, Oxford Magazine, Rattle, Rio Grande Review, South Dakota Review, and Weber Studies. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including We Used To Be Wives, E.R., and She Is the Song, I Am the Music. Anne Wilson teaches writing courses at the University of San Diego.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

The Writers' Circle

With the first full week of the spring semester finished, I find myself re-tracing a familiar circle, once more encountering some of the same issues raised by members of my creative writing classes every semester. Already, a couple of the students have approached me with doubt and conflicted emotions about whether or not they belong in such a course.

In the Introduction to Creative Writing course, the questioning usually comes from a young writer who has never shared his or her work with anyone else, and anxiety arises when workshop meetings are mentioned in the class syllabus or explained during the opening meeting. As always, I try to express my sympathy for their situation, understanding the vulnerability beginning writers feel, and I offer reassurance that those workshop sessions will not be as painful or embarrassing as one might imagine at first. In fact, I attempt to convince the concerned young authors that all of them are in a similar position, and the tone of conversations in the circular setting of the workshop, even those containing critical commentary, continually will be conducted in a constructive and supportive manner.

Similarly, sometimes a student eligible for enrollment in a more advanced creative writing course as an enjoyable elective—an option available in the college catalog and a selection especially popular among seniors majoring in a science who wish to explore the more creative side of their nature once before graduation—will seek to speak with me after a few class meetings to express reservations concerning his or her decision and wondering whether it would be advisable to withdraw from the course.

Usually, the student appears troubled by the high level of discussion about composition or seemingly strong knowledge of contemporary literature and writing techniques revealed by a few fellow classmates who are majors in creative writing or English. Again, after a conference with the student I normally discover any hesitation about taking the class is not truly warranted and, in most cases, the student eventually uses the knowledge and contributions by others in class discussions as invitations to investigate new works and previously unfamiliar writers on his or her own, leading to greater enrichment as a reader and as an author.

Certainly, as I addressed recently in a previous post on creative writing instruction, the goals for most undergraduate participants in workshops do not include initiating a career as a creative writer. Even the students who major or minor in creative writing often pursue a second major as well, combining writing with another area that might more likely provide a career path. Indeed, this need for a blending of studies even occurs at times on the graduate level, as I notice the Hamline University School of Law now offers a joint JD/MFA in creative writing.

Nevertheless, I understand the sense of uncertainty and natural nervousness displayed by beginning writers when they realize others will be responding to their work, particularly when sitting face-to-face in a circle during workshop situations. Fortunately, my many years of experience witnessing these feelings of anxiety among students have allowed me to demonstrate an authentic faith in their abilities and instill a confidence all will be well in the end. As I remark repeatedly in the opening week of classes, by the time the semester ends, I can almost guarantee the young writers will not only become comfortable sharing and discussing their work with one another, they also will band together, develop a bond as a group—even when engaged in friendly competition and contesting or challenging stylistic options—that urges each member to become a better writer, as well as encouraging one another to respond to literature with more perceptive readings.

To offer evidence I merely need to recall past classes where students who have had doubts later created wonderful work about which they could be proud. In fact, some students who had at first voiced their unease eventually delivered some of the finest contributions to class and surprised themselves. For example, one former student who had never written a short story before entering my fiction-writing course, and had asked after the first week whether she should drop the course, is currently negotiating publication of her third novel.

In this past fall my poetry writing class consisted of a few students who seemed to need reassurance, including a couple that considered dropping the course early in the semester. However, just as I had advised them, all the class members found themselves bonding and gaining strength from one another, especially when discussing their poems in workshop or through email correspondence on the class discussion board. A few students who had never shared their written work with others were soon relying on one another for assistance and assurance, and I was pleased to see the quality of the class writing grew immensely as the semester progressed.

I reminded them that writers frequently resort to their peers as trusted first readers of their work, and the classroom workshop circle in its minor manner resembled famous gatherings of writers over time, such as those who once clustered in Paris cafés or New York taverns, or the individuals who met regularly around the famous round table at the Algonquin Hotel, as pictured in the accompanying painting—writers’ circles. Perhaps circles also serve as an apt symbolism in this post, acting almost as a reflection of the cyclical pattern of teaching every school year, leading students gradually toward more confidence one semester, then starting the process over in the first weeks of the following semester.

In addition to anxiety about sharing their work with one another in workshops, every term my poetry-writing students also must confront a fear of public presentation, since they are required to participate in a formal reading of their work at the semester’s end. The annual reading is open to all on campus and in the community, where it is promoted in advance, and held in the magnificent setting of the university art museum’s main gallery. These readings are always well attended, sometimes drawing an audience of more than one hundred listeners.

