Ohio Poetry Association Blog

Hocking Hills Festival of Poetry Presented by The Power of Poetry             “I have laid aside business, and gone a’fishing.”             (Izaac Walton, The Compleat Angler, ca. 1650) The Izaac Walton Lodge, up the slope from Lake Logan , is the unpretentious home for the unpretentious—and magnificent-—annual Hocking Hills Festival of Poetry, this year held on April 19–20. Alan Cohen, who says he is “the planner, cook, schlepper, dish washer, talent agent, etc.,” estimated that the Festival—whose theme, “Songs of the Other World”—brought together some 140 poets and friends from as far as California and Maryland . Special guests were poets Naomi Shibab Nye and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and storyteller Will Hornyak, who read or performed from their work each evening. More on them below. First, we heard music, performed by pianist Evie Adelman and flutist Gert Young, of Bach, Schumann, and others. (There was an occasional flat note.) Laz Slovits played guit