Turner, Alberta T.

Alberta T. Turner (1919 - 2003) Professor Emerita of English and a widely honored poet, died at her home in Oberlin, Ohio, on May 21, 2003, after a long illness. She was married to the late Arthur Turner, a professor of English at Oberlin College, and is survived by their two children and five grandchildren. Alberta taught English at Cleveland State University part time from 1964 to 1969, then full time until her retirement in 1990, and part time again for several years after that. Before 1969 she also taught English courses at Oberlin College . She was director of the CSU Poetry Center from 1964 to 1990, during which time it gained an international reputation for its publication and service to poets locally and worldwide. In 1969 she became a founding editor of the literary magazine Field, published by Oberlin College, and she remained an associate editor until 2000. A graduate of Hunter College, with advanced degrees from Wellesley College and Ohio State University, Alberta Turner during her years at Cleveland State became a poet of international stature. She published eight volumes of poetry including Learning to Count and Lid and Spoon (Pitt Poetry Series), A Belfry of Knees ( Alabama ), Beginning with And: New and Selected Poems (Bottom Dog), and Tomorrow Is a Tight Fist (Mellen) - her last book, published in 2001. She was author of several books on the writing of poetry, including To Make a Poem, 50 Contemporary Poets, and Poets Teaching, which are still in use around the country, and she was an authority on John Milton, with scholarly publications on his works. The CSU Poetry Center was for a while the focus of poetic activity in Cleveland, especially its free monthly workshop, the Poetry Forum. The Forum was open to the public, and the public came-academics, street poets, high-schoolers, housewives, the brilliant and the mad. Alberta moderated and took all comers in stride. Sessions sometimes lasted three or four hours, and everybody's poem received serious attention. Under her directorship the Poetry Center became a major publisher of contemporary poetry, with over a hundred titles in print, many of them first books by young writers who have since become leading figures in American letters. At the height of its publication activity, the Poetry Center received between 800 and 1000 book-length manuscript submissions each year from all over the country, indeed the world. Her involvement with Field magazine, along with her duties as director of the CSU Poetry Center, brought Alberta into contact with most of the major poets writing at the time, and she lured them to Cleveland State to give readings and workshops. One can scarcely name a major American or British poet active between 1965 and 1990 who did not visit CSU; the Poetry Center still retains audiotapes of most of these live readings made over three decades. To the end of her life Alberta lived in the house that she and her husband built in Oberlin and where they raised their family. She commuted to Cleveland on the Greyhound bus, often leaving home before daylight and not returning until late in the evening. Her energy was amazing: after having gotten up at dawn to catch the bus, taught and conferred with students at CSU all day, and then conducted a grueling workshop until eleven p.m., she would lift her arms and exclaim with enthusiasm, "It 's been such a wonderful day!" Though she was in fact a model of reliability and scholarly rigor, Alberta enjoyed playing the role of the inscrutable poet in the staid university workplace, slyly calling attention to the emperor's new clothes that she sometimes detected in academic rigmarole, and mystifying administrators with her sibylline comments. But she took her work seriously and was proud of her academic status, no doubt in part because she had worked so hard to establish it. She loved Cleveland State and was grateful for the opportunities it gave her. In spite of being a distinguished author, she remained devoted to her students and accessible to them. If she had had to choose between her literary laurels and her teaching, she would not have hesitated to take the latter. I have never seen her so desolate as at the farewell reception in her honor upon her mandatory retirement at age 70. Happily, she returned to teach part time for several more years. A whole coterie of former students kept in touch with her, years and decades after they had been in her classes. Though we now mourn her loss, we can be grateful for her contributions to the world of letters in general and to this university in particular. -- Source: Trawick, Leonard. Eulogy for Alberta T. Turner [electronic resource]. Minutes of Cleveland State University Faculty Senate Meeting, Nov. 5 2003. Viewed Sept. 12, 2008: http://www.csuohio.edu/organizations/facultysenate/min20031105.html