Last semester’s group presented their compelling and competently written poetry with an ever-emerging confidence, appearing to gather strength from one another. The various poems they offered from those they’d written throughout the semester—revised and edited after class workshops, commentary on the discussion board, office meetings with me, or private consultations with a classmate—proved to be graceful, polished, and often profound. The audience was attentive, engaged and entertained by the readers.

The variety of styles and subject matter was especially rewarding to me, as the students had struggled all semester to identify distinctive voices and illuminate important instances within their works. Most poems were written in free verse, but some students attempted the traditional forms of the sestina and the sonnet or wrote in syllabic lines.

Of course, there were poems about different variations on the theme of love and loss. One student wrote a haunting poem about a relationship in which the speaker declares in its opening lines: “I haven’t died / though you leave / all of me untouched, / our bedroom door closed, / only ghosts dare / carry one another / across the threshold.” A second offered a comically offbeat and satirical view of love through allusions to Looney Tunes characters: “Porky Pig has Petunia! Even a pudgy, / pink, sputtering pig finds love! I spit / and sputter too, much like Sylvester, / tongue-tied in your presence.” Another poet spoke of the temporality of life, and emphasized the necessity to appreciate what we have while we can, quirkily commanding: “Hold my hand while you still can, soon / we will be brains in jars, electric currents, flashing lights / with only our synapses to cuddle against.”

Two students examined dramatic scenes in moments of tragedy inspired by personal history. One wrote forcefully and poignantly of family members who had perished or survived in concentration camps during World War II: “crooked numbers, embedded in his wrist, / tell of Stefania dragged away to her death.” Another very powerfully chronicled an uncle killed while serving as a medic in the war zone, and subtly evoked emotion with directly blunt lines about the notification after his death: “Someone was calling / A list naming the lost.”

All the class members wrote wonderful ekphrastic poetry perfectly suited to the environment of the art museum. For instance, one chose to relate a task undertaken by Michelangelo: “close friends / nicknamed him Il Divino: / the Divine One rubbed shoulders / with angels, wrestled pale saints. / His brush wet with paint, he cursed / the scope of the Sistine vault, / the ache and whine of his spine— / he prayed for rasp and chisel.” Another poet imagined a story line for a pair of figures portrayed in a painting, a couple caught forever in a frozen moment as they were fishing from a rowboat: “Each morning, they bobbed in the old boat and watched / for nibbles on their long line. Bobby loved to smell her hair / when leaning in to help . . ..” A third poet chose to depict the puzzling figure in a more surrealistic artwork, beginning his poem: “I’ve watched your back retreating through the field, / and find myself unsure just what you are / here to do, or why you are trying to shield / your face when you are all alone, and far / from home.”

A number of the poems caught lovely natural images, as when one captured a scene in a snapshot: “She clicks her camera through a car window / and sees fir trees on the rocky shore, / dotted in dry, yellowed grass like rooted cows so thick / the only world beyond is the burning / blue sky and a smoky trail of stretched / cloud disappearing behind . . ..”

I thank my students for permitting me to quote very briefly from their poems, even though they did not know in what context the works would be cited. I am certain I’m unfairly excerpting bits and pieces from the poems, and these represent only a small sampling of the impressive output by the class during last semester; however, I hope to give a glimpse at the admirable results attained by these students, a few of whom questioned themselves and wondered to me at one point early on if they would be able to be “poetic” or expressed concern about being unsure they had anything significant to say. These questions would be answered by the students themselves, since they demonstrated by the end of the semester that their poems proved the reply to both comments is a positive response. They had participated in the workshop circle, developed their own circle of writers on whom they could depend, and they had completed the class cycle, moving from anxiety and doubt toward more self-assurance and a certain amount of faith in their own growing abilities as authors.

William Stafford: "Traveling through the Dark"

On Wednesday of each week this semester I teach an evening seminar. In order to avoid driving slowly through the center of town, I usually slip onto a bypass that skirts the city for those quick three exits between my home on the northern border of Valparaiso and the university campus located on the southern end of town. Although some construction has occurred along this length of road, including a couple of new shopping centers, one stretch of the roadway still runs alongside wooded areas and a few yet undeveloped fields.

Returning from class the other night, as in the past, I noticed a group of seven deer gathered in the middle of one meadow that extends from the woods and runs parallel to the highway. Sightings of deer are common in this area. Nearly every day I may view two, three, or more deer ambling along the roads in my neighborhood. In fact, some mornings when I walk down my driveway to the mailbox, especially in winter, I might find deer that have come out of the wooded ravine across the street from my house.

