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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Sept. 29, 1960
KU Poet Says Poetry 'Dull'
By Byron Klapper
"Poetry is terribly dull."
Award-winning poet Arvid Shulenberger was describing modern poetry. Prof. Shulenberger is an associate professor of English. His book "Ancient Music and Other Poems" was published recently by the Allen Press, Lawrence.
In a Daily Kansan interview at his home, Prof. Shulenberger relaxed in an easy chair in his pine-paneled study, lit a cigarette, and talked about the merits and pitfalls of modern poetry.
"I DONT approve of most poetry being published. I think that poetry in this country is 'in damn bad shape,' he said. "The best poetry is in the form of manuscripts among poets themselves, and not the works that are sold commercially.
"Poetry is not usually published with the intention of making money for its author. Usually he doesn't expect to sell more than 50 to 150 copies of his work."
Prof. Shulenberger said he published his poems because he just 'elt like getting vid of them.
"If they don't get published they clutter up your mind and every two or three years you read them and rewrite them and then send them to your friends in the form of manuscripts."
PROF. SHULENBERGER gave his definition of poetry:
"Poetry is: what anyone can get away with. It is seeing one thing in terms of another, and how one thing is like another. Poetry is a metaphor."
"There is a popular notion that only verse is poetry. Actually, verse is nothing. It is just a tool and an aid for the memory which dates back to the time when people had to remember.
"BEATNIK POETRY is alive, but has little in the way of talent," he said. "Real poets are independent and do not belong to any particular school of thought. Beatnik poets are not half as revolutionary as they
ARVID SHULENBERGER
"Poetry is a metaphor. . ."
think. It's conventional, and it's been with us for a long time."
Speaking of student poets on the KU campus, Prof. Shulenberger said, "There are quite a few students writing good poetry. They don't become bad until they become self-conscious and sophisticated."
Before publishing "Ancient Music and Other Poems," Prof. Shulen-
berger's poems appeared in numerous publications in this country and abroad. "The New Yorker" and "The Western Reader" are two of the magazines which have published his poetry.
For his poems, Prof. Shulenberger received the University of Chicago's Fiske poetry prize in 1948 and Poetry Magazine's Field prize in 1949.
Prof. Matzke Safe in Congo
Howard A. Matzke, professor of anatomy, and family, recently involved in the Congo violence, are doing well, Paul G. Roofe, professor of anatomy, said yesterday.
Prof. Matzke was working under research grants this summer in Lwiro, when the African independence upheaval forced him to flec to safety.
Professor Matzke, his wife and two children, Judith, 15, and Charles, 11, are now in Kampala, Uganda, where he is continuing his research at Makerere College on the central nervous system of mammals.
Prof. Roofe stated that Prof. Matzke has been given a one-half year leave of absence from the University of Kansas.
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Smith has taken no solid food and has not spoken audibly since May. Hand said. His weight has dropped from 164 to about 110 pounds.
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LANSING — (UFI) — Perry Edward Smith, convicted killer of the Herb Clutter family of Garden City, remains in "pretty fair condition, except for weight loss." Warden Tracy Hand of the Kansas State Prison said today.
Clutter Killer Continues Strike
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Smith said at the outset of his
I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. —Ogden Nash.
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hunger strike that he planned to starve himself to death "to beat the noose." Smith and Richard Hickok are under death sentence for the shotgun massacre of Clutter, his wife, and their two teen-age children at their home near Garden City last Nov. 15.
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