David Wagoner Birthday Reading

What

A poetical celebration of David Wagoner’s birth, life and poetry.

When
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214

Who should come
Join us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It’s OK if it’s from your library. Note: David Wagoner will not be joining our group.

Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join in our informal discussion of poems we know and love and poems we are only just discovering. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group where everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader’s Workshop. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.

How to find the organizer(s)
We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'This space reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.

Details
Born (June 5, 1926) in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner has been initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, the result of his teacher and friend Theodore Roethke's recommending he apply for a teaching position at the University of Washington, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls how "when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up."

Although Wagoner has written numerous novels, Robert Cording believes that "it is Wagoner's poetry on which his reputation will rest," for Cording notes that for Wagoner, writing poetry is "a constant attempt to break through the barriers between interior and exterior so that whatever lies behind 'the dark window' might be revealed." Leonard Neufeldt calls Wagoner "simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America." "His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius."

Excerpted from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7134 accessed 5/24/08

For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop

by David Wagoner

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open

Vaguely and gradually go sliding

Shut again, fly up

With a kind of drunken surprise, then wobble

Peacefully together to send him

Home from one school early. Soon his lashes

Flutter in REM sleep. I suppose he's dreaming

What all of us kings and poets and peasants

Have dreamed: of not making the grade,

Of draining the inexhaustible horn cup

Of the cerebral cortex where ganglions

Are ganging up on us with more connections

Than atoms in heaven, but coming up once more

Empty. I see a clear stillness

Settle over his face, a calming of the surface

Of water when the wind dies. Somewhere

Down there, he's taking another course

Whose resonance (let's hope) resembles

The muttered thunder, the gutter bowling, the lightning

Of minor minions of Thor, the groans and gurgling

Of feral lovers and preliterate Mowglis, the songs

Of shamans whistled through bird bones. A worried neighbor

Gives him the elbow, and he shudders

Awake, recollects himself, brings back

His hands from aboriginal outposts,

Takes in new light, reorganizes his shoes,

Stands up in them at the buzzer, barely recalls

His books and notebooks, meets my eyes

And wonders what to say and whether to say it,

Then keeps it to himself as today's lesson.

Source: Poetry (October 2002).

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30899 accessed 5/24/08

Expect more at the Birthdays of Poets Blog. Go now.

All best and see you Wednesday,
Andrew Christ

Legal stuff
Your e-mail address will not be sold or used by me for any purpose other than to promote these events and the Birthdays of Poets Blog. If you prefer to not receive these messages, reply to this e-mail address (riverjunctionpoets at gmail dot com) and include the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the text of your message.

Parting Thoughts
Research indicates that better readers make better writers. Maybe this is why, in the Poet's Market, editors of literary magazines often recommend poets read more poetry. Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else. Celebrate (poetry) together. May God continue to bless us mightily one and all. Be sure to thank a veteran for his/her service. Remember: only you can improve the audience for poetry. Please read, discuss and share responsibly. And vote.

-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Garrison Keillor Performs in Saginaw

A SIGH FROM SAGINAW

By Garrison Keillor

Tribune Media Services

I have rather low self-esteem, which is a handicap for a man in this line of work whom you, dear reader, expect to give you 750 words in the strike zone about the economic stimulus package and all those little government checks going out to 130 million of you in hopes you'll go buy candles to light against the darkness and maybe a rod and reel so you can teach a man to fish, but I can't and it's too late to rebuild self-confidence.

I write these words in a Ramada Inn in Saginaw, Michigan, hometown of the poet Theodore Roethke, who wrote a poem that began, "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed she would sigh back at them." I came here to give a speech and afterward a man said, "Thanks for coming. It's so hard to get first-rate speakers to come to Saginaw." Which was sort of crushing to me.

Evidently they'd tried to get Alan Greenspan to come and read tea leaves for them and, failing that, had to settle for me. Oh well. Probably if Roethke himself had come to Saginaw, they'd have said, "Nice of you to come, Ted. We tried to get Louis Jenkins but he was asking too much money and demanded a first-class hotel."

My speech is entitled "Aging: The Opportunity of a Lifetime" and at twenty-five minutes it's a little long. The audience was rather subdued, and who can blame them? Saginaw is sagging, along with the rest of Michigan, and you see guys sliding into the bars at 9 a.m. and you see the For Sale signs and feel in your gut the pain of people whose houses are their IRAs and you want to pull into their driveway and give them a hug, but nobody wants a tall guy with glasses and low self-esteem to throw his arms around them unless he is a buyer with his checkbook out and a ballpoint pen.

I almost said, "I suffer from low self-esteem," but I've met people with high self-esteem and that is a real affliction - the big honkers barreling through airports hollering into their cell phones, who have less self-doubt than the average caribou, galloping around and making a big impression - guys who used to attend my sales seminar, "Why Not Be the Best, Earn Buckets of Money, and Retire Before You're Fifty to a Beach House on Barbados?" I remember them well. They paid $1,000 apiece to hear a whole string of clichés revarnished and covered with cat fur and afterward they said, "Thanks for your ideas. It's so hard to find inspirational speakers who really inspire you."

I'll tell you one thing. I wish I'd written "when small birds sighed she would sigh back at them" - such a fine thought, and what did Alan Greenspan ever say in ten words that moves you so much as those, assuming you have known a gentle woman with lovely bones who is so attuned to the world that she can hear the sighing of birds - and I admire Saginaw for producing Roethke and for celebrating his centennial in May and preserving his boyhood home at 1805 Gratiot Avenue.

It will be a reminder to Saginaw that out of suffering come gifts of great beauty. Roethke suffered from bipolar disorder, was alcoholic, came back to Gratiot Avenue several times to recuperate from breakdowns, and died at fifty-five. But he was a brilliant teacher. And he wrote "My Papa's Waltz" and exquisite poems about his father's greenhouses in Saginaw and the poem about the woman who sighed at birds.

You can sit in the Saginaw airport, as I did, waiting for persons unknown to you to ask you to carry something aboard the aircraft, worrying what they might do if you report them to the nearest authorities, and think of that woman lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed she would sigh back at them, and your mind is carried to thoughts of various women whose bone structure you have known and whose sighs, which you had imagined were about you and your finesse as a lover, were actually meant for nuthatches and chickadees, and that is an interesting idea to carry with you to Lincoln, Nebraska, the next stop on the tour. My new lecture is entitled "Discover Yourself Through Vegetable Gardening" and I am generally available for booking all through March, April and May. Rates are negotiable.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)

(c) 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved.