Samhi C. – Staff Writer

skc5908@psu.edu

Who is Professor George Looney? 

You know that one professor who runs a lecture-style class, and yet you never get bored once? The kind of class where every word has you hooked. Each class is filled with semi-serious jokes that beget life lessons, connecting the curriculum to real life and vice versa. There is no going off-topic, because he finds a way to connect every utterance back to the texts. That, in just a few words,  is Prof Looney. 

His first poetry collection, “Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh”, was published in 1995. His twelfth full-length collection of poetry, “The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible,” which won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize, will be released this coming Fall. Although he mostly writes poetry, he also writes and publishes works of fiction, such as his most recent book, “The Visibility of Things Long Submerged: Stories.” 

For those of you who do not know of him, he is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at Behrend, a title he earned six years ago. He is also Co-Editor for “Lake Effect.” He has been teaching and focusing on writing for forty-three years, and this is his story. 

Childhood, education, and early career 

When I asked him where he grew up, without missing a beat Prof Looney replied, “That would be Jupiter.” He laughed and said, “No, it was Cincinnati.” 

He earned a B.F.A. in Art Education at the University of Cincinnati. “I’d already decided teaching was what I wanted to do,” he says. It was in his fourth year of undergrad, however, that he had decided that while being a teacher was still what he wanted to do, visual arts were not his calling. 

“I was selected to hang pieces for the senior and graduate art show in the library,” he narrates. He was to “make decisions on where things would go.” It was at that point that he “recognized and realized a couple of things. [He] wouldn’t really be anything more than a competent artist [and] those things which were more important to me at the time were coming out more in my writing than in my art.” 

Meanwhile, even as an Art Education major, he had taken Creative Writing classes, initially because of his future wife. He found that he enjoyed writing, especially poetry. He talks of two professors in specific that encouraged his craft: Terry Stokes and Don Bogen.

Of Stokes, he says, “His poetry at that time really impressed me… he was very much a kind of surrealist… sort of more wild and more baroque… it had an energy… As a professor, he was very inspiring… He convinced me that I had some talent.” 

Of Bogen, he says, “He was much more academic and wasn’t as wild as Terry was… very intelligent… he made us think about things in more passionate ways than Terry did. I respected Don Bogen as a teacher.” 

Professor Looney describes Stokes and Bogen as “opposites,” claiming he himself “came down somewhere in the middle.” 

Though he had already applied to grad school Art programs, he decided to switch to Creative Writing and went forth with the new plan. After spending a year as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant and being a building substitute for Walnut Hills High School, he attended Bowling Green State University from 1982 to 1984 and earned an M.F.A in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry. He says Bowling Green is a “small, little town. Larger now… It’s actually a nice place to live.” 

In 1984, after he got married, he worked as a substitute teacher in Tucson, Arizona. “If they didn’t call with a job for the day,” Prof Looney said, “I would go into the library with my wife [who was a librarian] and spend the day reading… I did even more reading there than I had in grad school.” 

From 1986 to 1988, he lived in Chicago, Illinois and worked at three different universities: Loyola University, Columbia College, and Roosevelt University. 

After this, he moved back to Bowling Green and worked as a Lecturer at Bowling Green State University as well as an editor for “Mid-American Review,” where he started the Translation Chapbook Series, which is published in the journal to this day. He has continued to serve as the Translation Editor for “Mid-American Review” for the twenty-three years he has been teaching at Penn State Behrend. 

Writing advice and his inspirations 

“I cannot give any one answer. For any poem, there’s more than one answer.” 

Amongst the answers are reading and, often, re-reading the work of other writers. Looney specifically mentions Richard Hugo’s work and states that he has read “Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo” thirty-five to forty times, learning something new each time. He says, “Good reading is just as much about vision as good writing is about vision.” 

Professor Looney also mentions how thinking about other art forms, such as music, movies, dance, sculpture, and especially painting, informs his work. He explains how learning about paintings, their story, and writing ekphrastic poetry can help keep a writer from “making it all about themselves” since when overdone, over-inserting oneself into a creative work can sometimes be detrimental to the work itself. 

“Obviously, it’s in part about the self [but] if that’s where it stays, if that’s the only realm it exists in, why should anyone else care?” 

He talks of how he and other writers should “Take raw materials from yes, [our] life and [our] experiences [and] make it universal.” 

He also says he appreciates the “freedom to discover new forms of expressions.” He notes his agreement with William Carlos Williams who once argued that while there is nothing new to say, there are new ways to say it. 

Finally, he says, the primary factor he lets guide his work is “language… I try to make my focus the language and the form.” He asserts that language is older, more experienced, and it knows more than we do. We have to listen to what language has to tell us. If we do that, we end up writing things we never thought we could. 

Prof. Looney explains the importance of being able to write things we never thought we could, to be able to make discoveries in our own work, as a key factor in making our writing interesting for an audience. He quotes Robert Frost who once wrote, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Prof Looney says, “Listening to the language, listening to the process, and therefore being surprised” is how he believes writing should work. 

Favorites of his own literary works 

“Hopefully, the next one,” Prof Looney says. He talks about how writing is a skill that must constantly be improved upon and how each work can be better than the previous one. 

He does pinpoint one line, from a poem from his collection “The Indefinite Clarity of Sky: Poems of Kinsale” that aims to “merge experiences in Kinsale [or Cion tSáile, Ireland] and Ohio,” which he considers to be one of his best. “I remember I was sitting in a chair in that room,” he says “and I was working on these lines and when I finished the poem, the very last line was ‘Loss is something only the living cling to’… I realized I had written something so much better than I could write… Best sentence I’ve ever written… I have no idea how I wrote it.” 

Current works-in-progress 

He is presently working on polishing a number of unpublished, but complete, collections of poetry, and writing poems for a new collection that is tentatively titled “A Conversation with the Visible.” He will be spending time this summer in The Cleveland Museum of Art studying the Caravaggio painting there to finish a series of ekphrastic poems, based on paintings by Caravaggio, that will be part of this new book.

One last word 

Prof Looney and I discussed the concept of hiring teachers or professors who have studied how to teach and he expresses that our education system should hire teachers and professors who have studied the subjects they plan on teaching. 

“You can’t teach anybody anything,” he says. “All you can do is to create an environment in which learning can take place.”