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Ken Feltges

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Why you should know who he is: Ken Feltges has been working in and around the Buffalo poetry scene for more than 20 years. His poems, each of which draws a vivid character sketch to capture a revealing moment, have been published in several small literary magazines and in local newspapers. Though he’s also a photographer on the side, Feltges considers his true artistic legacy to be his 35-year teaching career at Kenmore West and his current stint at Mt. St. Mary’s. In those institutions, he’s made it his duty to turn young people on to poetry, to show them that poetry shouldn’t be intimidating.

Background: “I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in a small town called Newburgh, on the Hudson. Most of my childhood there was very normal. No grotesque stories. A very solid family where the line was clearly laid out, and I had no problem not crossing it. My father worked hard, and my mother was a housewife who later worked.” Feltges came to Buffalo State College, where he majored in English and met his wife, Trudy. Both of them went on to teaching jobs at Kenmore High School, which later became Kenmore West.

What turned you on to poetry? “I always wrote short stories or poems, but I didn’t read and I didn’t send things out. I became very, very interested in film when I was a kid. The afternoon treat was to walk downtown to the movie theater and, for a quarter, see a movie. I saw a movie or two a week almost every week of my childhood. As I started to write, I realized that words in poetry are written images instead of visual images. It was a very easy transition, then, to think in pictures as I wrote, as a crossover from film. One of the things I decided I really liked about poetry was that you get to be other people.”

Is any of your writing autobiographical? “I try to be careful with my life personally, because I don’t like to put some things out there. I make composites of poems. I might pull an incident from my childhood and put in maybe two other things so it’s not just a stark thing that happened to me. Some of it is autobiographical, but somewhat disguised.”

Then where do your characters come from? “I keep a cassette recorder in my car all the time. If I’m driving somewhere and I see a piece of graffiti on a building that I think I want to use, I’ll pull out my recorder and say, ‘Hertel Avenue. Brick building. This was written on it.’ Or I hear a newscast on the radio that’s interesting. When the tape runs out, 30 minutes on a side, I listen to it. A lot of it is junk, but sometimes there are eight pieces, little lines. I copy them out, put them in a box, and I know I can make a poem out of it.

“I also have collections of matchbooks and cocktail napkins all over the place with notes scrawled on them. The problem is then you have to read them, you have to read your notes.

“So I build characters around these observations, these notes.”

Major influences: “Lawrence Ferlinghetti, just because his is such a departure from traditional style. Robert Frost, because he was a great disciplinarian when he wrote. Robinson Jeffers, who’s kind of fallen on hard times. He’s very stark, very cynical. One of his lines was, ‘I’d rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.’ Also, the plays of Tennessee Williams, which I consider almost poetry, as well.

Why do you think poetry is important in our society? “Good poetry is probably the truest voice out there about how people behave, why they behave a certain way. It’s a true voice because it’s a private voice, and it’s an honest voice. When you read a good poem, there’ll be a line that’s so good that it cuts to the bone. It makes you wince in pain, or it makes you blink in joy that they got it. That’s what it felt like. It’s the truest voice out there if people can get by the fact that they don’t need to be intimidated by it.”

Why is it hard to turn people on to poetry? “I think it’s so hard to convince people…it’s like opera and ballet, which are cultural intimidators. You’re not supposed to like it. Who cares if you like it, it’s still good for you. You don’t have to like it, it’s like spinach and broccoli. And people really think that way.

“It’s alright if you don’t get an entire poem. If people could get past that…maybe it starts in third grade when everyone has to write a haiku about winter. It’s a killer, and everybody hates it. Then they get to high school, and the whole purpose is to find the theme. They’re told, ‘You’re wrong, kid. That’s not the theme. How great to teach someone that they’re stupid.”

How do you teach poetry to make it accessible? “When I first came to Kenmore, we started a poetry elective that became wildly popular. We did mostly contemporary poetry, but we also looked at rock music. We said, ‘It may not be a poem, but it certainly has poetic qualities.’ Then we started bringing in musicians and artists and poets to talk about how they create their music, their art, their poetry. We wanted to teach them about the creative process. It’s been wonderful teaching people that music, art, poetry and literature are one big tapestry.

“Sometimes I just ask students to write down the line that strikes them the most. ‘Don’t find anything else, pull the line out, then tomorrow you’re going to tell me why.’

“People will sometimes come up to me after a reading and say, ‘I know you’re going to be insulted, but I understood that poem.’ There’s this idea that your not supposed to understand poetry, and that’s why it’s so inaccessible to the general public. What’s wrong with understanding what somebody wrote? I like understanding what I read.”

Ken Feltges continues teaching his popular poetry class at Mt. St. Mary’s, and is trying to find time to get his poetry manuscript published in the meantime. You can catch his upcoming reading April 23 at 7pm at Rust Belt Books.