Poet's short trip to Oberlin

Acclaimed poet, Oberlin resident, to read Tuesday

It's not an uncommon experience, when one lives in a college town, for the man in line behind you at the grocery store to hold a Ph.D. in French, or for the woman in front of you at the dry cleaners to be a renowned biologist. It comes with the territory. But not every accomplished resident of Oberlin is necessarily on the faculty of the college of the same name.

Take, for example, the poet Lynn Powell. Powell, who some might recognize from lines at the bank or the post office, does have a connection to the college - but it's not tenure. Powell is an accomplished poet who just happens to live in Oberlin with her husband, Associate Professor of Physics Dan Stinebring.

Powell will be a part of the college community next Tuesday, however, when she gives a reading sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the English Department and the Dean's Office.

Powell, who holds an MFA from Cornell, published one collection of work, Old and New Testaments. She is currently working on a second collection. Her first effort won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, offered by the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as the 1996 New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Paris Review and Poetry.

Though much of her work seems autobiographical, the predominant theme, reflected in the very title of the collection, is religion.

One representative piece is the poem Nativity, which opens the collection. The speaker takes on the role of Mary, her newborn son playing the part of Jesus. "Some parents shy away from the body, / but we hush up about the cross -" writes Powell. This statement reflects the treatment of the religious throughout her work: an emphasis on the human, biological realities reflected in the spiritual, not on the larger morals implied by the cruel lessons of the scripture: "stark scripture plain enough to a child: death / looks back at every birth, even God's."

In the first two lines of Balm, Powell powerfully evokes a sensuality which suffuses almost every one of her poems, whether or not the subject of the poem is as necessarily sexual. "After love, I keep your smell all day, / my own smell subsumed like a maiden name." This sensibility, when encountered in poems such as After Bonsignori, makes the theme of the spiritual entirely new for the reader. Powell's is a spirituality which not only understands the physical world, but delights in it. That is what makes her poetry effective: the way it reconciles so adeptly the distance between the world of the spiritual and the world of today, in the increasingly secular contemporary consciousness.

The formal nature of Powell's verse cannot be overlooked in any discussion of her work. While all the poems flow with the same easy rhythm one expects from competent free verse, Powell is a writer who writes out of the tradition of poetic form. Many fine contemporary writers do this, almost unnoticed, as is only fit. Form becomes most noticeable when not handled well; when well done, it must be sought out and appreciated.

A fine example of this is the poem Myth. Once again this is a poem has a spiritual theme, though this time not the Christian world of most of the other poems but instead using Hindu references. The piece is structured as a sestina, an elaborate poetic form of six stanzas, each six lines in length, concluding with a three line stanza. Each line ends with a key word, repeated in varying orders in every stanza of the poem. Powell cheats a little, alternating the words "past," "present," and "future." But the formal arrangement of the poem is not its most noticeable trait, it simply adds a texture to the work which readers will grow to appreciate on a second or third reading.

The opportunity to hear Powell's yet unpublished work should not be missed. It will be interesting to see what she explores thematically in her new work. Even so, Old and New Testaments is a collection which should engage most readers enough to warrant more than one reading.

Lynn Powell will read on Tuesday, Feb. 23 in King 106 at 8 p.m.

Testaments: Poet Lynn Powell, a considerable local talent, will read from her work on Tuesday. Powell's book, Old and New Testaments, has the spiritual power referred to in the title of her collection, but is thoroughly modern and accessible for a modern reader. Powell, whose affiliation with the college is non-professional, will not have to travel far to share her work, and serves as a reminder to both students and faculty of the resources to be found within the borders of the town of Oberlin. (photo courtesy Office of College Relations)