Nevertheless, my sighting of the deer beside the highway this week reminded me once more of William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark,” a poem I admire greatly and have taught regularly in my literature courses throughout the years. I know I’m not alone in my fondness for this work. Indeed, I believe there are few recent American poems that have enjoyed the popularity this piece has seen. Included in many anthologies and ever-present in syllabi of college English courses, “Traveling through the Dark” may be so well known for its narrative and the emotionally difficult situation in which the narrator discovers himself that readers easily could overlook the work’s technical excellence.

TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

The poem carefully combines more formal elements with the relaxed diction of free verse. The lines involve variations of rhythm that remind readers of the iambic pentameter one might find in a typical Robert Frost poem, although a Frost work the content in this piece more likely resembles could be “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which also refers to a pause for reflection along the road of life and which does not use iambic pentameter. In fact, as Jonathan Holden has remarked, the pattern of the lines in Stafford’s poem is mostly that of “four-stress accentuals.”

Stafford also flirts with rhyme by employing near rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes, particularly relying on assonance or consonance: “road” and “dead”; “killing” and “belly”; “waiting” and “hesitated”; “engine” and listen”; “swerving” and “river.” The partial and imperfect rhymes hide the poem’s deliberate construction enough that the language does not appear forced or artificial, with the narrative sounding frank and unfiltered. With its four quatrains and closing couplet, the poem even seems to feel like a camouflaged form, one that resembles an extended sonnet and reads like one.

Throughout the poem, Stafford embeds internal rhymes or echoing sounds as well, subtly delivering an underlying lyricism that does not call too much attention to itself; instead, the words almost come across as delivered in natural speech. The speaker’s informality seems as intimate as an admission confided to a friend or family member. In fact, Stafford has reported the initiation of this poem began as he related the story to one of his children the morning after he’d returned from teaching late one night, having experienced the event dramatized in the poem’s lines.

Many have observed the ways William Stafford bridges conflicting worlds in his poem: the human and nature, civilization and the wilderness, technology and the environment, emotion and reason, the physical and the mystical, life and death. As a number of other poets have done, Stafford conveys the clash that occurs when one state intrudes on the other, crosses unmarked borders, and delight drifts into disaster. (Indeed, when teaching this poem, I often link it to similar poems written by Elizabeth Bishop, another poet who likes to explore the possible harm when humans intrude upon the natural environment and mar the landscape.) Beginning the poem, the speaker at first chronicles a moment of discovery with an opening line that would appear positive if isolated: “Traveling through the dark I found a deer . . ..” However, as the line turns, so does the emotional impact on the reader: “dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.”

In fact, Stafford organizes his lines and words so carefully that he directs the reader through the experience both spatially and spiritually, as he evokes and lifts levels of emotion. Notice the order in which he reveals his finding: “the heap, a doe, a recent killing.” The speaker brings his reader closer while also gradually unveiling disturbing specificity. The speaker continually moves from darkness to light, from ignorance to comprehension. He repeats the technique later when he touches the deer: “her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, / alive, still, never to be born.” The process moves from life to death, from an awareness of the situation to an understanding of the consequences. (Readers are invited to consider the various options for interpreting the word still: quiet, motionless, inanimate, stillborn, even now, yet, nevertheless, in spite of that, etc.) Indeed, at one point physical contact also causes a shift from the emotional to the rational: “My fingers touching her side brought me the reason.”

The need to make a decision in this situation confronted by the speaker leaves no pleasant choice. His options are as narrow as the road he travels in that mysterious and dark night. In the first stanza, he already acknowledges he must clear the route, “to swerve might make more dead.” However, by the final lines in the closing couplet, he returns to words originally mentioned in that opening stanza, and to his pattern of contemplation: “I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, / then pushed her over the edge into the river.” Ironically, as many might suggest, in literature a river often symbolizes life, but also the inevitable passing of time that does not hesitate for anyone.

One could question the reference to “us all,” and wonder whether Stafford has the right to include everyone in his thinking. On the other hand, the speaker could only be referring to the group present at the scene: the deer, the fawn, the animated automobile whose engine “purred” as the speaker ironically gives life to this object along with the “wilderness” that is listening, the traveler himself, and even the reader now in attendance. In either case, Stafford creates a dramatic moment, a pause for reflection before he acts, as he knows he must.

