Poetry & Poets in Rags

Many of the articles in News at Eleven have to do with the current state of poetry: has the internet helped, was it better before, is it taught well, and will the Dodge go on. We begin, though, with a first chapter of Frances Wilsons' 'The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth'. Many of you will go out and buy the book after reading it. There is no way not to be attracted to the remarkable Dorothy Wordsworth.

Lot's of good links in Great Regulars as well. And take a scroll through Poetic Obituaries.

The InterBoard Poetry Community this week welcomed The Poets' Graves Workshop as its latest member forum. They've got a wonderful group over there. Take a moment to click in and read around. They not only join the IBPC group of online poetry workshops, but the group of forums that receives these announcements each week. It's great for Poetry & Poets in Rags to be part of Poets' Graves.

Also, in the yet-wider online community of poetry forums, the well-known and longstanding Gazebo is down. Chris Potter writes, "It seems that the server/webmaster change is taking longer than anticipated--and that there has been some internal damage to our site." So, until that is ironed out, she has set up Gazebo in Exile to have a place to meet. Check in and check it out.

And thanks for clicking in here.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

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Rus Bowden · at 6:20 PM

to suggest that from girlhood she seemed destined to live like "a sterile bud"; on the contrary, she comes across as someone who responds to her physical environment with open arms, someone acutely alert to the pleasures of the senses, who wants nothing more than to love and be loved in a home of her own. The problem with Dorothy Wordsworth is not, I suggest, that she did not experience or excite desire but that the idea of her doing so makes her readers so uncomfortable.

from The New York Times: First Chapter: 'The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth'

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Rus Bowden · at 6:19 PM

start with her appearance. No images of her as a young woman are extant. She was short, we know, and thin. Coleridge said of her, wonderfully: "If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary--if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty."

What's filtered down to us is a certain fiery yet ethereal spirit. In his poem "Tintern Abbey," her brother praised "the shooting lights" of her "wild eyes." Thomas de Quincey saw something of the "gipsy" in her, and called her the "very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known."

from The New York Times: A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth

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Rus Bowden · at 6:18 PM

traditional painter. His portraits and still-lifes of the 1920s, however, represent the peak of his achievement. In these years, he turned against his Ceret breakthrough and destroyed as many of the paintings as he could find. When someone wanted to buy a new painting, in the 1930s, I have read, he insisted on them giving him a Ceret canvas to destroy in exchange.

In poetry, Soutine's Ceret period is very sympathetic with Cesar Vallejo's Trilce (most of which was written, in Peru, during the same years).

"Soutine at L'Orangerie"

from Bookslut: "Soutine at L'Orangerie": A Poem

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Rus Bowden · at 6:18 PM

or its worth to me in thousands of dollars. Likewise I want a new megaphone. I want torturers in both the jail and St. Rose hospital fired. The same Justice should be visited on ill trained ambulance and firemen paramedics who cannot decipher an attack from a hangover. Also my ransom money payed for the release of my vehicle returned to me, along with my attorney's fees. Moreover I want my dignity and compensation for the violation of my religious, civil and human rights, which were trampled upon when I was made nude against my will. I demand compensation for pain and suffering, for insult to injury-for being brutalized - falsely persecuted and prosecuted by law enforcement- and finally for being misdiagnosed by hospital staff while being denied treatment and harassed and berated by paramedics from Hayward city firemen and AMR paramedics. [--Raul (Curly) Estremera]

from Indybay: Police Torture Activist & Poet, Raul (Curly) Estremera

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Rus Bowden · at 6:17 PM

in the "truly great", as the phrase from his famous poem has it--has more than a trace of his German, and specifically German-Jewish, background. The German Jews had embraced Kultur virtually as a passport to legal emancipation and civil rights, obtained by 1871, and to ultimate acceptance in German society, in which they were to be brutally disenchanted.

Many of Spender's best-known poems were written in Germany; it could be argued that his poetry generally declined after 1933, when it was no longer safe for him to live there, and he turned increasingly to prose.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Stephen Spender's Jewish roots

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Rus Bowden · at 6:16 PM

of a century ago, had an extraordinary impact. Day Lewis's assertion that poets (and, in particular, himself and his colleagues WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice) had a prominent role to play in articulating the pressing challenges of economic recession and rising unemployment ran to six editions in the years up to the second world war, three more before 1945 and was still being reprinted in the mid-1970s. A few months after it came out, the Evening Standard reported on a meeting between TE Lawrence and Winston Churchill. They were bemoaning the state of Britain when Lawrence remarked that he had been reading a book by "the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day Lewis".

