Sunday, October 28, 2007
Abbott Ikeler:The Poet Behind The Outpost

Abbott Ikeler is the author of the poetry collection “Outpost” ( Ibbetson Press 2007) Ikeler , a Harvard graduate, with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, has taught literature and writing at Bowdoin College, the University of Muenster, and Rhode Island College before joining the corporate world. His academic credits include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, a book on nineteenth-century aesthetics, and numerous articles on Victorian literature. He currently teaches Public Relations and Advertising at Emerson College in Boston, Mass. I spoke with Ikeler on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: In a book you penned some time ago: “Puritan Temper and Transcendental Faith” you dealt with the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle and his early lyrical style that was later tempered by religious thought. Do you think that fundamentalist religion or political polemic can undermine poetry or creative thought?

Abbott Ikeler: Carlyle was moved back to his father’s fundamentalist religion because of the guilt around his death. He was also by the death of Goethe who was his mentor. His father used to say you need to work with your hands and the only book you have to read is the bible.

When I think of poetry in the political sense I think of Auden who wrote that poetry makes nothing happen or Yeats who wrote that even as bombs fall around us the poet just smiles and goes on. The poet doesn’t get involved in politics. But of course Yeats contradicts himself later.

DH: What made you switch from an academic setting to public relations in a corporate setting?

AI: You want to know frankly? It was 1984, and I was making 20,000 a year. I was tenured and I had my PhD for fifteen years. A friend of mine, whose wife was a business secretary, told me that she was making a better salary than I was with a degree from Katherine Gibbs. I though there has to be a better way to make a living. A friend of mine who worked at WANG said if you come to us we will give you a position where you will travel all over the world. They put me in charge of Advertising and PR for their Asian subsidiary.

DH: Where you interested in PR writing?

AI: Yeah. One of the things about being an academic, particularly in Literature, is that you have to find romance in engineering. I read Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine,” that dealt with the romance of building the first 32 bit computer. The one problem with teaching is, if you stay in the same discipline, there is a repetitiveness to it. There is a tedium grading over twenty to thirty thousand papers during a lifetime. Most of the academics I know have left their positions for the money issue or because of the weight of repetition. But now I am back in the classroom and I am loving it. I teach graduate students so I don’t have the weight of repetition.

AI: The poet Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive, would never talk about his poetry life at the office. He felt once he did he would be viewed as a poet and not a businessman. How was it for a former academic in the corporate world?

DH: In the corporate world I kept my academic credentials and my literary ambitions pretty much under my hat. It is a world where the academic frame of mind is viewed as too abstract, and not likely for a company to make a profit from.

DH: How has your business experience helped or hindered your writing?

AI: It has helped me be much more succinct. My style has gotten much leaner.

DH: You titled your latest poetry collection “Outpost.” The poem looks at the world from the vantage point of a fort or an outpost.
Do you feel it is the poet’s job to look out from an outpost, on the expanse of life, and remind us all to live now for we all must die?

AI: To remind them certainly how precariously short our time is. Poets use ordinary moments and hopefully derives something sublime.

DH: It seems that you feel you are in a fight against encroaching age, infirmity.

AI: Yeah. It is a fight against the dark. A friend said if he described the overall mood of my poems it would be optimistic melancholy.

DH: Can you experience a “sublime” moment right here in Union Square Somerville?

AI Absolutely. Often we find happiness in the most mundane places. Often my poems look at that.

Epiphanies



They happen on a subway platform
in the midst of mild debate,
hardly heated, on the merits of a film.
Or between courses at a restaurant
unrated by Michelin
over the indiscretions of a distant friend.
An old incompatibility
of taste or moral vision gathers
in an unremarkable moment in a quite prosaic spot
to a settled recognition on one side or the other
of a wall that can’t be climbed.
The rest—days or decades—is merest epilogue.

-- Abbott Ikeler


To order Outpost go to: http://www.lulu.com/content/876211
Labels: Holder on Ikeler

posted by Doug at 10:40 AM 0 comments

Diminishing Returns, by Karl Koweski

Diminishing Returns, by Karl Koweski

sunnyoutside, 2007

ISBN 978-1-934513-01-9

38 pages, $8.00

Review by Eleanor Goodman




Mr. Koweski clearly enjoys telling stories, and he is good at it. In Diminishing Returns, most of the poems involve a narrative structure: a family road trip, an interaction between lovers or friends, an anecdote about the foibles of child-raising. These are not philosophical forays, nor art objects concerned with their own beauty. Rather, they are snapshots of people’s lives, full of humor and an offbeat view of our daily experience.


In “fiberglass dinosaurs,” a family visits an amusement park where “frozen monstrosities / hulk in the Tennessee woods / like junkyard Camaros.” Each member of the family responds differently to the scene, but the speaker, the father, is disappointed: “For me it’s another / wasted fifty dollars, / another bead on a / vacational string / of wasted fifty dollars.” Anyone who has brought a child to an amusement park or watched a kids’ video for the hundredth time can relate to this. But the father’s jaded eye is tempered by the reaction of his son, who “sees....the most awesome beasts / the world has ever offered / tamed only by his father’s presence. / And that alone / makes everything worthwhile.”


Mr. Koweski also looks into the darkness of families, and the potential for devastation when the family unit is dysfunctional. In his painful and humane poem, “the cat’s in the cradle and the kid’s in the litterbox,” he tells the story of two children, two years old and six months old, who are stranded in their trailer home for days after their parents die from drug poisoning. “The children sickly, but alive. / The two-year-old, perhaps / unaccustomed to a lack of / adult supervision, kept his / sister and himself fed / and watered with what he / found in the cat bowl / while their parents / decomposed in the bedroom.” There is little poetic cadence here; like many of the pieces in the book, the lines read like prose. It is important prose, however, and we need more stories like these in written form. Writing solidifies experience, and creates something more lasting and important than a tale to tell at a backyard barbeque. “Usually when I tell this story, / I’ll add a little levity. / I’ll say they were found / in the litter box, or, / at least they didn’t / scratch up the furniture. / But the jokes / are only tiny horrors / meant to obscure / the horrible truth.” Poetry makes casual joking more difficult, and “the horrible truth” becomes a bit more accessible.


Humor is a powerful coping mechanism, however, one which Mr. Koweski employs to good effect throughout the book. “Dancing with diane” is an amusing yet biting romantic history. The speaker describes being eight years old and being told by his parents to ask his cousin Diane to dance. Not knowing which girl in the room is Diane, he asks the drunkest blonde he can find instead.


She set down her

Long Island Iced Tea

and obliged me,

afterward asking the

quintessential question,

“Who are you?”


I’ve yet to answer

that question

but I’ve been dancing

with the wrong women

ever since.


Romance and sexuality are fertile topics for Mr. Koweski. He approaches both with verve. In “computer porn sabotage,” the speaker bemoans the erasure of “Northern Indiana’s largest / privately owned collection of porn” by his wife. “All those hours spent amassing... / the blondes, the brunettes, the redheads, / the midgets, the transvestites, / the double amputees.../ kilobit by painful dial-up kilobit.” The mind boggles trying to picture it – or trying distinctly not to picture it. But Mr. Koweski never flinches. He writes of the ugly, the ridiculous, the absurd, and the disturbing. We should all have such bravery.

Eleanor Goodman. Ibbetson Update. Nov. 2007. Somerville, Mass.