Robert Frost Slept Here: The Poetry Center

It's called simply the Poetry Center, this modest but welltended former residence on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson. And it may very well be unique in the literary world. Here poets and poetry students gather to read and discuss what the American poet Wallace Stevens called "sounds passing through sudden rightnesses." Here they listen while a writer talks of the dream or emotion or experience out of which he or she has drawn the seed of an idea for a poem. Here they assess the interest and worth of the poems that have grown from such seeds. And here poets of international stature read from their works and talk about the subtleties of their craft.Contributing to the literary atmosphere are thousands of books-slim volumes with such titles as A Fraction of Darkness, Field Work, Flights of the Harvest Mare-that line the shelves of the house.

How did such an unusual gathering place come to be? The history of the PoetryCenter began in the late 1950s with a gift from a generous woman who wanted to "maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry." She was Ruth Walgreen Stephan, whose fortune derived from the Walgreen drugstore chain. A poet and editor of an avant-garde magazine called The Tiger's Eye, she spent several winters in Tucson while writing two novels. The cottage where she stayed obviously met her literary requirements for peace and quiet, for she eventually purchased it and later decided it would make an ideal reading room for poets and lovers of poetry.

Center began in the late 1950s with a gift from a generous woman who wanted to "maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry." She was Ruth Walgreen Stephan, whose fortune derived from the Walgreen drugstore chain. A poet and editor of an avant-garde magazine called The Tiger's Eye, she spent several winters in Tucson while writing two novels. The cottage where she stayed obviously met her literary requirements for peace and quiet, for she eventually purchased it and later decided it would make an ideal reading room for poets and lovers of poetry.

The idea of donating the cottage to the university also appealed to her. She had a specific notion about the sort of place it would be. In one of her letters to A. Laurence Muir, a UofA English Department chairman and first director of the Poetry Center, she wrote: "Let us keep it a poet's and poetry library, with no criticism except by poets."

Stephan also helped establish the book collection, TEXT BY DAN GOSS ANDERSON PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK W. DYKINGA donating volumes from her own library and providing the fund that is used to acquire more books. In the fall of 1960, the center was dedicated and officially opened by the eminent poet Robert Frost. The following year, Stephan donated a second building to the center because readers couldn't use the collection when a poet was staying at the cottage. The books were moved into the newly acquired house, and the cottage became exclusively the guest quarters for visiting authors.

Paley, John Gardner, and Tillie Olsen. Most, when they came, stayed in the cottage. Their photos (now more than 200) line the Poetry Center walls, and their books fill the shelves.

For several years, the kitchen wall of the guest cottage was a favorite autographing surface for visiting poets, a practice initiated by Yevgeny Yevtushenko of the Soviet Union. Though the wall has since been painted over, all of the scrawlings have been preserved in a photo album; several of them pay tribute to the warm hospitality extended to visiting poets at the center.

May Swenson, for instance, wrote: Lucky poets who are taken Into this kitchen to find bacon, Eggs, coffee, even cream, Lucky their sleep, lucky their dream.

Today the center, directed since 1970 by Lois Shelton, subscribes to more than 200 literary magazines and has a file of hundreds of tapes and records of poets reading their own works. The book collection has grown to more than 15,000 volumes, making the center a poetry resource unmatched in the Southwest. The center also provides news, referrals, and other information for those interested in poetry and poets. And it is used not only by creative writing classes but also by other departments of the university, as well as by members of the community at large.

Still, the means are always too slim fully to "maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry."

And the center has run out of room, directly affecting the book collection: with every new volume that arrives, another must go into storage. But a more serious threat

Since 1960 a large number

comes from the City of Tucson itself. A street-widening program is scheduled for Speedway Boulevard, the major eastof well-known poets from Europe, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and Asia have come to Tucson to give readings for the center. So has almost every American poet of distinction, including most winners of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry since 1955. Robert Penn Warren read here, as did Carolyn Kizer, Denise Levertov, James Wright, and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Other prominent fig ures included Ferlinghetti, Bly, Ginsberg, Ashberry, Hass, Koch, and a number of writers of fiction, among them Grace West thoroughfare on the center's north side. Current plans call for demolition of the center's library building late in 1989. Shelton says that, though the guest cottage will remain, the collection will be moved to a temporary location; supporters hope a permanent home will be constructed before long.

In the interim, however, the center continues in its role as a pleasant, quiet place to come and read poetry-or even to come and learn what poetry is.

The curious visitor will discover many kinds of poetry here, especially in free verse form, a structure of irregular or loosely organized rhythm and one in which the poet may experiment with patterns of rhymes and nonrhymes - so that each poem, far from actually being "free" in form, has its own individualized pattern. For such writers, the language of ordinary speech is the primary element of poetry. Arizona poet Richard Shelton calls it "language standing on its own hind legs."

As poets play with the language, they sometimes uncover new relationships between words and emotions or between words and the physical world, relationships that go far beyond the ordinary meanings of words to reveal hidden truths. Here is one example by Sylvia Plath. In her poem "Wuthering Heights," she discovers in a grassy English countryside something new about wind and the hearts of sheep and destiny:There is no life higher than the grasstops Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind Pours by like destiny, bending Everything in one direction.

Poets try to unsheathe the language we use, to cut away the veils separating us from the world we live in. For nearly 30 years, the Poetry Center has been dedicated to fostering this pursuit, and to making poets and their words more accessible to all.