Today it seems extraordinary that so much hope could be invested in poetry.

from The Guardian: Sacred indignation

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Rus Bowden · at 6:14 PM

modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences.

The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published.

Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000.

from Telegraph: Internet 'is causing poetry boom'

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Rus Bowden · at 6:14 PM

when his seven-year-old daughter brought home a worksheet requiring her to read a short extract from the Greek myth Perseus and the Gorgon, and then answer 20 questions on it.

'That was the homework, that's what they did on myths that term,' he told a conference hosted by the charity Booktrust.

'How crazy, and absurd and poverty-stricken and pathetic is that? It had nothing to do with the story.'

from Daily Mail: Schools are teaching 'literacy without books' in 'poverty-stricken' lessons, says Children's Laureate

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Rus Bowden · at 6:13 PM

on their toes to see Tennyson pass," Joseph Epstein wrote. Today, however, a figure like Tennyson probably would not write poetry and might not even read it. Poetry has been shifted—has shifted itself?—off center stage. Literarily, poetry no longer seems in any way where the action is. But might there not be some good and serious poets out there, amidst the careerists? Poetry's appeal to its creators and to its audience is potentially so strong that there will always be those who will try to achieve something great in verse, difficult though it is. Some are surely trying now, and one or two may even be succeeding. But how would we know?

from The American Spectator: Poets Galore and Subsidized Poets

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Rus Bowden · at 6:12 PM

to partner with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to save the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival, a four-day event that attracts high- profile poets and tens of thousands of poetry lovers.

Montclair Township manager Joseph Hartnett wants to present the 2010 festival in Montclair's central business district, which includes several performance spaces and church halls as well as restau rants and parking.

from Star-Ledger: Montclair steps in for sake of poetry

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Rus Bowden · at 6:10 PM

materials on famous forgers such as Thomas Chatterton, an 18th century teenager who wrote poems that he claimed were lost works of a 15th century monk, AND 19th-century forgers Thomas J. Wise and H. BuxtonForman, who used their knowledge of the printing process to forge and offer for sale 50 pieces of British poetry and literature. THERE ARE ALSO secondary historical, critical, and reference material on forgery from all periods, as well as material on imaginary voyages, counterfeiting, forensics, and the technology of forgery detection.

from The Smithsonian: Libraries' Surprising Special Collections

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Rus Bowden · at 6:00 PM

wonder when the bride arrives; mystery and solemnity in the religious service where the choristers sing the joyous anthems; Dionysian jollity in the feast; poignancy in the bridegroom's longing when he can come unto his love; serenity at the close in "the safety of our joy"; and the final hope of a large posterity.

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: The finest of bridal songs ever: Epithalamion

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Where unassuming forgiveness exists, there exists wisdom. As in the lake full of water lotuses grow, or as prosperity grows in the homes of the fortunate, so does forgiveness grow ever more in the man of wisdom (Jnana). He puts up with everything that happens with the same enthusiasm. (As a man shows in wearing new garments made to his special liking).

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: Forgiveness and compassion

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Rus Bowden · at 6:00 PM

owned and ran a successful automotive die design business in Michigan. There are others--Phillip Levine, whose poems continue to return to his native Detroit, and Theodore Roethke, whose imagination grew out of his father's greenhouse in Saginaw. I could go on. "Let us all be from somewhere," says Hicock's poem. But, as the great poet Richard Hugo says, a poet must then switch allegiance from the triggering subject to the words themselves.

A Primer

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: We all come from somewhere

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Rus Bowden · at 5:59 PM

commonplace humanity against obdurate divinity, and finds decisively in favour of the former.

His delight in the human is conveyed more clearly still, perhaps, through the relish of his physical descriptions. An unashamedly carnal series of poems on women delicately sidesteps the pitfall of reductiveness by evoking beauty suggestively, through natural imagery: a new husband flames at the sight of his wife "pouring/The torrent of her hair in the light of hearth and home"; the protagonist of "Woman on a Swing" moves langorously back and forth against the luminous backdrop of "a hemisphere of sunset that will take/For ever to become decidedly/The night" in a dress "soft as a moth".

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Setting humanity against divinity

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Rus Bowden · at 5:58 PM

in our little worlds, with each click of the keyboard, with each thought that goes unexpressed? No matter how big our mental space, no matter how peopled our social sphere, no matter what kind of a romantic partner we have--real or imagined, we are all lonely for a majority of the day. We are in that space between the ears, dreaming, waking, drinking coffee, passively reading the latest news, and not engaged in a verbal, physical, or spiritual exchange with someone else. Maybe Stephen Dunn's poem "Loneliness" will help you:

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Poem for One

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Rus Bowden · at 5:58 PM

that lovers are not truly cognizant of their happiness is the mistaken idea that they should "seize the present." According to this speaker, life is lived "less in the present" than in the future, and even less in the present and future combined as in the past.