Stafford’s imagery creates ambiguity and blurs distinctions between participants. When he writes, “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red,” the syntax implies almost equally that the exhaust was turning red but so was the speaker, and some of the emotions traditionally associated through symbolism or connotations linked to the color red (blood, embarrassment, anger, aggression, conflict, violence, sacrifice, war, a warning of danger, etc.) may be evoked and loosely tied to the speaker’s state of mind.

Some have criticized this poem as too sentimental or for a perceived reliance on the pathetic fallacy. Richard Hugo once even responded to the poem: “stop thinking hard for us all, Bill, and get that damned deer off the road before somebody kills himself.” Nevertheless, I regard this poem as another of the many examples where William Stafford approaches sentimentality by daring to express sentiment so clearly; yet, he ultimately avoids overstepping the bounds and trespassing on sentimentality because he concludes the poem with his blunt statement of action. Indeed, when he composed the poem he shared it with a local writers’ group whose members were shocked by the abrupt and unsentimental ending.

Much of this history of the poem is chronicled along with many others in a wonderful trio of documentary videos with interviews of Stafford and commentary on his poetry, produced and preserved by Mike Markee and Vince Wixon, which are now available as DVDs. The three videos (What the River Says, The Life of the Poem, and The Methow River Poems) are accompanied by an informative viewer’s guide. Last semester, when Wixon came to Valparaiso University as a visiting poet, he exhibited exuberance for Stafford and knowledge of his poetry that must have served to infuse the project with so much energy and enlightenment. I highly recommend these videos for viewing, especially on a day like today, William Stafford’s birthday.

William Stafford was born in Kansas on today’s date (January 17) in 1914; about the same time Robert Frost’s great early book, A Boy’s Will, was just becoming known to many readers. Robert Frost was already 40-years old. (Indeed, Stafford’s first book of poems was published when he was in his forties.) Although Stafford lived in another section of the twentieth century and made his home in different regions of the country (he is most closely associated with the Northwest, where he died in 1993) than Frost’s New England, I believe William Stafford still stands as another legitimate heir to Frost as one of America’s highly ranked poets who write about the intersection of humans and nature, the infringement of individuals on the wilderness. A biographical summary on Stafford at the Academy of American Poets observes: “Stafford’s poems are often deceptively simple. Like Robert Frost’s, however, they reveal a distinctive and complex vision upon closer examination.”

Today, after witnessing those deer so close to the highway while I drove home the other night, I recalled “Traveling through the Dark” and I remembered Stafford again. Therefore, I decided to revisit Stafford’s poetry once more for “closer examination,” and I thought I’d jot these notes as an expression of appreciation, my minor way of honoring him on his birthday.

"Best of the Net" Selection: "Swallowed" by Anne Haines

I am pleased to announce that Sundress Publications, which compiles an annual “Best of the Net” anthology, has selected “Swallowed” by Anne Haines, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, as one of only twenty poems chosen to be honored from all the works appearing in online publications during 2007. Poet Chad Davidson served as this year’s final judge.

Last year Sundress published the first edition of its anthology, which included remarkable works displaying both the wide range and fine quality of poetry now appearing in a multitude of Internet magazines. As I mentioned in an August post when nominating poetry from Valparaiso Poetry Review, the editors of Sundress deserve praise for correctly bringing greater recognition to the developing presence of quality poetry online.

I congratulate Anne Haines, and once more I would like to take this opportunity to thank all contributors to Valparaiso Poetry Review. I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR. I also welcome the admirable efforts of Sundress Publications to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals. I recommend readers look for the new edition of the “Best of the Net” anthology when it is released on February 1.

Walter Bargen: "Visual Appeal"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Walter Bargen’s “Visual Appeal,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Walter Bargen is the author of eleven collections of poetry, and he has had poems published widely in literary journals, including American Literary Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, River City, Seattle Review, Seneca Review, and Sycamore Review. Bargen’s most recent book of poems is Remedies for Vertigo (Cherry Grove Collections, 2006). The Feast, published by BkMk Press in 2004, won the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award from the Kansas City Star and the Writer’s Place. Other honors he has received include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Chester H. Jones Poetry Prize. Last Tuesday, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen the first official Poet Laureate of Missouri.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

An Anniversary Note: One Year of "One Poet's Notes"

Today marks the first anniversary for “One Poet’s Notes,” the editor’s blog for Valparaiso Poetry Review. As described in the blog’s sidebar, “One Poet’s Notes” was begun as a personal notebook that offers readers ongoing commentary complementing content published in VPR. The blog’s entries are intended to connect those poems, essays, reviews, and interviews in the journal’s semiannual issues with other news and additional information relating to poetry and poetics.

