THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9701310734
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 69 lines
Tough guys write poetry.
Computer specialist supervisor Ken Poyner of Virginia Beach is a 6-foot-1, 287-pound weightlifter. At 41, he looks like a cruise missile with spectacles. Poyner has published 300 poems in 60 magazines, from the Iowa Review to the Kansas Quarterly.
``When you're under a set of weights,'' Poyner says, ``with 100 pounds in each hand, you're thinking of nothing else.''
That's the kind of focus he brings to his verse, which is strong, like he is. The latest evidence is Poyner's collection, Sciences, Social, published by the University of South Carolina at Aiken. Things happen in these poems, like the strange manifestation in ``News``:
Up the street the dust is crawling.
Slowly, in waves like wheat
The small particles inch,
Some twisting side to side,
Others in a straight line.
Poyner is bald, but nobody kids him on this. His wife Karen, a veterinarian's assistant, is also a bodybuilder. When Ken is not supervising computer specialists, he may be found giving readings at places like Bucknell University, the Maryland Writers' Center and George Washington University.
Children press their noses to the window to see.
Plump, middle-aged women
Stand on their porches with hands
In apron pockets. The dust
Turns at Main and Bank.
Poetry took him by surprise way back in high school.
``I was trying to impress a young lady,'' he recalls, ``and I picked up a copy of Randall Jarrell's The Lost World. It was like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer. I forgot the young lady.''
The compressed communication captured him.
Sidewalks of dust empty into the avenue,
Alleys of dust mix into the thoroughfare.
Backroads of dust merge into
Major highways. Men from the Exchange
Stand on the steps and slap their thighs.
Poyner feels poetry requires us to contribute context, story. It calls for us to collaborate, to fill in holes - much in the way that radio drama once asked us to fill in sets for ``the theater of the mind.'' Poyner feels this creative demand on the audience is poetry's strength.
And he feels the lack of demand, the insistence on providing everything in a contained and simplified box, is the weakness of TV.
Test Poyner's mettle by ordering Sciences, Social. Send him a check for $5 to P.O. Box 14452, Norfolk 23518. Get some exercise.
After amazement, laughter has begun in parts of the city.
The dust continues to march amiably westward.
Everyone is watching as though it were some show.
What is the dust? What is the ``news``? What does it mean?
That's the connection between pumping iron and poetry. They're both heavy. They increase blood supply to the brain. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College.