This speaker is convinced that "The present/Is too much for the senses,/Too crowding, too confusing--/Too present to imagine."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Frost's Carpe Diem

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The speaker plunges in immediately describing the disturbing event that seems to occur routinely: "The old woman across the way/is whipping the boy again." And as the neighbor lady is corporally punishing the boy, she loudly condemns him testifying so that her neighbors can hear about "her goodness and his wrongs."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Hayden's The Whipping

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The speaker then claims that when the "Old Devil" transforms his "baleful eye" into "stars that melt into the gloom of night," the speaker again loses his "courage" which "quickly flies." The speaker at this point even loosens his disdain for the evil one by calling him "my dear fellow." The speaker has been transformed himself from openly acknowledging the evil of the "Old Devil" to addressing him as a chum. At this point, the speaker reveals that his winning this fight "is slim."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Johnson's The Temptress

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He discovers that the illness caused by his earlier errors is actually helpful, and he exclaims, "O benefit of ill!" He understands again that the pairs of opposites that operate on the physical level of existence can, in fact, become valuable teachers.

He finally understands, "That better is by evil still made better." In order to comprehend the good and the true, the artist needs to have the contrast of the bad and the false, which is evil.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 119

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As each insect, bird, flower, and tree struggles to contribute its own unique offering, it demonstrates all of the attributes that a duality-based existence requires. The human observer/speaker, who has surveyed all of this activity, determines that those activities include fear and love. The creatures all act out of a combination of fear and love.

The bad news is, "those who love the garden/that in the radiant vacancies they inhabit/there is only the gardener/to love them back."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Solway's The Garden

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In "After This," Guruji reminds his devotes that even after he leaves his body, his soul will retain the one and only desire that is left to a self-realized saint: he will not wish to return to an incarnation, "Unless to mingle the dewdrop tears of other prisoned soul with mine,/And show them the way that I my freedom won." He will gladly return in order to give others the methods by which he earned his "freedom."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's After This

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Rus Bowden · at 5:57 PM

a restless householder consulting his dog on how to escape ordinary life makes me laugh out loud. But the end delivers a knife twist to kill off the unexamined life. How do we resolve the need for comfort with desires that press us in wild directions? Sometimes like this:

How To Like It

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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Rus Bowden · at 5:57 PM

and unlike most great men he really looked like one. Six-foot-eight, big frame, and a big white beard and a shock of white hair, a booming voice, so he loomed over you like a prophet and a preacher, which is what he was.

from Garrison Keillor: A Prairie Home Companion: Bill Holm: 1943-2009

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April 5, 1974
by Richard Wilbur

The air was soft, the ground still cold.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: April 5, 1974 by Richard Wilbur

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Bridal Shower
by George Bilgere

Perhaps, in a distant café,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Bridal Shower

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The Cross of Snow
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Cross of Snow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Late Winter Rains
by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

When the rains finally start they do not stop.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Late Winter Rains by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

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Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane
by Ellen Bass

I'm not well. Neither is he.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane by Ellen Bass

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What I Believe
by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: What I Believe by Michael Blumenthal

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Zero
by George Bilgere

First it was five above, then two,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Zero by George Bilgere

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Rus Bowden · at 5:56 PM

trans. Tsipi Keller, March 1, 2009

from Mutable and Immutable

2.

Who is he who paralyzes me

from Tsipi Keller: Zeek: from "Mutable and Immutable," a 10-poem cycle by Maya Bejerano

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Rus Bowden · at 5:55 PM

themselves to objects, to details, to physical tasks, and here, George Bilgere, an Ohio poet, happens upon mixed feelings about his mother while slicing a head of cabbage.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 205

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Rus Bowden · at 5:55 PM

Michelle Obama was posing

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: A Found Poem

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Rus Bowden · at 5:54 PM

a poem to celebrate the 175th Anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The poem, entitled Frozen Music, was read aloud by RIBA president Sunand Prasad at last night's Royal Gold Medal dinner for the architect Alvaro Siza.

Motion follows in the footsteps of poets such as Betjeman, Hardy and Wordsworth, all of whom were poetically inspired by buildings and architecture.

Frozen Music by Andrew Motion

An eye, shaded for better judgement,

from Andrew Motion: Building: Poet Laureate writes poem for RIBA anniversary

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Rus Bowden · at 5:54 PM

"Have you found a metaphor?"

"A metaphor?"

