Rick Campbell on Industrial Cities & Workers

Rick Campbell is a poet living in Tallahassee, Florida, and the author of five poetry collections: The History of Steel: A Selected Works, Dixmont, The Traveler’s Companion, Setting The World In Order, A Day’s Work. He’s earned a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Campbell is the former director of Anhinga Press, a founder and board member of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition, and English professor at Florida A&M University. 

As a poet, Campbell doesn’t care for pigeonholes.

“It’s true that industry, industrial cities, and workers are a large part of what I write about,” he says. "If poetry was really organized by a subject index, those could be mine, along with baseball, music, and rivers. And as much I like and use history, anthropology, and popular culture in my poems, I think, or hope, they are about much more universal themes than just these topics.”

To make his point, Campbell brings in his literary heroes.

“Let’s say, in Richard Hugo’s words, that these topics are my triggering subjects, just as fishing was one of his. Philip Levine, who is, more than any other poet in our country, said to be a poet of work and industrial cities, is not just a poet of work. He once said, in an interview, that he wanted more tenderness in his poems. And he once wrote to me, in response to my poems: 'I said to myself … this guy is as bad as I am, he just won't get over the old place & the lost way of life.' " 

“I hope," says Campbell, "that my true subjects are wonder, loss, love, and the other ways that we attempt to make sense of what it takes to live in this world.”

Here — “as a poet and a person" — he shares his favorite books on the theme of industrial cities and workers:

We Shall Be All:
A History of the Industrial Workers of the World
by Melvyn Dubofsky 

This book was important to me because it legitimized my personal beliefs about workers, unions, the long and ongoing struggle by workers to create a decent life, dignity, and personal freedom in the workplace. Granted, the Wobblies were almost a thing of the past when I came of age and the steel mill workers that I knew had achieved a pretty comfortable life, largely through the struggles of generations of workers who came before them, but this book made me proud to be from the working class. I saw the Wobblies as heroes. They were tough and they got the shit kicked out of them in many ways.

New and Selected Poems
by Philip Levine

I could list here almost any collection of poems by Philip Levine. Every book by Levine is important to me. Not This Pig was the first one I read. They Feed They Lion was the first one that floored me. What Work Is, and A Walk with Tom Jefferson are also still my favorites. But for all poets, it’s not their books that I go back to, that I consider important, but it’s a few, or maybe many, poems. I read one poem at a time and almost one line at a time. The line is the most important element of a poem, of poetry, to me. I don’t think there is a need to tell people about Levine’s poems; for me, I felt that they allowed me to write about, or create myths about, the life that I was living because I saw, or thought, that there were many similarities in my life and the poems that Philip Levine wrote. In short, I wanted to write poems like those Levine wrote even if I never became as great a poet as he is.

Leaving Pico
by Frank X. Gaspar

It’s a coming of age novel, blended with a wonderful magical realism frame tale, about growing up in the Portuguese fishing community of Provincetown. The Pico people, Gaspar’s and the main character of his book’s ancestors, are Portuguese from the Azores. There’s no mill, no factory, no industrial city, in Leaving Pico, but the fishermen are certainly workers, their lives are certainly hard, full of struggles to make a living, to take care of their families, to stay alive. This is a beautiful coming of age novel, every bit as good as the classics in the genre, but when Gaspar added the grandfather’s tale claiming that it was his ancestor who really discovered America, and has him tell the tale to his grandson, the novel’s narrator, it adds an element to an already great book that elevates it to a level all its own and makes it one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Gaspar, I want to note, is also one of the best poets in our country and each of his poetry collections could also be in my favorite books list.

Good Books: Sandy Longhorn on Midwestern Rural Life

Sandy Longhorn is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form (forthcoming 2015), The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths and Blood Almanac. Longhorn teaches at Pulaski Technical College, where she directs the Big Rock Reading Series, and for the online master of fine arts program at the University of Arkansas Monticello. In addition, she co-edits the online journals Heron Tree and One, and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.

“I grew up on the very edge of Waterloo, Iowa, the daughter of children of farmers," says Longhorn. "Our little neighborhood was surrounded on all sides by working farms, and I spent much of my summers and some of my holiday breaks on my paternal grandparents' farm in northeast Iowa. At home, we had horses that we boarded at a farm (not a riding stable) just down the road. I grew up steeped in the ways of working the land."

As a student Longhorn was challenged by a professor to explore “what it meant to be from the rural Midwest,” says Longhorn. “From that moment on, I began to try and write poems that captured the rural Midwest with authenticity, with an open-eyed truth, and with a voice that honored the land and the people from which I sprang.”

