Readorama: Poet Rodney Jones, a Harper Lee Award winner, to speak at Rockhurst University

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-person

void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.

Go looking for articles discussing the poet Rodney Jones, and the word “accessible” appears.

That suggests that some poetry may not be accessible. But Jones, who reads this week as part of the Midwest Poets Series at Rockhurst University, concedes that only a certain number of readers may volunteer to go those places that poetry — in a sometimes circuitous way — can take them.

“Sometimes it occurs to me,” Jones said in one interview found online, “that if I were a spy and wanted to send a message, a poem might be a good place to do that, so cold is this beloved media, so few its readers.”

The verse at the top of this column comes from Jones’ poem “A Defense of Poetry,” included in “Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985-2005,” published in 2006.

“It has more to do with who we write for by default than with our subjects or the obliqueness of our wording,” Jones, professor emeritus of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, said in a recent email.

“If you read poems, you’re likely a poet yourself, and as has often been pointed out, poetry, like beer, is an acquired taste and, more sadly, in an educational setting, a required taste.”

Jones describes poetry as a “cold media,” as opposed to film.

“I have been usually accessible, perhaps to a flaw,” Jones writes, “but accessibility is not the reason more people don’t read poetry. People don’t just like romance, violence and sex, but mystery and weirdness; they don’t mind looking up words they don’t know, and never seem to mind not knowing where they are as long as a writer puts them in a trance.

“I resolve to do that, but be patient.”

Robert Stewart, editor of New Letters, the Kansas City literary journal, and director of the Midwest Poets Series, believes Jones looks out for his readers.

“Some other poets today, in truth, favor deliberate obfuscation, and, as Jones says, ‘the third-person void,’ ” Stewart said.

“In Rodney Jones’ poems, speakers are identifiable, and they speak with a singular, authentic voice.”

Jones, an Alabama native, in 2003 received the Harper Lee Award, named for the “To Kill a Mockingbird” author and presented every year by Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville.

His work has appeared in eight editions of “The Best American Poetry.” His book, “Salvation Blues” received the annual Kingsley Tufts Award, presented by Claremont Graduate University in California.

“Many things happen simultaneously in a Rodney Jones poem; familiar words come up in surprising ways,” Stewart said.

“Jones simply cares enough for his readers to lead them through it.”

Jones will read at 7 p.m. Thursday at Arrupe Hall Auditorium on the Rockhurst University campus near Troost Avenue and East 54th Street. Admission is $3; no one will be denied admission for lack of funds.

A not-so-Free State

Everyone knows the troubled path Kansas took to statehood.

The story usually includes the triumphant narrative of the free state supporters who ensured that, after years of bloody conflict with opponents, Kansas didn’t enter the union as a slave state.

However courageous that was, it may have left a legacy perhaps too comfortable for those Kansans who came later.

“This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927,” published last year by Brent M.S. Campney, details how after the Civil War racial violence occurred all over the United States — including Kansas — and not just in the American South.

Campney’s research explores how white Kansans often employed images of the South and its association with racist violence in constituting the identity of Kansas as the “Free State.” Further, Campney has found, the South and the violence that often occurred there provided a means to obscure, dismiss and justify similar incidents in Kansas.

One aspect of Campney’s research concerns how white Midwesterners “predicated their own identity as racially progressive and anti-racist by comparing themselves to — and finding themselves superior to — white Southerners,” Campney said in a recent email.

Campney, today a faculty member at the University of Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, earned a master’s degree in American Studies at the University of Kansas in 2001, writing his thesis on white resistance to civil rights reform in Lawrence from 1945 through 1961.

When he left Kansas to pursue his doctorate at Emory University in Georgia, Campney resolved to use anti-black violence such as lynchings and race riots to research how whites and blacks sometimes interacted in Kansas, he said.

His book also details, Campney said, the various ways in which such violence was resisted.

Campney speaks at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. For more info, go to kclibrary.org.

This story was originally published January 30, 2016 at 5:09 AM with the headline "Readorama: Poet Rodney Jones, a Harper Lee Award winner, to speak at Rockhurst University."