I Have My Own Song For It

Preface

Preface F Anyone opening this anthology may have, at the beginning, some questions about the book: Why now? Why these two editors? And why these poems? The first of these questions is the easiest to answer. In 2003, Ohio celebrates its bicentennial, a natural occasion for a summing up of the state’s history and achievements. While Ohio can proudly point to its material accomplishments in such areas as agriculture and manufacturing , it can also take pride in its rich literary heritage, both as the cradle of writers like Sherwood Anderson and Hart Crane and as the inspiration for works like the poems in this anthology. Not since early in the last century has a book like this one appeared. In 1911, Clement Luther Martzolff edited Poems on Ohio, a collection of verse more notable for its affectionate feelings about the state than for its lasting value as poetry. It is time now for a more modern vision of Ohio, a gathering of poems whose language is fresh and resonant, with a perspective that may be personal or historical , close-up or wide-ranging, in contemporary attitudes towards the character of the state. Why is this anthology edited by two poets who are not natives of Ohio? That circumstance is partly a matter of accident and opportunity . When the Ohio Bicentennial Commission organized its Literary Advisory Council, both of us were invited to serve as members. And as Elton Glaser was, at that time, director of The University of Akron Press, he was in a position to propose that an anthology like this be published in the Akron Series in Poetry. Further, between the two of us, we have lived for forty-five years in Ohio, long enough to understand what our adopted state means to its residents. As poets, too, we have the experience to appraise poems for their aesthetic qualities. Outsiders by birth, insiders by poetic training and practice, we bring to the anthology a dual perspective that informs and balances the book. Being born in Ohio, or even residing here, was not a criterion for F xiii either the editors or the poets whose work was chosen for the book. And neither was literary reputation. This is not a collection of Ohio poets, famous or otherwise, but a volume of poems about Ohio. In fact, some prominent native poets, such as David Wagoner, Kenneth Koch, and Richard Howard, are not represented here, because they have written little or nothing about the state. Well-known Ohio poets like James Wright, Mary Oliver, and Rita Dove—all of them Pulitzer Prize winners for poetry—are included in the anthology, but so are poets, native or not, whose names will be new to many readers. Although some poets who appear in the book still live in the state, others may have done no more than pass through Ohio on their way to someplace else. The emphasis, then, is on the poems, not on the poets. We had only two criteria for inclusion (though perhaps we were not, in a few instances, strict constructionists of our own laws). First, the poem must be in some way recognizably about Ohio. Second, the poem must be aesthetically successful, with interesting language, compelling imagery and figures of speech, and an incisive form shaped to its subject. Some of the poems we considered worked well as poems but seemed to be more generically about the Midwest, with no identi fiable Ohio features. Other poems were overtly about Ohio, often in a mode of buckeye boosterism, but lacked the depth, authority, and polish we required. Altogether, we read more than 960 poems, either submitted to us or sought out in books, and from that number chose the 117 poems in this anthology. The organization of the book was suggested by the poems themselves , which fell into affinitive groupings that seemed preferable to the default position of alphabetical order. What eventually emerged from our sorting of the works was a kind of virtual tour of the state, from the natural to the urban, as the poems settled around lakes and rivers, farms and open country, small towns and large cities. A final category was left open for those poems that did not directly have geography as their focus, that were more inclusive or various in their concerns, or that concentrated on material we could not easily fit into any of the other divisions. xiv E [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 09:55...