Poetry

By Brian Wright O'Connor Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle. My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened. Born in 1930, my dad grew up in the company of soldier-storytellers on Army garrisons from Manila to the Old West, and watched his own father and three uncles set off for war in Europe.

War has a way of pushing passions beyond the battlefield's physical boundaries. That's important to remember, because hatred can grow in the absence of efforts to promote understanding. This week's series of events sponsored by the Philadelphia area's Jewish Americans and Arab Americans is just such a worthwhile effort. The events started Sunday at a Sufi mosque on Overbrook Avenue, where about 100 people - Muslims, Jews and Christians - came to read poetry and talk about peace against the backdrop of Middle East fighting.

Polite, respectful and friendly are words often used to describe Thomas, 16. Like other teenagers, he enjoys a variety of activities including playing basketball and baseball, running track, riding his bike, listening to rap music, going to movies, and spending time with his friends. He recently started rock climbing. A sophomore in high school, his favorite classes are gym, especially swimming, and English, because he likes writing poetry. One of his poems was published in the school magazine.

The faces around the seminar table in Phyllis Girard's cramped classroom were transfixed. On the video screen was an elderly man named Stanley Kunitz, one of America's leading contemporary poets, reading from his work. My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, that spring when I was waiting to be born. The juniors and seniors in Girard's gifted class at Bristol Junior-Senior High School were viewing an introductory tape in a series called Poetvision: Poets on Tape for Schools.

Luray Gross thinks kids are going too fast, and she is trying to slow them down - with poetry. In a world where the constant onslaught of noise, sounds, and images leaves little time for "feeling," Gross is challenging the children to slow down, take it easy, let their senses roam and enjoy. And for four days last month, the fourth graders at Berlin Township's Eisenhower Elementary School did just that. They participated in a program called "Artists in Residence," a venture under the auspices of the State Council of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, in which artists such as Gross travel to schools throughout the state and spend time exposing students to their areas of expertise.

As if love weren't confusing enough, this year we're faced not only with the usual Valentine's Day hype but also with the ultimate in anti-romance, shows like The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, and Are You Hot? This is the "reality" of true love in 2003? Ten-pound chocolates, diamonds-and-thigh-highs-are-forever ads, and a bunch of brain-dead, money-grubbing exhibitionists competing to win America's heart? Impossible. Surely we long for something else. Deep down we must know that Valentine's Day is a crock, and Joe Millionaire is a happy idiot.

To the list of favorite poets read in Addie Toleno's sixth-grade classes, one was added yesterday: Julius. Julius, a former resident of a Philadelphia shelter, was one of eight men the shelter has helped who came to thank Toleno's class at Medford's Memorial Middle School for bringing donations of clothing and food each month. As his personal way of giving thanks, Julius - a former street person who lived until recently at My Brother's House, a shelter on South 15th Street in Philadelphia - read the students selections from "Poetry in Motion," a mimeographed booklet containing some of the more than 100 samples of free-form verse he has written.

Sylvia trumpets its true subject in the opening frames. "Dying Is an art, like everything else," Gwyneth Paltrow quotes, in a narcotic monotone, from poet Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus. " "I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. " And from that moment, the movie, which opens nationally tomorrow, storms toward its inexorable conclusion - Plath, with a folded tea towel on which to rest her troubled head, and a waiting stove.

ANNE SEXTON A Biography By Diane Wood Middlebrook Houghton Mifflin. 488 pp. $24.95 'There is a popular notion, " observed interviewer Patricia Marx to poet Anne Sexton in 1965, "that creative genius is very close to insanity. " Citing the psychological troubles of major poets such as Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, Marx asked, "Do you feel there's truth in this notion?" "Well," replied the well-known veteran of breakdowns, suicide attempts and general dysfunction, "their genius is more important than their disease.

Robert Penn Warren, who in February became America's first poet laureate, gave the first public reading under his new mantle yesterday and used the occasion in Washington to lament the standing of poetry in contemporary education. He said that schools today gave "no general education" in poetry and that students often weren't even exposed to it "unless they have a special interest in it. " The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner said he didn't know if the new title would boost American interest in the literary form.

