CMW Community

Shari Miller Wagner’s poems illustrate how the sphere of folk culture interacts with academic culture, where poetry-writing, with its origins in academic classrooms, is highly valued. Shari’s forms are sophisticated, from an academic point of view, but her subject is Mennonite and Amish folk culture. Four-part unaccompanied hymn-singing, home cooking, family legends and recreation, rural chores: all are re-created--and perhaps preserved--by being given artistic shape for a new, more cosmopolitan audience. The folk poets among us—such as cowboy poets and street rappers—do the opposite when they include academic and popular/mass culture subject matter in their folk poetry forms. Shari’s many other poems on interesting places in Indiana and on quirky Hoosiers illustrate her longstanding personal interest in folk culture wherever it is found.