On Tuesday, Oct. 16 the Pepperdine Libraries presented “Poetry in the Stacks.” The poetry reading featured Pepperdine professors John Struloeff and Jeffrey Schultz, as well as award-winning poets Mary Jane Roberts and Sherman Pearl. Event Coordinator and Director for Library Advancement and Public Affairs Ken LaZebnik declared that he was “thrilled with the turnout and reception” and the “combination of two poets from LA and two from Pepperdine.” He was equally thrilled with the “library [being that] gathering point for poetry” making it the “natural place for that full house, even if they were forced to be here [by their professors],” he joked. The combination of “touching poems, funny poems, political poems and childhood poems” provided a range and “came together beautifully.”
The night was kicked off by Schultz’s reading. Schultz’s poems have appeared or are to be anticipated in Great River Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest and Willow Springs. Just this past March, he was one of four winners of the 92nd Street Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest. Prior to reading his poem, “Civil Twilight,” he gave the disclaimer that he “struggled to find [a poem] that is not too long” and that if he were forced to say what it was about, it would be “certain ideas of God and power and art, which is sort of common in America.” He then proceeded to describe that his inspiration for the poem was a friend who is “mostly an untreated schizophrenic” and that “Civil Twilight” refers to the time after the sun has passed below the horizon but the sky is still lit.
The political commentary in some of Schultz poems led way to Roberts, who had written politically for television, film, theater, and has short stories published in Crosscurrents among other achievements. Her poetry has been featured in the Orange Country Poetry Anthology, Bitterroot, Dreamworks and DAWN Magazine, among others. She has also been involved in the National League of American Pen Women and has won the First Prize for Poetry.
Roberts’ reading featured excerpts from her book, “Sound of No Sound.” In several short poems seemingly revolving around nostalgia, Roberts read, “elusive, my world shaped by words.”
Followed by Roberts was a retired journalist and freelance writer Sherman Pearl. As a co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and current president of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, he has work published in more than 50 literary journals and anthologies. In initiating his reading with an elegy for himself and declaring that he will be missed terribly, the room roared with laughter. He continued to share of dreadzones, or zones not covered by radio, shedding light on the notion that “you drove all this way” and yet it “terrifies you.” Followed by poems nostalgic of his father and childhood, he raises universal question in declaring his hair color as “the color of acceptance.” Furthermore, with regard to his writing philosophy, he said, “You never write poetry with the thought of accomplishing something. You write, because you have to write and the writing process is separate from the publication process.” He further explained, “The great trick in poetry is being able to listen to what the poem is trying to tell you about how it wants to be written.”
The night ended with Struloeff’s reading. As the director of the creative writing program at Pepperdine, his fiction and poetry has appeared within the Southern Review, the Literary Review, Rattle, Open Spaces Magazine and Schooner. His poems included experts from his collection, “The Man I Was Supposed to Be,” his very first published poem, “Knee Deep in the Pacific.”
When asked what he intended to do with his poetry, he explained that he simply wanted “to connect with the audience” in a way in which “maybe they can hear a part of their lives.”