We asked, you wrote, we like! Our second annual Inquirer poetry contest attracted more than 200 entries from all over the place, on subjects ranging from swimming to astronomy, pets to love. So many people out there care about poetry and are writing good stuff. As we did last year, we're printing the three finest of many fine poems, with thanks to all. A further selection appears online at www.philly.com/poets .     A Wall-Eyed Pike in a Glass Tank Open mouthed, like Placido Domingo holding a high note, he charges the glass he can't see, separating him from the minnows.

Steve Burns is a part-time waiter. He does carpentry, too. But his real job is poetry. The Sicklerville resident, 23, volunteers for Apiary, a print and online literary magazine as energetic and eclectic as the Philly poetry scene it nurtures. From the current issue, available free in the literature room at the Parkway branch of the Free Library: I lost my Philly accent somewhere in the outback returned with a tan and an easy disposition "Apiary is a medley of everything," says Burns, who reviews readings, tours independent bookstores, and conducts interviews for his "Captain Steve" column.

Some think of poetry as something you do alone. The "single genius" idea. Sometimes it is. But, just as often, poetry is a communal thing - as it will be, in Philadelphia and environs, throughout April, Poetry Month, and on down the year. "This shows you that the Philly poetry scene has a big heart," says Joanne Leva. She's referring to the third annual poetry festival, starting at noon April 27, a free poetry Woodstock at which 22 diverse poetry-centric people and groups will read and talk poetry at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The topics ranged from love and sex to history and time, but it was all poetry in motion Sunday at the Arts Bank in Center City. Among the recitals was a graphic short poem by Lamont B. Steptoe, "New Orleans," that described having nonviolent, sexual fun with women in the Big Easy. "Most people can't pull that off," Sean Lynch, 20, said. "It's so hard to pull off being vulgar in poetry. " Lynch, a student at Rutgers University's Camden campus, said he had been writing poetry for a decade but performed for the first time in a public forum during Sunday's 17th annual Poetry Ink. Lynch said Steptoe inspired him to go public.

If you're going to put on a poetry festival . . . first get on a ship. Paul Muldoon, poet and professor at Princeton University, is setting up the third Princeton Biennial Poetry Festival for Friday and Saturday. And getting on a ship, in part, is how he chose the poets who'll be there. We'll explain. First: The festival, which began in 2009, is a great chance to see a diverse group of wonderful poets, poets who write all sorts of ways about all sorts of things. Friday kicks off with the New Jersey state finals of Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation competition for high school students.

Poems 1962-2012 By Louise Glück Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 pp. $40. Reviewed by John Timpane   My mixed feelings about Louise Glück's poetry may, in some eyes, make me unsuited to write a useful review of this book. It's a very important book to have, if you like the U.S. poetry of the last half-century. Louise Glück, no doubt about it, occupies a singular and influential place - for the good - in poetry since 1962, inspiring countless poets, and teaching countless more.

Siduri Beckman, 14, swoons over George Eliot's Silas Marner with a passion many girls her age reserve for, say, One Direction boy-band phenom Harry Styles. "I loooove that book," she said, sitting in the auditorium at her school, Julia R. Masterman. Correction. She loves Eliot's Middlemarch first, then Silas Marner . But Philadelphia's first youth poet laureate - Mayor Nutter announced her title this week - has never read Harry Potter. If her tastes seem a little serious, Beckman herself is not. She explains that her parents, Karen and Michael Beckman of West Philadelphia, named her Siduri after the "bartender to the gods" in the Epic of Gilgamesh . The literary Siduri knows the secret of everlasting life, Beckman says.

I LOVE MY CAT. It sat on a mat. It's OK that it's fat.     I love that. That was the first poem written by Siduri Beckman, then 6 years old. It was terrible, she says now. But eight years later, her poetry has landed her a one-year gig as the city's first youth poet laureate. Mayor Nutter and Gary Steuer, the city's chief cultural officer, will make the announcement Monday evening in City Hall. Beckman, 14, a student at Julia R. Masterman School in Spring Garden who aspires to be a district attorney and eventually a Supreme Court justice, stood out among the 30 applicants.

THE CROWD ROARED as Kai Davis walked toward the stage and took her place behind the mike. She stood there for a moment, silent, her wavy locks glistening beneath the spotlight. She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath and released a stream of poetic verbiage before an intimate audience at a poetry slam Friday night inside Studio 34, in West Philadelphia. The spoken-word poetry scene (also known as slam poetry) is booming in Philadelphia. After the sun sets, the poetically inclined and curious file into venues throughout the city to share their work or, as some poets call it, to "get free.