Professor wins poetry awards

Local author and professor wins a national poetry competition.

Roy Seeger, a new addition to the English faculty at USC Aiken, won the Main Street Rag Publishing Company's poetry book contest. The news of the win came the same weekend he heard he would be moving to Aiken.

In addition, Seeger was recently named as the co-winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Contest for the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and won the 2007 Gribble Chapbook Contest - the Buckbee, A Writer Inc.

For Seeger, writing is a way a life.

"Looking back, I can barely remember a time I didn't write - stories mostly. It was a big part of my childhood. Then, as I grew older, sporadic poems crept in my notebook, but I always told myself they were song lyrics. Back then, I never really read poetry so I had all these preconceived notions of what it should be. I thought I had to write like Robert Frost. Those were really horrible poems," said Seeger.

"It wasn't until I read a lot of contemporary poets, starting seven or eight years ago, and began understanding what poems could actually do that I consciously thought of my poems as more than rants or gimmicks."

Inspiration for Seeger comes from everything around him. "I find inspiration everywhere, in the everyday life, in books, family, strangers, friends, television shows, National Geographic, in my classroom, everywhere. I think inspiration is just a matter of being receptive to outside stimulus, to be analytic of it," said Seeger. "Another answer would be that I find it in my own meager childhood traumas; where else would I get my poems?"

When asked if he had a favorite poem from his latest book, "The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds," Seeger said, "It really depends on the day. I like most of them in a nostalgic way, but I also have the feeling that I am finally done with them now. I think of some poems as better for poetry readings, but I cannot really pick a favorite. It wouldn't be fair to my other poems.

"My favorite poems are the ones I'm currently working on or just finishing up. Those are the ones that swim around in my head all day, the ones that make me want to write."

Seeger will host a reading on Wednesday starting at 6:30 p.m. at Davor's located at 227 The Alley along with writers from Broken Ink, USC Aiken's undergraduate journal and Dr. Andrew Geyer's creative writing class.

"The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds" may be ordered at www.mainstreetrag.com and will be available at the reading.