“One Poet’s Notes” also seeks to expand the material available to VPR’s readers by presenting critical perspectives on distinguished books of poetry that, for one reason or another, did not receive reviews within the limitation of the main pages of VPR, but were worthy of recognition. As a glimpse at Valparaiso Poetry Review’s page listing “Recent and Recommended Books” would indicate, the journal receives many more fine collections of poetry than could possibly be included within the issues of VPR. Therefore, the editor’s blog attempts to give extensive exposure to some of those books, hoping to enhance their readership and bring them the greater recognition they deserve. Consequently, in the past year “One Poet’s Notes” has highlighted about three-dozen recent poetry collections with detailed reviews.

The format of the blog also has allowed readers to connect with other notable sources for poetry or information about poets, especially with links to various media, including recordings of poetry readings and interviews, as well as various videos relating to poetry and poetics. As the “Audio and Video Links” subheading in the blog’s sidebar displays, “One Poet’s Notes” has contained more than two-dozen such links during its first year.

Moreover, since Valparaiso Poetry Review has now existed for nine years, a particular goal of the editor’s blog has been to reintroduce readers to works published in previous years and still available in the journal’s archives. The VPR Poem of the Week feature has spotlighted almost fifty poets with works appearing in earlier issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This element of the blog has helped increase interest and readership for VPR’s back issues, and it has acquainted readers with a number of poets or poems they might not have previously known.

Indeed, the continuing presence of “One Poet’s Notes” has increased the daily readership for VPR throughout the year. When the initial entries of “One Poet’s Notes” were posted last January, one could not know how many readers might find their way to the blog. However, I have been pleased to see its audience increase steadily over the past twelve months, rising from only about 500 readers that first month to nearly 4,000 readers each month now. Consequently, this as well has enhanced the number of readers who have visited Valparaiso Poetry Review’s seventeen issues published thus far, so that the combined monthly readership reaches about 7,500.

The increase in readership has been assisted by recognition and respect generously demonstrated by others, including many friendly fellow bloggers who have pointed their readers in this direction with high recommendations of the content here. I especially would like to take this opportunity to thank those in the literary blogging community for their warm welcome of me and their pleasant reception for “One Poet’s Notes.”

In addition, some well-known literary organizations and institutions have at times kindly suggested “One Poet’s Notes” to their readers. One prominent example occurred when Charles Simic was named the new U.S. Poet Laureate. The Library of Congress included this blog’s review of Simic’s latest collection as a source in its press release and linked to the critical commentary on its website for citation by newspapers or browsing by viewers. In fact, “One Poet’s Notes” was the only source cited for a review of Simic’s My Noiseless Entourage.

I have been honored and very happy to recognize specific works from Valparaiso Poetry Review’s recent issues by nominating them publicly on “One Poet’s Notes” for selection to various “Best of” collections: Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Already, a pair of those nominations has been chosen for inclusion in the upcoming Best of the Web anthology to be published by Dzanc books, and I was glad to announce that news on the blog as well. As I have said a few times on the blog, I am pleased when an opportunity arises to share the work of VPR’s poets with a larger audience and enable them to receive the greater recognition they deserve.

As 2008 began, the higher readership brought about by “One Poet’s Notes” required some changes (including discontinuation of the VPR mailing list, which had grown too long and awkward) and permitted the initiation of the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page, global and open to all who wish to receive regular updates on news about Valparaiso Poetry Review or instant notification when new issues of VPR are released. Again, I urge readers to take advantage of this additional feature. The presence of the VPR group page on Facebook also has expanded exposure of the journal and “One Poet’s Notes” to an even larger audience.

When I wrote the first comments in “One Poet’s Notes” a year ago and submitted those words for public viewing, I could not anticipate what would occur in the following twelve months or that there would be an overwhelmingly positive response in correspondence received from readers. Nor could I foresee that direction the blog would take to where it is today, 120 posts later. Bolstered by the encouragement I have received from readers and the continuing support from VPR’s writers, I look forward to the future, which I trust will include a few more different features in the new year.

Thank you, again, to all who repeatedly have been readers of “One Poet’s Notes.” I hope you will return regularly to discover entertaining and enlightening entries throughout the next twelve months as well. On this anniversary, I express my appreciation and I offer a note of gratitude to each of you.

Philip Levine on His 80th Birthday

On this date in 1928 Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan. His upbringing among working-class immigrants and African Americans living under the rule of continuing racism forever shaped Levine’s view of the world. The family figures he knew as a boy in the urban landscape of Detroit and the young men he met as a worker in its automobile factories have been ever-present as personages in his poetry. Even today, his poems often read as elegant yet plain-spoken elegies giving tribute to those who were battered and scarred, who felt chronic pain suffered during everyday battles, or those outcasts and artists (particularly writers and jazz musicians) who lived on the edges of society, men and women he once knew and to whom he now has given voice, again and again.

