Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Thursday Morning, April 4

Back in Ada, Oklahoma at East Central University for the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, to which I manage to get to every-other-year. I flew down from Albany with poet Sally Rhoades to the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City & drove the 90 miles or so to Ada on Wednesday. We joined about 20 or so other writers at Polo’s Mexican Restaurant to greet old friends, make new ones, eat, drink, & talk, talk, talk.

The Director of the Festival is Dr. Ken Hada, assisted by other faculty & an army of student volunteers. Ken is a big, warm, teddybear of a man, who came East a few years ago to read at Caffe Lena & at McGeary’s in Albany & is a friend to poets not only to Oklahoma & regional writers but to writers everywhere.

The next morning at ECU there were more old friends gathered around as the book sale table(s) were set up. It’s been 2 years since I was last here so it felt like a family reunion rather than a literary conference. The morning readings were held in the Estep Auditorium, while in the afternoon there were split, competing sessions in Estep & across the way in the North Lounge.

The first reader was Benjamin Myers, a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, whose book Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) is a particular favorite of mine. He read exclusively from his new book, Black Sunday (Lamar University Press, 2019), a story of the dust bowl told in sonnets by & about the Burns family & other characters in their town. He poems in the persona of Lilly Burns, her daughter Louise, & Lilly’s husband Will, as well as Henry, the town drunk, & The Reverend. The poems were vivid accounts of life during that most difficult time in the history of Oklahoma & country, not to mention the hard-working people who had to try to live through it.

Joey Brown is a poet & prose writer living currently in Missouri whose work I remember fondly from past years here. She read mostly from the manuscript of her new collection of poems titled "Content Subject Change," but began with a moving anaphoric piece repeating “because…” titled “Lanie Thinks About the Reasons for Leaving.” The poems in the new collection are based on memories of old family photographs, without going back to view them. Other poems were “Tattoos” (she keeps a jar of red dirt wherever she is living), “Ways I Am Like a Tumbleweed” (for her husband), & the humorous “Explaining Here to My In-laws.” Sally & I ended up spending some light-hearted time hanging out with Joey throughout the festival.

I’ve also seen Gary Worth Moody here at past festivals. His poems were more directly concerned with nature, in the form of animals, than the previous readers, beginning with a poem incorporating terms from falconry; other animals included a deer & a palomino, & a touching poem “In the Animal Hospital Killing Room.” But to show that the killing is not always human-driven his poem “Through Orphan Dark” was about coyotes & pumas hunting prey.

The second morning session began with the venerable Larry Thomas, former Texas Poet Laureate, affectionately know a “Buffalo,” a warm & imposing presence here each year whose drawl is as capacious as his hugs. His latest collection is from Blue Horse Press, Boiling it Down: The Electronic Poetry Chapbooks of Larry D. Thomas from which he read only one piece, “Placido,” about a deaf, self-taught Mexican artist, during which Larry interjected personal asides, as if we were sitting around talking poetry & life over beers.

Julie Chappell was new to me & I was instantly captivated by her poems from her manuscript “Scorpion Dreams” & her zeal in dealing with the pests. Interestingly enough there was an theme of violence running through the poems she read, including “Execution” of a snake & a turkey, “Black & Blues” & a poem responding to violence in a song.  “The Lottery” was set in 1973, followed by “Bone Fragments,” & another poem about a young man killed in Viet Nam. When I got home & was writing up these notes I saw that she had had a poem published in a collection titled Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza ’94 (Manic D Press, 1995) in which Albany poet Mary Panza also has a poem — we poets are all connected in an intricate web.

Another writer new to me was Chris Ellery who read from his recent poetry collection Canticles of the Body. The work combined images from Christian liturgy with references to the 7 Chakras, as well as other traditions, notably Buddhism. He illustrated his reading with projected images. The poem titled “The Great Vigil of Easter” focused on the heart Chakra. Then he read “The Good Shepherd” a moving piece about Fr. Frans van der Lugt, a Christian missionary who was killed in Syria; despite the fact that the Estep Auditorium is carpeted you could, as they say, hear a pin drop.

I’ve heard Walter Bargen at previous Scissortail festivals & have his book Days Like This are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (BkMk Press, 2009). His poems were always seasoned with humor, like his poem “Bucket Music” about catching snakes, even a poem about cattle mutilation, “Udderly Gone,” which expanded into a story about a teacher who was teaching the poem who had contacted him about it. He also read from his new book My Other Mother’s Red Mercedes about an all-too-common theme among today's poets, his mother’s dementia.

At this point, when we broke for lunch, I was already feeling like the long trip here was well worth it. My reading was yet to come in the afternoon.

More information about the festival can be found here: http://ecuscissortail.blogspot.com/