"Now, I live in Little Rock, Arkansas, about as large a city as I can manage these days. While I do not miss the brutal cold, I miss the wide-open sky, the far horizon, and the wind; these are the elemental forces that course through my blood.”

Sandy Longhorn recommends three good books on midwestern rural life:


If You’re Not from the Prairie
by David Bouchard
Illustrated by Henry Ripplinger

I did not start writing about rural life until I’d left my prairie home and discovered how little most urban people thought of it. Bouchard’s words and Ripplinger’s images capture how the weather and the land work to shape the people who live in the vast spaces so many see as “empty.” While If You’re Not from the Prairie might be simplistic and sentimental, it succeeds in defining our region for outsiders and it does so with a pride that says, “yes, we matter, too.”

Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie
by Richard Manning

“There is no reason to write a book unless the process of imagining it changes one’s life forever,” writes Manning in the opening chapter of this phenomenal book. Tracing the history of grassland in America from the first evidence of human settlement through the massive changes brought by European-Americans, including and up to the dramatic changes wrought by 20th century agricultural technology, Manning distills science, history, and politics into crystalline prose.  

American Primitive
by Mary Oliver

This was one of the first “contemporary” books of poetry that I read as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, and while Oliver’s poems traverse the American landscape, the poems of the “empty” spaces meant the most to me. In particular “Ghosts,” a poem that centers around the near extinction of the American bison, stuck with me and gave me permission to look more closely at my own relationship to the natural world. Oliver’s work does not simply observe the natural world; it weaves the human into the landscape as well. This technique resonated with me on first reading, and continues to resonate today.

Sharon Bond Brown on Women's Ordinary Lives

Sharon Bond Brown is a contemporary painter fascinated with snapshots, casual images that capture candid moments. Acquiring random photos from antique shops and friends, she adopts portions of the photographic images to create painted compositions that add or eliminate elements. Beginning with either colored gesso or acrylic under-painting, the finished images are worked in oil over these preparatory surfaces, which often glow through from beneath the glazed-on oil. The results are situations, faces, and places offering a universal resonance.

“I am the daughter, granddaughter and sister of psychiatrists so I have always been drawn to the inner stories of people,” she says. “I have been appreciating the extraordinary in ordinary and banal moments caught by the home photographer for the last 28 years, when, following a career in social services, I came to my senses and turned to art full time.”

Brown and her husband were forerunners in Denver’s burgeoning art scene when in 1990 they bought an industrial pattern shop that they converted into an art gallery and home. They later helped start the RiNo art district, a thriving concentration of creative businesses, including architects, art galleries, designers, furniture makers, illustrators, painters, media artists, photographers and sculptors.

An avid reader, Sharon Bond Brown recommends three good books celebrating women's ordinary lives:

La Vida
by Oscar Lewis

This seminal sociological study of the culture of poverty in Puerto Rico and New York is an explosive page turner. It is the ultimate example of authentic voice and its power. The insights about the effect of poverty are revealed through the voices of a family, raw and riveting. Its first line: "I am as frank as I am ugly and I don't try to hide what I am because you can't cover up the sky with your hand." I have read it three times and will again, all 700 pages of it.

Mrs. Bridge
by Evan Connell

This book is a snapshot of the 1950s through vignettes of ordinary life. Short, clean, clear, it mines the role of woman as wife, mother, and social being. It so accurately depicts the repression and expression of the period and the paralyzing effect of self-consciousness. Its often one-page chapters capture life as it is remembered . . . episodically. Funny, keen, ironic, rich, it was the first book I chose for my now 26-year-old book group.

The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls

This remarkable memoir was given to me by my first friend, with whom I reconnected 35 years later. Anyone would look at the "facts" of the author's hardscrabble life and be appalled. But it is testament to the triumph against all odds that Walls has found a voice and a life of value. Her generous portrait of her largely crazy parents also reveals the kind of dysfunctional petri dish that gave rise to her grit and determination. It has the best opening line of any memoir as well: "I was on fire."

Good Books: Jeff Düngfelder on Absence & Silence

Jeff Düngfelder is a filmmaker, photographer, sound artist and designer living in New York. His designs appear on entertainment packaging, posters, websites and environmental graphics. Düngfelder spends his days working as a One to One Creative Trainer for Apple at the Fifth Avenue Genius Bar, a store that draws 30,000 people daily.