As I mentioned in my review of Breath (2004) that appeared in “One Poet’s Notes” last January: “Perhaps no other contemporary poet has exhibited as large a cast of characters in his or her poetry as Philip Levine has in his heartfelt elegiac lyrics concerning personal relations, as well as in the eloquent emotional reflections on historical figures or cultural icons whose influence may have helped mold Levine’s own heart and certainly aided in shaping his art.”

I also reviewed his previous collection, The Mercy (1999), in the initial issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 1999-2000). As I noted then, Levine’s most recent collections have displayed a mature voice even more concerned with mortality and a need to preserve memories: “Early in his career, Levine's poetry was often characterized as very angry, and that anger provided much of the energy fueling many of his best poems. But that rage evident at an earlier age and in a large share of his poetry, although not gone altogether, has given way to some extent in recent years, especially in his three latest collections, to an even more thoughtful and reflective poetry exhibiting an even greater generosity of spirit.”

With the poems in Breath, Levine continued in this vein, as I observed: “In the last two decades readers may have detected a mellowing voice in many of Philip Levine’s poems, which has resulted in a strengthening rather than a weakening of the poetry. The language one finds in his recent collections appears more open to a greater range of sentiments and to possibilities of extending forth moments holding tender emotions without slipping into sentimentality.”

The author of nearly twenty books of poetry, Levine is one of our most honored contemporary American poets. The Simple Truth (1994) won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991) won the National Book Award; Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979) won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In addition, Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships.

Today, on Philip Levine’s 80th birthday, readers can celebrate and salute the poet by listening to an audiotape of Levine reading “Messieur Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit 1942” on the Academy of American Poets website or by viewing a wonderful film clip on YouTube of Levine reading poetry at a fundraiser for KPFA in Berkeley. Audio presentations of an interview with the poet and a full reading by Levine also are available at the Lannan Foundation.

Perhaps the final section of the five parts in “Dust,” a poem appearing in Breath, would provide a fine touch on this January birthday as well:

On a TV spectacular the cosmos
spins like a snow shower in a light show
of heavenly bodies. I’m reminded of Dust Bowl
photographs on Life magazine: a farmer
and his woman run toward shelter while the earth
they tore some living from rises against them
with all its plenitude. The man and woman
are not driven from their garden in shame
as in a painting, their mouths broken with moans.
These two borrow a Ford with bad tires and worse spares;
they have themselves and three kids to feed, and so
like the wind they head west where perhaps the land
has settled down, decided to be merely
the land they’ll someday take up living in.
Even the atom may be largely empty space,
the TV says. Einstein and Niels Bohr quarrel
for days and resolve nothing. Tonight my wife
holds a glass of black Catalan wine up
to the candlelight and drinks to my New Year
and I to hers, acts as good as any
to stall our time from whirling into dust.

[Important reminder: With the start of January, the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page has been instituted to allow readers an opportunity to quickly keep up with Valparaiso Poetry Review issue releases and news updates about the journal, as well as those book reviews and topics on contemporary poetry regularly presented here on “One Poet’s Notes.” The VPR Facebook group is global and open to everyone, and I invite all readers of Valparaiso Poetry Review or “One Poet’s Notes” to visit the page, where I request you add your name as a member.]

Gray Jacobik: "Sasturgi: Wind-Sculpted Snow"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Gray Jacobik’s “Sasturgi: Wind-Sculpted Snow,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Gray Jacobik’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Sycamore Review, and many other journals, as well as in two editions of the annual Best American Poetry anthologies. Her first book, The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), received the Juniper Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review Press, 1999) was a winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. A third collection, Brave Disguises (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), won the AWP Poetry Series Award.

She edited Fullest Tide: Poems of Ann Silsbee (Custom Words, 2006), a posthumous collection. Jacobik also contributed a review of Ann Silsbee’s Orioling in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. A Professor Emeritus of the English department at Eastern Connecticut State University, Gray Jacobik is a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Sold Out AWP: Creative Writing and Critical Reading

This afternoon I learned that the 2008 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference meeting in New York City at the end of this month (January 30-February 2) has been sold out, and the AWP reports no more passes will be issued after more than 7,000 attendees already have registered. I am not sure of the complete reasoning behind this decision, but I am positive the AWP will have to amend this policy or face harsh criticism from members, many of whom planned to participate with on-site registration as has always happened in the past. Indeed, a number of those members already have made reservations for transportation and lodging, and I cannot see the AWP turning away those people. Since the conference is less than four weeks away, this issue must be resolved quickly by the AWP.

