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This story may be about recollections, and not first and foremost about my year as a Wick Fellow: about the memories sparked by the panels and presentations of this past March 12 at the Kent State Student Center, when former fellows and interns came together to talk, not about the meaning of literature, or poetry per se, but about the composition of our lives and how Wick was formative of that, of this. A writing life is somewhat a patchwork, quilted by scenes of witness, speculation, imagination. What it meant for me to be a young writer, who was also a graduate student in the 1990s, is stitched up for me by marginal moments, of perambulations from town to the Wick offices in Satterfield Hall, the auditoria of the Student Center, walks across campus with visiting writers to the memorials to the students killed in May of 1970, then along the old Normal School buildings set back from the State Route, and to the Brady Cafe. Centers have margins, and we bring our stories from those distances into a center and add them to the hearth fire. What I could say in March about my job at Wick ten years earlier had a lot to do with folding back a broadcloth of uncollected memories and finding the threads to work with.
In this recollection about a recollection, what impresses me most is that I didn’t know what I could say about my Wick Fellowship until I was again in Kent. In the days before setting out my memories of that time were diffuse and uncertain, and only took form when the seven of us, some of whom I had never met, had begun to share our experiences, so decidely diverse in our subsequent careers beyond graduate school; sharing as we were, once again, in the great resources, vision, and insight that have guided the Wick Poetry Center for twenty-five years. On seeing my teachers and my friends from Kent State again after such a long time, I came to realize how much of what I can now do, in very practical terms, was guided, shaped, and supported by them. The Poetry Center is a close friend of the English Department, the University, and as such is a further encouragement that young adults become good writers as they pursue their studies. It embodies the important idea that poetry has a stake in that education.
I became a writer.
Matthew Cooperman writes in these webpages that poets have “varied and strange needs”. This echoes a New Testament verse, Hebrews 13:9, “Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings; for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, through which those who were so occupied were not benefited.” The writer is trying to turn strange and varied circumstances, teachings that don’t look, sound or smell like teachings, into a food that can also participate in the experience of grace. We say grace and have gratitude, we are granted and grateful. I’m grateful for the Wick Center’s specific and ongoing enterprise amidst the strangeness of our lives, and all the making strange that poetry is, and grateful for the hard work, time, and sacrifice that Maggie Anderson and so many others has given to make a poetry center that is both serious and fun, graceful and kind. Thanks to the Poetry Center for its teachings, its provision of family, and its love. Try as I might to walk around the issue, gather up my memories and essay forth, so to speak, the gift remains there in the feelings of the heart, all along the way.
Douglas Manson's online writings/publications:
Sputtering Regularity (Unbecoming Normality)
little scratch pad press
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