Detroit Tonight Live: Poetry and Photography

Detroit has a lively arts scene and I’m proud to contribute to it in my modest way. My father and I will present portions of our ongoing photography/poetry collaboration as part of M.L. Liebler’s Detroit Tonight Live Series in May. I’ll read several Detroit-related poems as my father’s pictures of the city are projected. Other performers schedule to appear:
• Poet Sophia Rifkin
• Performance Writer Stephen Dueweke
• Blues & Americana Musician Maggie McCabe
• Poet Writer L. Bush
The show will take place May 30 from 7 to 9 pm at the Jazz Café at the Music Hall, 350 Madison Avenue, Detroit. Liebler always assemble diverse and diverting bills for this series.
www.jazzcafedetroit.com

Vonnegut’s Time

A professor once told me of his reaction to the idea of teaching Kurt Vonnegut’s work in college English classes. “What is there to teach?” he asked. He thought Vonnegut’s books were sufficiently easy to understand that readers shouldn’t need guidance to get through them.
Perhaps with the passage of time that has changed. Readers in the Vietnam War era of the 1960s and 1970s found parallels between their experiences and the World War II events Vonnegut depicted. Maybe young readers need to know a bit of history to grasp what Vonnegut was doing and why it resonated the way it did.
What they don’t need, I contend (and I think my old teacher would agree), is for anyone to rummage around in Vonnegut’s biography in order to make sense of his writing. Yet this is precisely what several misguided books do. I discuss the problems with their approach in an essay in Logos: A Journal of Modern Socity & Culture.

“Road Bird” in Avalon

My poem “Road Bird” appears in the Winter 2013 issue of The Avalon Literary Review, which can be obtained here: www.avalonliteraryreview.com.

Midwestern Gothic Q&A

Midwestern Gothic, which published a poem of mine in its winter 2013 issue, also ran an interview with me on its website. It can be read here: http://midwestgothic.com/2013/01/contributor-spotlight-john-g-rodwan-jr/

Forthcoming and New

Quietude here shouldn’t be taken as inactivity on the writing front. The latest issue of Meat for Tea: The Valley Review (Vol. 6, Issue 4) carries an essay of mine titled “Top Ten.” I also have a poem in the current Midwestern Gothic (Issue 8). In addition, writing of mine is forthcoming soon in The Avalon Literary Review, African American Review, Cream City Review, Concho River Review and Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture.

Norman, OK

Since Mongrel Empire Press published Fighters & Writers in 2010, I’ve come across a couple unexpected references to Norman, Oklahoma – the publisher’s base – in novels (by writers interested in fighters, as it happens). In Harlot’s Ghost Norman Mailer gives the narrator’s wife a professional rival from the city. In Tabloid City Pete Hamill has a damaged Iraq war veteran hail from the same town.

Both Mailer and Hamill were friends of José Torres, and they both dedicated books to the boxer. (I dedicated Fighters & Writers to Torres well after Mailer wrote Why Are We in Vietnam? but before Hamill’s Tabloid City came out in 2011). Hamill not only pledges Tabloid City to the memory of the former light heavyweight champion; he also describes a character donning “a robe from the 1957 Golden Gloves tournament, where his friend José won the middleweight championship.” (Torres was indeed a Golden Gloves champ, but in 1958… Artistic license on Hamill’s part, I guess.)

Manny

Appropriately, I think, given the book’s dual subject, I write about the great boxing trainer Emanuel Steward in Fighters & Writers in connection with another author’s work. In the essay “A First-Class Sport” (which takes its name from a comment made by Teddy Roosevelt), I consider how Steward and others used boxing as a way to help youngsters:

This desire to aid children’s development through boxing is common among both trainers and cops. In his memoir, Serenity, Ralph Wiley recalls his early days as a sportswriter on the boxing beat and visits he paid to the New Oakland Boxing Club, where he met a police officer representing the PAL who worked with young fighters. “Boxing breeds respect,” Jerry Blueford told Wiley. “I don’t care if any of these kids ever become pros, or even good amateurs for that matter. I’m trying to get them into something they can work at. Off the streets. If they leave here in a couple of years and rob a bank, at least they didn’t rob it while they were here.” In a section that harkens back to Roosevelt’s remark about tough neighborhoods, Wiley describes visiting Detroit’s Kronk Boxing Club, in “the bottom of the rundown bunker of a recreation center on an otherwise barren lot of the decayed inner city.” Wiley calls the place “a haven of sorts for the children of Detroit” and he cannot help being impressed by its principal, trainer-manager Emanuel Steward, because of “how Emanuel had overcome long odds, and helped his young men overcome long odds, just to be strong and functional.”

Wiley refers to the original Kronk location on McGraw, where Steward taught Tommy Hearns, Hilmer Kenty, Jimmy Paul, Duane Thomas, Dennis Andries, Steve McCrory, Milton McCrory, Michael Moorer, and so many others, not the later location on West Warren, which according to reports started being dismantled almost immediately after Steward’s death on October 25.

Detroit still needs the kinds of havens Steward provided.