Obviously, the AWP’s “sold out” designation also indicates the great growth in popularity of the organization and the greater demand for creative writing courses at universities, which many of us as writers and teachers of creative writing can celebrate. On the other hand, I’ve heard some cynics suggest this points to a sellout of aesthetic principles to commercialization, not only by the organization but also by individual creative writing programs whose increased presence often provides economic advantages to English departments, especially in those where enrollment figures might otherwise be declining. This opinion is particularly shared by folks already skeptical about whether writers really can be taught in college classrooms how to produce poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

Due to a scheduling conflict, I had not intended to be present for this year’s conference, which is disappointing because I’d love to return once more to my old hometown and see many familiar faces. However, I have attended a number of the AWP’s annual gatherings over the last two decades, and I have observed the steady growth of these meetings, as well as the increasing popularity of creative writing programs in American universities. Indeed, I have witnessed this firsthand as I helped design and develop my department’s creative writing major and minor options in recent years.

Nevertheless, preparing the syllabi today for my Spring semester creative writing courses that begin next week, I again am reminded of an ongoing controversy repeatedly debated within English departments and with other liberal arts colleagues, or even among some authors. Once more, I consider the question regularly repeated about how effectively the subject of creative writing could be taught to students—or whether it should be taught at all.

For decades this topic has generated much discussion, with a number of articles arguing from different perspectives. Although a definitive answer has never been achieved that satisfactorily resolves the familiar question (“Can creative writing be taught?”), I believe the debate usually has created a healthy conversation and often has led to rewarding results.

One can get an idea about early indications of the lingering doubts concerning teaching creative writing in American universities by examining comments included in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880, the D.G. Myers study released in 1996. Among his many sources, Myers cites a couple of statements from the 1920s. Adele Bildersee spoke in 1927 about creative writing in the classroom: “the art of writing cannot be taught; it can only be learned.” William Webster Ellsworth remarked in 1929: “writing can not be taught, but a would-be writer can perhaps be helped and inspired.”

Myers even reports that the Iowa Writers Workshop brochure for years introduced itself to students with the following observation: “Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed.”

In Richard Hugo’s influential collection of essays about poetry and writing, The Triggering Town, published in 1979 as a sharp rise in creative writing programs was just beginning, he opens the first chapter with a brief explanation to his poetry writing students of his approach: “I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.”

One of my own teachers, Dave Smith, has examined this question as well in his 1985 book, Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry, with an essay titled “Notes on Responsibility and the Teaching of Creative Writing”: “Can creative writing be taught? Writing can be and always has been taught. One may teach both the forms and formulas of literature. One cannot teach how to write masterpieces of great art. Art history, art appreciation, and studio instruction teach a great many valuable things about painting. There has never been a course which could teach even the most talented apprentice to be a Michelangelo. But was Michelangelo self-taught in a void? In writing what is taught is respect for time, history, discipline, struggle, expectation, and accomplishment.”

Elsewhere in the essay Smith continues to discuss the merits of instruction in creative writing: “Creative writing is one of the few formal opportunities in education for self-discovery and self-creation. It leads a student less to right answers than to right questions. It creates more intelligent, informed, and responsible readers by immersing them in the actual process of imaginative exploration and accomplishment.”

Clearly, teaching creative writing does not involve merely making minor movements of words from one place to another or considering an alternative expression during revision, the necessary workshop “nuts and bolts” about which Hugo advised so well. A course in creative writing also should instill more abstract qualities, particularly curiosity about how others have employed words in their literature, as well as a willingness to investigate language intimately. As Smith suggests: “We must teach them that to be a writer is to examine, dramatize, describe, understand, and enter wholly into the world as words.”

Currently, one can find an interesting extensive essay about this issue at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs website. D.W. Fenza’s “Creative Writing & Its Discontents,” written in 2000, chronicles the state of creative writing at university programs since the 1980s, and it explores the development of creative writing programs since the establishment of the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1942. Fenza notes, the AWP was initiated 25 years later in 1967, when a small group of 15 writers representing 13 universities gathered.

Today, there are more than 400 creative writing programs at one level or another in universities across the country, and just about every university includes creative writing courses in its college catalog. Indeed, one now can find all the details about current university programs in creative writing online at the AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs. Surely, the blossoming of creative writing programs throughout the nation helps explain the 7,000 people attending this year’s sold-out AWP conference. (As a born and bred New Yorker, I’m proud to say the attraction of New York City certainly contributes as well.)