"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"

I knew immediately what Rose meant. I had. It was the sky--the wind. (The cynic in me cringes on rereading this. But, in fact, it's how I feel.) When I got home to Brooklyn, I asked one of my mother's friends whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: "The water. The ocean."

The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than nowhere is one that's hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss
also Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: The Long Goodbye

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Rus Bowden · at 5:53 PM

and try to seize the throne. Humility is too humble to claim what is rightfully hers, the proud plume now spoiled by her tears, but she exhorts the Virtues to fine the beasts by demanding they bring double the number of gifts to the next meeting of the (now legislative) court.

That's the bare and somewhat tortuous story: what it symbolises is a more complicated matter. The rich interpretative possibilities, will, I am sure be fully explored by that clever and dedicated band, the posters of Poem of the Week.

[by George Herbert]

Humilitie

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Humilitie

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Rus Bowden · at 5:53 PM

and Black Arts has not been looked at closely enough, particularly in both movements' affinities for poetry as a speech act wherein the use of words overrides any attempt to lock down for them a kind of meaning.) By weaving African song into American English, these writers, Lorenzo [Thomas] argues, brought new perspectives to American poetry.

from Dale Smith: Bookslut: Marsupial Inquirer: Lorenzo Thomas, American

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Rus Bowden · at 5:52 PM

and expression of the wealth of being," [William A.] Luijpen writes. In other words, while it is certainly useful to become acquainted with various systems of thought, authentic philosophy means thinking through the problems posed by philosophy on one's own and arriving (or not) at one's own conclusions.

I have been re-reading Luijpen's book and find myself surprised to discover how much it has shaped my thinking.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The train of thought so far--where my column has taken me

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Rus Bowden · at 5:51 PM

Like an ancient cartographer

from Express-News: Poetry: 'House plans'

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Rus Bowden · at 5:49 PM

on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father was a brewmaster and his mother the daughter of a baker.

As a young woman, his mother had worked in her father's shop, where she memorized the names of each pastry to recite to her customers. When Geisel was a young boy, she often recited her "pie-selling chants" to lull him to sleep. Later in life, Geisel would attribute his poetic impulses to his mother's rhyming.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss, Children's Book Writer/Illustrator

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Rus Bowden · at 5:49 PM

by Louis MacNeice

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Bottleneck by Louis MacNeice

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Rus Bowden · at 5:48 PM

by Suzanne Wise

The spine does its turtle charade

from Guernica: Poetry: Dumb Show

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Rus Bowden · at 5:47 PM

by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

He sat silent under the baby grand

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'First Love' by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

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Rus Bowden · at 5:45 PM

by Meredith Root-Bernstein

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Contemplation

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Hawkins Stable
by Jean Valentine

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Hawkins Stable

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Rus Bowden · at 5:44 PM

Off the skin of water scumbled blue a ghostly

from The Oregonian: Poetry: Off the skin of water scumbled blue a ghostly steam

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Rus Bowden · at 5:44 PM

The wreck

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Salvage'

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Rus Bowden · at 5:43 PM

"Every year I write a Valentine poem for my husband, Charter Weeks. The drab, cold month of February, however, is not terribly conducive to romantic notions, so sometimes my thoughts turn to the darker side of deep love: the specter of loss."

Valentine

Familiar enemies have wiped out the flock of Barred Rocks,

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poems from the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot

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Rus Bowden · at 5:40 PM

Sounds & Signs of Spring in Portsmouth

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Sounds & Signs of Spring in Portsmouth

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Rus Bowden · at 5:39 PM

numbered prose stanzas in groups of eight to twelve, embedding in each group a quotation that she calls an inlay. These inlays are brief, even fragmented, lines from thinkers past and present, ranging from Ruskin to Lévi-Strauss to Sontag. The idea of the poetic inlay, [Donna] Stonecipher explains in a note to the reader, came to her while viewing a museum display of inlaid furniture.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Curiosity in Motion

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Rus Bowden · at 5:38 PM

(CB Editions, £7.50), J O Morgan charts the self-education of "Rocky", Ian Seoras Rockcliffe. Playing truant from school, Rocky, and the reader, learns much from the "peaks, mists, creatures, breath" of Skye in this arrestingly lovely memoir.

From Natural Mechanical

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: J.O. Morgan

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Rus Bowden · at 5:37 PM

By Carol Muske-Dukes

from Slate: "Addicts" --By Carol Muske-Dukes

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Rus Bowden · at 5:36 PM

February 20, 2009

Jeremiah at the Outlet Mall

Even the parking lot is a three day walk across,

from Zeek: Two Poems by Adam Sol

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Rus Bowden · at 5:35 PM

gravitated toward Beatnik, bohemian, and hippie circles, and he regarded psychedelic drugs as a path to enlightenment. He recalled reading poetry with Allen Ginsberg in New York City, and he met Abby Hoffman in jail while doing time for financial misdeeds.

