INTRODUCTION TO “MAHONING VALLEY POETRY” : A MANIFESTO

In 1982, I moved to Ohio University to begin graduate studies in Creative Writing. My friend Nate
Leslie had entered the program the year before, and after I arrived, I noticed that his poetry and mine
usually elicited the same befuddled, uncomfortable reactions from our professors. Nate’s explanation was
to the point: “We’re from Youngstown.”
The most noticeable difference between Youngstown poetry and theirs was subject matter. OU is
set in a very small college town surrounded by farmland and state forests. The poets there wrote about
fences, barns and cows, trees and streams—what Nate and I came to call the “stones and bones” school.
They wrote about snow-covered fields; we wrote about ragged stretches of land that would soon be gridded
by new housing developments. They wrote about sunsets; we wrote about how the steel mills at night
blazed brightly enough to blot out the stars. Nature, for them, held the sum of all meaning.
This is a trivial point, of course—poetry can be about anything, and certainly, Youngstown poets
write about nature as well. But there was something more: they wrote and spoke the words “oak” and
“river” and “rock” as though they were innately laden, heavily laden, with mythic significance. It was as if
they were saying “Trees speak to me; let me tell you what they are saying.” This reverence, to me, was no
different than a New-Age channeller summoning up an improbable ancient warrior. It was an interesting
but ultimately false evocation.
The poets constituted a privileged priesthood and their poems were sacred scriptures, chanted
litanies, empty rituals that were meant to have meaning simply because they were rituals. And they read
their poems that way, like a bishop reciting the Pater Noster: slow, sonorous, the voice rising at the end of
every line as if it were a question.
Youngstown poets know better. If poetry for these others was religion, for us it is mysticism.
Youngstown poets don’t know what a tree says, or anything else for that matter, and we can’t imagine the
pretentiousness necessary for someone to say that they do. We are not solemn receivers of the truth; we are
active, ecstatic participants in the magic—magic not in the sense of “special” or “dazzling” or “amazing,”
but magic in the sense of the transformative, the transpersonal, and the transcendent. We do not worship the
world; we stand in uncomprehending awe before it.
Youngstown poets recognize the unshakable ineffability of existence. We know we will never be
able to capture the world in our words, but we revel and reveal in the attempt—and in the intense sadness
and joy that it brings. We know that poetry is most certainly not a mirror held up to reality. It is a hammer.
We use it to shatter the complacency—not just of our personal lives—but of our ideas about what the world
is.
The poets of Youngstown say, “I have no idea what the world is. But look. You have never seen
this. Listen. You have never heard this.” Perhaps this is because area poets are still children at this—
unschooled, innocent, parochial. Perhaps this is because great art emerges out of adversity—economic,
emotional, spiritual. Perhaps this is because, although we take the writing of poetry seriously, we do not
take it personally. Our poems are not our children; we do not own them; in fact, they are something so
utterly alien that at times we are incapable of recognizing them.
Youngstown poets recognize that a point comes, long before it is completed, when a poem no
longer belongs to the poet. It is vital, living on its own terms, and the best the poet can do is to futilely hold
on to the leash and struggle to restrain the poem’s violent lurching. We recognize what Youngstown poet
George Peffer recognized in “The Poem”:

It lives like a dog inside

While you consume the whole world.

After you give it a few broken teeth,

A swatch of filthy pelt, a bone

It leaps for your throat.

If it’s a real poem, it’s coming out.

And we recognize that, on its way out, we may be mauled. And that it may be rabid. And that we yearn for
it as for a lover.