Reactions to Poetry Forum demise

 Sam Hazo's decision to wind up 43 years of International Poetry Forum programs continues to reverberate. Here's a message from Mary Alice Gorman, co-iowner of Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, after a blog entry of mine on remembering the old days:

 "Maybe after a fashion it was all button-down shirts, rep ties and penny loafers.   I remember the early days with readings on campus…….waiting for Galway Kinnell to return from Selma AL bloodied and bruised……playing with Judy Collins’ son backstage at her performance at the Duquesne theater……hearing James Dickey’s reading and trying to relate that to "Deliverance"….we were all pretty common folk commuting to college and working. Maybe by the time Yevtushenko came to Pgh, simultaneous with the arrival of Sam’s son, we did dress up a bit.

One thing that Sam holds dear is that poetry is an essence basic to our culture……..the Forum will be missed."

Words, words, words or diligence goes unrewarded during a cold Feb. 22

 Breaking from reading galleys of upcoming books -- implausible, illogical crime (Harlan Coben and Jonathan Rabb), goofy fiction passed off as Midwestern wisdom (Jane Hamilton) and a terrific history of the forgotten war between Italy and Central Powers in the Alps in World War I ("White Winter"), I sought to educate myself by reading two lengthy pieces in our finest of periodicals -- the New York Times and The New Yorker.

In a mammoth exercise in fawning obsequiousness Feb. 23, New Yorker scribe Daniel Zalewski slobbers over Ian McEwan, calling his best-selling works "almost scandalously popular." Danielle Steel's success is a scandal. McEwan's well deserved

Much of the article is worth skipping including Zalewski's wide-eyed description of McEwan's 60th birthday party with various Brit literati -- "Zadie Smith walked over, in a nubbly canary-yellow dress." McEwan's hospitality toward Zalewski was extremely generous and he repaid him by repeating generous appraisals of his novels, even though "All of McEwan's literary friends . . . have an odd tendency to dismember his books."

Why? Could it be they are not perfect? We'll never know. (Of course, they are not and his last two were, well, uninspiring.)

The value in the article is McEwan's observations and explanations of his craft. If you can wade through the sugar-donut prose, there are a few snatches of insight.

Across Times Square at the NYTimes, we find full-time lawyer and part-time poetry observer David Orr asking us to consider "greatness" in poetry -- "because for the first time since the 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness."

Orr is simply repeating the warnings that have surfaced for years since those great white male poets of the last 50 years started dying and the graduate schools of poetry writing flourished. Recently, one accomplished poet of that generation told me of his worries that the craft was devolving into self-indulgent, undisciplined mush.

Think of past poetry readings of younger poets. When did one of the readers read a poem that was not about him-or-herself?

In the end, greatness is defined by the generations and is not some universal standard.

If Orr has a point -- and it's not always clear that he does -- today's poets need to study the works of the "greats" and learn from their successes and failures.

Read it for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

A look back at pre-International Poetry Forum Pittsburgh

Quite a week here in Pittsburgh for the arts sector. The International Poetry Forum is folding up, as I had suspected in the fall. There was something about the new season and Sam Hazo's annoucement of it that suggested he was worrried about cash flow. I've been covering the IPF  for more than 20 years, so when the founder sounds unenthusiastic, I can feel something in these old bones. Folks,realize, I am one of the few neutral observers of the forum, an organization that is so Pittsburgh it makes the Terrible Towel seem like an after-thought Kleenex your mother gave you just in case you sneezed before your class picture. This organization was created on money from A.W. Mellon Charitable Trust in an era when the literary landscape was firmly rooted in the East. Universities like Pitt and Carnegie Tech, as it then was, were pushing metallurgy, not MacLeish or, God forbid, Mailer.

Sam was a visionary in mid-1960s Pittsburgh. At the risk of sounding like somebody out of a Rick Seback rehash on the history of bingo night in Western Pennsylvania, I remember those times of a low-key intellectual life in the Smoky City. There were poetry readings and other bookish programs. but nothing on the radar of the common folk. When I could get the old man's station wagon and find my way to a prehistoric Walnut Street to sneak into the original Casbah for espresso, bongos and some third-rate Ginsbergian beat poet, it was like a trip to the moon.

Hazo changed that scene. Oh, it was still button-down shirts, rep ties and penny loafers, but the chance to hear poets your English professor mentioned was exciting. I hope I can hear more from readers about those days, but I fear my readers don't read blogs.

Just a plug: T.C. Boyle was on his game for a PG web site chat with me. Please check it out and if you compare it with the one the NYTimes Book Review did, you'll not only find it longer, but more informative.

http://www.post-gazette.com/multimedia/?videoid=101534

Where have all the experts gone, Google?

One of the tools of my trade, any journalist's really, is that long list of go-to-guys when you need information, comments or just sympathy for my thankless job.

When W.D. Snodgrass died, I dialed Don Faulkner at SUNY Albany and, presto! he lined me up with Snodgrass sources. The same process worked for my John Updike obituary and a piece on Edgar A. Poe.

Sadly, that brilliant, yet diabolical Internet creature, Google, is replacing the experts with their fathoms of knowledge.

Example: The other day, I needed background on a poem, so I phoned a well-versed source in that discipline and left a message. The expert returned my call with the advice:

"Just Google the poem. I'd have to look it up."

Remembering John, newspaper style

 John Updike died a week ago today (Feb. 3), as we all know. Immediately, a clutch of writers cranked up the appreciation machine. Here's what some wrote:

"It was Updike's task, while not denying the repressiveness, to celebrate what was valuable about life in the village." William Pritchard in the Boston Globe. (Feb. 1)

"He was a strongly visual writer. . . Writing his powers could be as focused as Kodachrome." -- Karen Long in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. (Feb. 1)

"Updike achieved his greatest fame as a novelist, but it could be argued that the short story was his greatest strength." -- John Mark Eberhart in the Kansas City Star. (Feb. 1).

"Truth be told, Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, something valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work or rococco flourishes across pages." -- Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer. (Feb. 1)

I'll weigh in Feb. 8, aiming to capture the writer's progression from youthful imitations of older writers to the developed adult sensibility of a long life.

Filling time till kickoff

 Even the most blase among us are getting antsy Sunday afternoon, hours before the biggest spectacle in America begins. With most of the food prep out of the way, I'm reading "Best American Short Stories of 2008" edited by Salman Rusdie (Houghton Mifflin, $14). Interestingly the source of most stories (four) was Harper's with New Yorker one behind and Atlantic and Southern Review one behind the NY'er. Raises the question of, " Where do we readers find new short stories these days?" The commercial magazines are living on the economic edge and the smaller literary reviews depend on institutional or subscriber support.