Themes of absence and silence inform his art work, as seen at Ümlaut, where he each day he posts a photo accompanied by literary excerpts and music influences. The results are both profound and pragmatic, and offer an evocative look at daily life through a creative lens. 

"Within the frame of my work, I seek to capture the ineffable dialogue between viewer and image," he says, "to freeze in time split-second intervals of meditative stillness within an ever-changing landscape."

Jeff Düngfelder recommends three good books on absence & silence:

Be Here Now
by Ram Dass

This 1971 book on meditation, yoga and spirituality launched my life long interest in absence & silence. One section of the book called “Painted cakes do not satisfy hunger” turned me on to explore many other inspirational source material such as “The Bhagavad Gita” (Sivananda); “The Voice of the Silence” (Blavatsky); “The Perennial Philosophy” (Huxley); “Tao Te Ching” (Lao Tzu); “Raja Yoga” (Vivekananda); “I Ching: Book of Changes” (Wilhelm); and “Autobiography of a Yogi” (Yogananda).

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Music
by Leonard Cohen

This 1993 book of beautiful and terrible visions is a great collection highlighting Leonard Cohen’s work as a poet, novelist, and songwriter. I was drawn, first, to his music. His songs, their words, his themes of love, sex, religion and politics, opened up new ways for me to look at the world.

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
he said to me, 'You must not ask for so much.' 

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
she cried to me, 'Hey, why not ask for more?'

Brian Eno: Visual Music
by Christopher Scoates with Brian Eno

This 2013 book is a comprehensive monograph covering Brian Eno’s creations of Music, Light, Film, Sound, Video, New Media and Art. I think this is the first book to give insight into his process, and his quest for art that creates a quiet space for contemplation. I first became interested in him through his music, particularly with the album “Another Green World," which, for me, connected the dots between absence & silence. The first song that hooked me was “Everything Merges With the Night.”

Santiago, under the volcano,
Floats like a cushion on the sea.
Yet I can never sleep here
Everything ponders in the night.

Good Books: Valerie Savarie on Art Books

Valerie Savarie, Denver-based artist and owner of Valkarie Gallery, finds old and sometimes very tattered books to use as her canvas. She then takes the written story within and reinterprets it into a three dimensional piece by cutting, sewing and painting – creating a multidimensional collage while still leaving the majority of the book intact.

The characters she creates — the inhabitants of the books, as she calls them — are always painted in black and white, which allows them to live in balance within their predominantSoul Sisters - by Valerie Savariely black and white (text and page) surroundings. Sometimes, they are animals, sometimes they are more human.

“I am adding another chapter in the lineage of storytelling," says Savarie. "Before we had readily available printed books, stories were communicated verbally and passed on from person to person, with each storyteller adding their own twist. This is my way of passing on that tradition — creating a visual from the written and then allowing the viewer to create their own story from the images and words that they see."

Valerie Savarie shares her three favorite art books: 

Harold and the Purple Crayon
by Crockett Johnson

A book filled with art and very few words, this series has greatly influenced me as an artist due to its abundance of art, creativity and storytelling that can be made up by the readers. The main character, Harold, allows his imagination to take control in creating the world around him. Sometimes the worlds he creates are, especially when he lets the purple crayon take a life of its own, scary and challenging but he always manages to find a solution and draw himself out of it. It demonstrates how powerful our imagination can be — both on the positive and negative — and how it can help us solve any problem.

Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence
by Nick Bantock

Incredibly well-written with equally, if not surpassingly, stunning art, this interactive book (the first in a series of three) tells the story of two artist who meet through a chance correspondence. Sharing their passion of art and words with one another, their relationship builds through handmade postcards and written letters that travel hundreds of miles. Even with the best laid plans, it seems that physically their paths can not meet. 
The reader must actively participate in Griffin and Sabine’s world due to the interactive quality of the book which is filled with envelopes attached to the pages where letters wait to be removed and read.

Amphigorey Also
by Edward Gorey

Any and everything by Edward Gorey is a must. His books — sometimes filled only with black and white illustrations — are full of dark, if not macabre, humor. In this collection, one finds picture book tales (no words), short stories and drawings with a one line “description." My favorite is “The Stupid Joke," the story of a young child who decides he will not get out bed and no matter what anyone does or says, he does not budge. Eventually, the bed takes him captive, transforming into a winged beast and deposits the child at a place unknown and he's never seen again. This is another book that allows the imagination to run loose and create its own story. It requires the reader (viewer) to take time and look at the intricate details that are in the illustrations and at the words (when used) as their use tells more than just their face value.