During the mid-1960s, Mr. Burk's band, the CIA (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity), shared the bill with up-and coming stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

from Bay Area Reporter: Radical Faerie Ted "Haia" Burk dies

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Rus Bowden · at 5:35 PM

was active in her church and played the organ and piano and sang in the church choir. She also enjoyed reading, crocheting, word search, crossword puzzles, writing poetry and short stories. She was a member of Baxter County Poetry Club in Mountain Home. She was well-known for her excellent spelling ability.

from The Baxter Bulletin: Nellie Grace Crandall, 88

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Rus Bowden · at 5:34 PM

as a man with an insatiable curiosity about verse, attending readings by Robert Bly, and buying a ticket to HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" at the Palace Theatre in Stamford, or giving away his jewelry and performing other acts of kindness.

Davison's poem, "My Soul Knows Things," was read twice by his fellow poets--Rona Schankerman, who knew Davison for 20 years and wore a pearl necklace the retired engineer and grandfather of five had given her, and Eleni Begetis Anastos, Curley's owner.

"My soul knows things, my mother never knew," Schankerman read. " like who to trust with secret thoughts and in whose hands to place my heart."

from The Advocate: Victim of Stamford parking lot assault remembered in verse

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Rus Bowden · at 5:33 PM

Jerry's Home Quality Foods and also Mark's Economart. For the past four years she has worked as a PCA in the Twin Cities.

Miss Fairchild loved to read poems and also write her own. One of her favorite things to do was to watch movies, and she also enjoyed listening to music, her favorite songs being "Purple Rain" by Prince and "When Doves Cry."

from The McLeod County Chronicle: Jessica Fairchild, 24, of Minneapolis

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Rus Bowden · at 5:33 PM

Southwest Minnesota State University complained one day of having nothing to write about, he pointed to one of the ubiquitous black-and-orange insects. "You could write a million poems about that box elder bug," he told them.

To prove his point, [Bill] Holm went home and wrote a "bunch of poems about that box elder bug," said John Calvin Rezmerski, a poet and longtime friend. "Then it occurred to him that a box elder bug could be a metaphor for everything in our culture." Holm's book, "Boxelder Bug Variations: A Meditation on an Idea in Language and Music," was published in 1985.

from Pioneer Press: Writer Bill Holm, 65: The quintessential Minnesotan, 'bigger than life'
also MinnPost: Minnesota mourns the loss of author Bill Holm

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Rus Bowden · at 5:30 PM

the Hyatt Regency atrium without John's collaboration with the people who administer codes. . . . He did that in New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Singapore, wherever we were."

Mr. [John] Street was born in Fort Payne, Ala. He earned his architectural degree at Auburn University, where he played guitar in a band called the Dixie Cats. He was a poet, known for writing while on his commutes between Marietta and Atlanta. And he had a passion for books, collecting an estimated 15,000 of them over the years and giving most of them away to colleges.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: John Street, 81, helped build Atlanta's skyline

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Rus Bowden · at 5:29 PM

of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which crushed the reform process and restored a tough communist rule in the country, [Jan] Vladislav was again banned from publishing. He then founded the Kvart samizdat publisher's that issued over 120 books, including his collections of poems, essays and criticism.

Vladislav was among the first signatories of the Charter 77 pro-democracy manifesto. In 1981 he was forced to leave the country for exile in France.

from Czech Happenings: Czech poet, Charter 77 signatory Jan Vladislav dies

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Rus Bowden · at 5:28 PM

with his health, [Jason] Brown said he was determined to finish teaching this semester.

"Physically, he knew he was dying but he wasn't going to let anything stop him." Brown said. "It's a true loss. We're really going to miss him here. He died in his boots."

"Peter had published over 2,000 poems in his lifetime, more than anyone else in the history of the UA English department," said friend and English professor Carl Berkhout.

from Daily Wildcat: UA poetry professor passes away

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Rus Bowden · at 5:27 PM

for area architects, designing sets for Kanawha Players productions, and commissioned oil portraits and sculptures, in addition to watercolor landscapes, woodcarving, tombstone design, boat-building, poetry and songwriting.

Wiepper, with his trademark black beret and quick wit, was a fixture in downtown Charleston, where he worked in studios on Capitol Street and Hale Street.

from The Charleston Gazette: Charleston artist Bernie Wiepper dies at 84

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