Introduction
by Festival Director
Michael Pearson
GALWAY
KINNELL once said, "It is the dream of every poem to be a myth."
By that he meant, I believe, that every true poem intends to speak
in universal terms, to reach toward the hopes and fears of humankind.
Similarly, it is the object of any literary festival to establish
intensely and dramatically a relationship between important writers
and the community, to renew a world that has been lost to us through
habit or inattention with a language that batters it into visibility.
A great writer creates a city of words, a place that all listeners
or readers can enter to find themselves. --This year's literary
festival begins and ends with Pulitzer Prize winners, and in between
offers a range of voices and visions of the world. The Benefit Reading
on September 27 will be given by Galway Kinnell, Pulitzer Prize winner
and state poet of Vermont, a writer whose moral alertness and respect
for the world around him gives his work the quality of a human chorus
speaking for us all. The poet Sharon Olds has said of him, "Galway's
intense family feeling doesn't stop at the cabin door, on the edge
of the town, or the borders of Vermont, or the American shores. The
globe alone is, maybe, the defining border of Galway's works."
Likewise, the novelist Lee Smith goes beyond Southern accents in such
books as Oral History and Family Linen and depicts characters
who are reflections of us all. Lucille Clifton, who has been nominated
twice for the Pulitzer Prize and has won an Emmy for her contribution
to Marlo Thomas' Free To Be You And Me, has written poetry
and stories for children and adults. Her writing quickens and shapes
an awareness of black heritage. As one of her characters says, "...i
got a long memory/ and i came from a line/ of black and going on women."
Anne Bernays makes a universe of the university, particularly in her
sharply ironic Professor Romeo, the story of a Harvard professor
who is a best-selling author, a leading researcher in his field, and
an indefatigable seducer of his female colleagues and students. Kelly
Cherry, Peggy Shumaker, Toi Derricotte, AIf Mapp, Jr., Scott Donaldson,
Hal Crowther, and Ethelbert Miller will add to the extraordinary range
of voices. -- Appropriately, the festival will conclude with
a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who
will speak quite literally about words. He will talk about his work
on the 16th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a standard
reference that, in his words, "has tended to reflect the cosmos through
the gates of Harvard Yard." Kaplan wants to open the gates to Woody
Allen, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Kaplan, famous
for his biographies of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, once described
Whitman's life as a "demonstration of the regenerative power of personality,
change and language." Language is the heart of the matter, and language
that matters is at the heart of ODU's 13th Annual Literary Festival,
what we hope will truly become a city of words this fall.
