Stine and Ager highlight National Poetry Month

Editor's Note: Don Brenner is the student intern for the Visiting Writers Series.

On Thursday night SUNY Fredonia welcomed its last two visiting writers of the semester, poets Deborah Ager and Alison Stine, for the Alice Louise White Visiting Writers Series.  Coincidental or not, the poets' visit was during the heart of national poetry month and their craft talk and reading added an exclamation mark to the celebration.

Over two hundred students showed up for both the craft talk and the poetry reading in McEwen hall, and gave the poets a great reception and ovation.

The craft talk was at 4 p.m., and after a brief introduction to both poets, Ager began. Her main point was the idea of voice in a poem. She focused a lot on the emotional texture of a poem and line length, comparing Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and how their different line lengths affect the voice of the poem. Ager continued and gave all the attendees a poem written by Sylvia Plath called "Edge." She stressed how the tense of the poem can create a distance, or even bring a reader closer to the poem. For example, writing in a future tense will create a distance from the reader, and writing in the present tense, like Plath does in her poem, puts the reader right into the poem. These differences can change meaning, mood, tone, sound and pretty much anything the author really wants to change.

Stine's half of the craft talk was dedicated to a personal story about herself that she shared with the audience. She talked about when she gave up on poetry and started writing only prose. She then began to write a novel, but in two weeks she started writing poetry again. Her main point was that if you are stuck in your genre switch to something else. "If you write a poem, you can write a story. If you write a story, you can write a novel," she said.

Stine encouraged the audience to write in an uncomfortable genre, whether it be poetry, prose or even an essay, and bring the things you learn back to your original genre. She went on to discuss poems that had more than one story in them and read "All Law Enforcement is Local" by Bob Hicok and "Trash" by Ruth Stone. She ended her talk telling everyone to practice writing a poem with every line having a brand new subject.

A little after 7 p.m., poet and English professor Aimee Nezhukumatathil gave a rousing introduction for both poets and their reading began. Stine began the event, reading from her book Ohio Violence, and stepped up to the microphone in Midwestern form wearing cowboy boots. With a set-list of poems written on her hand, she started off with the poem "The Rescue." She continued on to read "School," "Fields Beyond Fields" and "The Curfew." She talked about her new book of poems which is coming out next year and read a few of those new poems as well. These included, "Wait," which was originally titled "Persephone in Hell," Child Bride" and "Letter After Dismemberment."

Stine made it a point to note that she is not the speaker of a lot of her poems. She mentioned she likes to write about weird news stories, saying that she loves reading weird news. She finished with the poem, "Moon Lake Electric."

She talked about how she likes to write first thing in the morning, before she becomes too stressed or tired. Stine got a lot of laughs from the audience when she said, "Poems are like pop tarts," alluding to the fact that poems can sit and wait to be revised just like an over abundance of pop tarts might fit in the cupboards.

Ager was next in the reading and said she felt like a rock star because, for the first time, she had made a setlist of her poems. She started with "Deborah Sampson," a poem about a woman enlisting as a man to join into the Revolutionary War. She continued to read from her book, Midnight Voices, while the audience listened intently. She read "The Accident," "Night in Iowa" and "Lament of the Telephone," among others, from her book. She also read a few poems from a book that she hopes to soon have published. She said she is working on writing a book of poems about the recent recession, which was highlighted especially by the titles of her new poems. These titles included "The Year of Living Miserably," a poem where she talks about losing her job, and losing her job again, "Pink Slip" and "Company Man." Ager finished her reading with "Water's Lament." In response to a question from a student audience Ager said that she writes whenever, and does not have a set schedule for her writing. She also offered a bit of inspiration to the aspiring writers in the room saying, "As an artist, the only rules are the ones you set for yourself."

After the reading, a lemon loaf provided by the Upper Crust Bakery was raffled off, along with a gift certificate for The Book Nook and two copies of 32 Poems, a poetry magazine founded by Ager.

Overall this was a great semester for the Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series. The series brought in three great writers, Laura van den Berg, Alison Stine and Deborah Ager, who audiences really enjoyed. Hopefully next year will be more of the same.