Although many universities now have graduate programs in creative writing, one must remember that the vast majority of classes in creative writing at universities are populated mostly by individuals who do not plan to become a published author or to pursue a career as a writer. However, one hopes all will become perceptive and critical lifelong readers of literature, those Smith referenced as “responsible readers.”

I teach creative writing to graduate students; however, most of my classes contain undergraduates. I have been fortunate to have remarkable young people in those undergraduate classes. Some of my students have gone on to careers in the field of writing. I’m particularly pleased to note one recently was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Nevertheless, most often not even half the students in the introductory creative writing classes are English majors or creative writing majors, but instead are taking the course as an enjoyable elective. As Fenza correctly concludes: “undergraduate workshops differ from graduate workshops because their primary goal is not to educate artists but to teach students critical reading skills, the elements of fiction and verse, general persuasive writing skills, and an appreciation of literary works of the present and the past.”

Consequently, I’m reminded as I construct my syllabi that one primary goal for a course in creative writing should be to teach students how to be better readers, to view the works through the eyes of their authors, considering the numerous options chosen or avoided through the process of creation and revision that led to the words on the page in front of them. In fact, I like to consider this as a supplementary goal in my literature classes as well.

Therefore, as I prepare my syllabi for the upcoming semester, and as I read the AWP news suggesting the popularity of creative writing, I am amazed by the stages of growth and intense interest I have seen in this field during the past few decades. In addition, I’m heartened by hopes that the world of literature might be enhanced by a new group of enthusiastically innovative writers. I also am optimistic their works will be embraced by a proliferating crop of intuitive readers. I’d like to believe many of these future writers and readers will have learned their skills in classes of creative writing.

[Important reminder: With the start of January, the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page has been instituted to allow readers an opportunity to quickly keep up with Valparaiso Poetry Review issue releases and news updates about the journal, as well as those book reviews and topics on contemporary poetry regularly presented here on “One Poet’s Notes.” The VPR Facebook group is global and open to everyone, and I invite all readers of Valparaiso Poetry Review or “One Poet’s Notes” to visit the page, where I request you add your name as a member.]

A New Face for the New Year

With the beginning of another year, I renew my wishes to everyone for much happiness, good health, and rewarding productivity in the upcoming twelve months. I also would like to note that Valparaiso Poetry Review will face the new year by offering readers a new face as well—the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page. You already may have noticed its addition today in the “One Poet’s Notes” sidebar.

With the start of January, the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page has been instituted to allow readers an opportunity to quickly keep up with Valparaiso Poetry Review issue releases and news updates about the journal, as well as those book reviews and topics on contemporary poetry regularly presented here on “One Poet’s Notes.” The VPR Facebook group is global and open to everyone, and I invite all readers of Valparaiso Poetry Review or “One Poet’s Notes” to visit the page, where I request you add your name as a member.

Since the audience for Valparaiso Poetry Review has grown so large over the years, and because many readers now filter their personal email boxes due to concern about an overload of spam messages, the original mailing list process of notification concerning releases of new issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review and other of the journal’s announcements that began with VPR’s initial issue in 1999 no longer seems practical or feasible. Consequently, the VPR mailing list for notification about the journal’s news and issue releases is being discontinued, and in the future all announcements about Valparaiso Poetry Review instead will be posted on the VPR Facebook group page and in “One Poet’s Notes.”

In addition to readers joining VPR’s Facebook group, I also would recommend once again that visitors to “One Poet’s Notes” take the simple step of subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed for an instant notice and the full text in your Google Reader or other feed source whenever there is an update with a new entry. Subscribing usually can be done with the link at the bottom of the “One Poet’s Notes” page or by clicking the RSS icon in the URL address line of your browser.

Perhaps each reader can successfully begin his or her New Year’s resolutions by completing this pair of actions easily accomplished with as little as a couple of mouse clicks: join the VPR Facebook group and subscribe to the “One Poet’s Notes” RSS feed.

I look forward to including much more material at both web locations in the upcoming months, and I am excited about publication of the forthcoming issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review in 2008. Indeed, to check the roster of writers who will be among those appearing in VPR’s next issue (Spring/Summer 2008) or to view any of the journal’s back issues, readers are urged to visit the List of Issues page of Valparaiso Poetry Review. The Author Archives supplies another way for familiarizing yourself with works published in past issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Also, if you are interested in submitting work for future issues, please remember to look at the VPR Submission Guidelines page.

Happy New Year and best wishes to all!