"Alvin Turner has high moments and low
moments, but not in a progressive
sequence. He takes life as it
comes-cynical in one poem, sentimental
in the next and thoroughly disgusted in
the next. Most people experience life
through contrasting emotions."
Kloefkorn said the reason there are
more poets in Lincoln than short story
writers or novelists is simply because
fiction is harder to write than poetry.
"It's difficult to find sufficient details
to flesh out a story," he said. "The
fiction writer needs precise smells and
voices, and that takes demanding
legwork. You need to go back through
old newspapers and dredge up detail of
the time you're writing about.
"You need a basket of information
from which to select details," Kloefkorn
said. "Most of us, I suspect, aren't willing
to do that. Also, there are more outlets
for poetry. Everybody can't get into the
slick magazines, and that leaves the little
literary magazines which don't have
enough money or pages for many
stories."
He said there's no advantage for a
writer living in New York or San
Francisco instead of Lincoln.
"Writing is a state of mind and if a guy
believes he can't write in Lincoln then
that's a condition of his mind, but it's not
the geography that does it," Kloefkorn s
said.
He believes the midwest is producing
its share of fine literary magazines,
compared to other sections of the
country. He listed Prairie Schooner,
South Dakota Review, and the Midwest
Quarterly (published in Pittsburgh, Kan.)
as comparing favorably with the better
southern literary magazines.
Saltillo magazine recently received a
federal grant from the Coordinating
Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM),
but it won't change the publication's
quarterly format, according to general
editor Jim Wilson.
"We're still going to be a quarterly,"
said Wilson, a graduate student in English.
"But the grant will allow us to put more
in each issue. Right now I'm not sure how
much money the grant will give
us.' Saltillo, which features fiction and
poetry by local writers and others as far
from Lincoln as New York and Boston,
will publish its fourth issue the end of
January. Poetry by Ted Kooser and
Leroy Scheele will be included.
"The quality of Saltillo has improved
since our beginning a year ago," said
Wilson, "because then we didn't know
how to print well. We do all our own
work and print on the Bluestem Press,
which is owned by several people in the
English department. Also, we're selling
more subscriptions now and getting more
donations."
Wilson said Bluestem is actually a club,
and always looking for new members. It
1
4
i
costs $15 initially and there is a $3
monthly charge, which allows members
to use the press to print personal
material. He said students who are
interested in joining should contact Bob
Pierce in the English department, or
himself.
Wilson agrees with Kloefkorn as to the
reason there aren't any major fiction
writers living in Lincoln.
"Poetry is just a lot easier," he said.
"To be a good fiction writer you've got
to write for years. After a certain point
it's work instead of fun, and since it's not
easy to publish fiction a lot of people get
discouraged."
Wilson has written 2 novels himslef,
but he's only planning to send the last
one, finished last fall, out for publication.
It's called All the Lost Generations end
he said he'll send it sometime before
Christmas.
f
il n
Poem
I know what you are thinking you
are thinking I am lucky so far
I have gotten this far I am what
one might call one of the lucky ones
through four lines with nothing
happening, the poem undeclared,
the weather picture entirely ignored
you are saying, see he is trying
to make a poem without giving in
to anything, no one getting kissed
to death, no one failing, no
gorilla escaping its cage to be
hunted down, and see how far
already I have come '
$
and into the second stanza and
you are still with me, perhaps there i
is some kinship between us you from
your small town me from my small
town you with your poems me with
mine, and perhaps you are saying
now it is beginning to dawn on
you what sort of trickery this is
his poems disclose themselves gradually
as dawn comes to the Plains States
he has all but adopted, or that his
love for words carries him off the
page then back again, the real poem
taking place somewhere else but is
almost a kind of secret between him
and the reader
how we encourage each other how we
complement each other the poem my
mirror when I turn to it and yours
when you do
how we depend on it to discover the common
ambition we keep from each other
through the separate arguments of our
daily lives. Must I say it did I
come to say it here is there no other
poem I can delay this to this that
you must already know how I aspire
to enter your life and alter it. 4
Must you go on reading off the pag
back into your life and back into, j '
your own poems unchanged as I nV
through this, unredeemed?
. j
by Steve Kadel
As the snow fell softly outside his
home in Crete Monday evening Greg
Kuzma sat in the living room playing with
his son Mark and daughter Jackie, and
watching the pro football game on
television.
"I usually don't watch football, but
this is a particularly good game," he said.
"Besides, the picture's clear tonight."
It has been said that Kuzma's long
black hair, wire rim glasses and blue jeans
give him the look of a hip graduate
student, but in fact he is an English
professor at UNL. He is also a poet.
He and his family moved from Lincoln
to Crete in August, and live in a large, two
story home near the edge of town. It's
quiet in Crete anyway, and Kuzma's
home sits well off the road on a sizeable
section of land. There are many trees,
bare now except for the snow piling in
their branches.
Inside the house one of the first things
a visitor notices are many colorful
paintings done by friends and a framed
print of Van Gogh's Bedroom at Aries at
the bottom of the stairway.
Upstairs on a desk in the hallway,
almost buried beneath other papers, is a
letter that should make Greg Kuzma
proud every time he reads it. The letter is
from Viking Press in New York and
discusses details of his book of poetry
that will be published this spring.
. "Most of the poems in the book are
old ones I wrote between 1967 and
1970," he said. "They're about camping
and fishing in the Adirondacks, and are
the poems most people in Nebraska knew
when I got here. I was called a nature
poet then, but I haven't written many
like them since."
Kuzma has published poems in the
New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, as
well as a long list of smaller literary
magazines. In addition to teaching poetry
writing classes at UNL, he edits and
publishes Pebble and the Best Cellar Press
pamphlet series.
But the Viking book will be his first
publication by a commercial press. He
expects the first printing to run 3000
copies.
"Your first book published by a
commercial press should be a glorious
thing," he said, "but I have almost an
anticlimactic feeling about it all. Most
New York publishers see everything as a
commodity. At first it seemed all they
were interested in was my health, so they
might make some more money later on
another book."
What sort of person is drawn to
writing poetry?
"All poets are concerned with how
each second of their life is different from
the last and how sad it is that all these
things are left behind," Kuzma said.
"Also, they have an inclination to believe
that things written down on paper are
important."
Robert Bly, a Minnesota writer, is an
important as any poet in America today,
according to Kuzma.
"Bly stands for something important,
which is listening to yourself --the inner
man," he said. "He's against busyness and
business."
Bly was very influential a few years
ago by using solitude, silence and hearing
himself talk, Kuzma said. It got poets
thinking about the internal things as
material.
"The San Francisco beat poetry of the
fifties was talkie and outgoing, as is the
poetry in New York," Kuzma said. "It's
wordy, flabby poetry about walking
down the street and meeting your friends
for lunch.
"Bly's trying to do something with
those big empty cornfields in Minnesota.
He's got a farm there and a guest house
behind his own home. A lot of people
make pilgrimages there and he lets them
stay and write," Kuzma said.
In 1968 Bly won the National Book
Award for "The Light Around the
Body," an anti-war and
anti-administration work.
Kuzma's own writing productivity has
been slowed lately, partly because of the
time he has been spending on
negotiations with Viking. But also, he
said, he may have written so much poetry
in the past years that he needs a rest or a
new writing form.
"It's still an adventure to write
poetry," he said, "but I feel I've already
written a lot of the easy things out of my
own experiences. I've exhausted poems
about camping and fishing.
"I don't write as much as I used to
because there has been interference lately
from other interests. I've got a lot of
energy that can't go into poems," he said,
"so maybe I'll try painting or throwing
pots."
