Tower Light writers embrace narrative, sound, sentiment

Poets and storytellers discuss influences on work, narrative; both conventional and non-traditional forms appear

By: Michael Mayday

Posted: 4/23/09

The Spring 2009 Tower Light will be released within the next few days. For years it has served as a creative outlet for students to show off their photography, poetry, prose and design.

"I have something to say, and this is a good forum to say it," senior Rob Ogden said. "I started writing as an escape from the morass of everyday life, the kind of drudgery. It's fun to create far away places and adventures, that kind of thing. And eventually, it becomes a forum for discussing more complicated and difficult things."

Senior Sarah Paye's untitled poem in this year's Tower Light is about the mystery of two people becoming one within a marriage.

"The first time I wrote it I took it to Dr. Somerville because I didn't know what to do with it," Paye said. "I didn't have any of the right words, but I had an idea I wanted to work with."

Somerville advised Paye to turn the poem more toward images and scenes rather than ideas, so it didn't sound too similar to John Donne.

Junior Cara Burke wrote two poems, "Mango" and "Good Friday," which made it into Tower Light. The first was originally meant as a "cute imagist poem," she said, and was submitted to Tower Light through a misunderstanding.

"Most of the editors on the board for the Tower Light are my good friends," Burke said. "I didn't realize that the submissions were sent in anonymously and so I sent in this poem about a mango because I thought it would be cute…they didn't know it was me and they actually liked it."

Her second piece was written last year after she reflected on how none of her family wanted to go to church on Good Friday.

Burke said conventional poets such as Lord Byron and Emily Dickinson influence her poems. She said she hopes to emulate their traditional forms, avoiding free verse poetry.

"Traditional forms are really, really good tools for achieving a good sound, because the beautiful sound is already there if you use the conventional rules," Burke said.

Perhaps because his stories must carry a narrative, Ogden is more concerned with cohesiveness than sound and sense.

"The main thing I'm concerned about is whether it sucks or not," Ogden said.

Authors like Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, Ogden said, are able create worlds so real that what they're writing becomes a dictation rather than a story.

Ogden finds a timeless charm in the Midwest of the early 20th Century. Ogden based his short story on a folk singer's song about a young man who gets revenge on his family for hanging his friend by burning their house down with his mother in it.

"For me, it would be very boring to go through life without these stories sort of happening and being a part of my whole experience," Ogden said.

"A lot of writers have written about this thing [in my story]," Ogden said. "But there's a lot about the early part of the century in this country in the rural places that's less glamorous than, but much more important than, or as important as the stuff that went on in the big urban centers. All of those little stories swim around."