Recap Wendell Berry, monsters, and poets: More reports from the Wisconsin Book Festival

Noting cautiously that making his first appearance in Madison might give him an over-inflated sense of self-importance, Wendell Berry packed Overture Hall during for a keynote address at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Sunday evening. The crowd responded with rapt and reverent attention, keeping so still that when Berry went for a drink of water, you could hear every swallow.

The introductions lasted nearly 30 minutes, tedious and unnecessary for a crowd intimately familiar with the man and his work. Berry seems to be one of those people you either know and love or have never heard of before, despite the decades he's spent writing about humans and the earth in essays, poems, short stories, and novels.

When Berry finally rose to speak, he chose the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s (the organization that puts on the book fest) “Making It Home” program theme to read his own short story of the same name. Berry’s “Making It Home” (1992) tells of a “lost” man who has been away at World War II and journeys home to his family and farm in 1945, meditating on people and places he once knew along the way. Berry’s gravely voice provided pitch-perfect narration for the story, not always the case with writers (see Novella Carpenter).

Berry finished up by taking questions from the audience, mediated by author Curt Meine. Speaking on his work with Wallace Stegner at Stanford in the 1950s, Berry said that Stegner inspired him to think of place as more than a mere setting: "A place isn't just where you live and what you do there, but you have a responsibility to preserve that place and what makes it special." Berry has taken that responsibility seriously, connecting the dots of land, food, ecology, and people for more than 40 years, and advocating—long before it was hip and made Michael Pollan famous—for the local food networks that seem so new and fresh today. Berry reminded Sunday night's crowd that these ideas have deeper roots than many people appreciated. When an audience member asked him about the renewed interest in sustainable agricutlre, he replied: "A few years ago I lost hope that things would actually change. I decided that I'd just keep on writing about it anyway. But then I looked at the situation again a year or two later and I thought, 'Hey, maybe there actually is some hope that people want to change this system.' I'm not just writing to myself anymore."

A second round of comics hilarity
Despite its title ("A Serious Look At Comics"), Saturday's second comics-related book talk at Overture Center's Promenade hall was as incredibly entertaining as the day's first. The books in question were supposedly James Danky's Underground Classics: The Transformation Of Comics Into Comix and Paul Buhle's Comics In Wisconsin. But Danky, Buhle, and Lynda Barry focused more on an entertaining round robin of anecdotes about the lost, drug-tinged, politically aware underground-comics scene of the '60s and '70s. The three also adamantly defended comic art as Art with a capital A, and praised comics' power to not only influence people's quotidian lives but also resonate on a broader political level.

An irresistibly funny Barry led the talk; Buhle and Danky understandably seemed a little defensive from all the high-minded study and promotion of comics as Art, but were still dryly witty. They all reminisced fondly of the lost golden age of underground comics—when fans could still buy self-published comic books at the head shop on State Street before the war on drugs was declared. "I was on State Street, about 12 years old, and I saw this cute hippie boy go into the head shop," Barry said. "I followed him. I saw the comics, picked up Zap #0 and forgot about the hippie boy."

Monsters and poets
Monsters Of Poetry, a sort of unofficial piggyback event held to balance out a perceived lack of readings by young poets (and also a lack of monsters) at the Wisconsin Book Festival, brought in a packed house Thursday night at the Project Lodge. The crowd definitely didn't come for the appropriately poetic refreshments (whisky and cheap beer): Listeners packed the little space so tightly (exhibiting hushed and studious wonder) that even the stage was used for extra seating. Latecomers huddled by the cracked door trying to snag wisps of poetry as it wafted uneasily into the chilly October night. Not all of the readers had much public reading experience under their belts, but they kept it short and snappy.

Thea Brown bravely opened the night and set the tone by admitting that, while she is currently in the MFA program at the Iowa Writers Workshop, she'd never read to an audience before. While Brown, and everyone else, needed to read from their ratty notebooks, they all clearly had sense enough to use pacing, dynamics, and diction to keep the audience hanging on their words.Their work wasn't so obtuse as to alienate the less devout, but definitely not transparent enough to disappoint the would-be critics and theorists. The readers also did their best to keep the night entertaining, with banter and audience participation, and even multimedia incorporation: one long narrative piece, by Adam Fell included a cued up excerpt of the Radiohead track "Reckoner."

Kevin Gonzalez pulled out some worn but excellent pieces from his informally grouped "poems whose titles begin with the word 'cultural,'" including "Cultural Strumpet," "Cultural Stud," and "Cultural Slut." Not surprisingly, these poems were the most inflammatory of the night, and their in-your-face confrontations of ethnicity and academia ("'How to fuck an English teacher for a good grade,'/ her first line read") met with an enthusiastic reception. All in all, it was a different kind of reading of contemporary, avant-garde-leaning verse. The room was so bursting with good feeling, literally and figuratively, it was hard to believe that the event was the same sort of stiff affair usually reserved for used book stores and small lecture halls in campus libraries.

Less-monstrous poetry
The crowd wasn't roaring Friday night at Avol's Bookstore, where the winners of a writing contest sponsored by Wisconsin People And Ideas gathered to share their entries. The crowd--mostly friends and families of the six readers--wasn't even big enough to roar. The loudest noise in the store was the creaking of wooden floor panels and customers perusing. But for a poetry and short story contest reading, this was still a rip-roaring success, despite the lack of actual roaring.

The three poets on hand pulled largely from life experiences, ranging from Judy Kolosso's strong pastoral (i.e. Wisconsin-centric) imagery to Caleb Whitney's sometimes-funny at times, sometimes-heart-wrenching tales from his long tenure as a volunteer fire fighter. Cathryn Cofell introduced her poetry by contrasting it with Whitney's, showing a good-natured feel for her fellow poet's work: "As Caleb's poetry is about fire fighting, mine's like a fire: too long and out of control." Cofell's poetry was quite erratic--both in style, with an inconstant meter and form, and in subject matter, touching on such topics as her history with men to her experience picking out a gift for an anorexic friend. That said, Cofell handled both her style and subject matter extremely well, presenting some lighthearted and very funny verses, as well as some that were serious and touching.