KSU professor casts light on steel industry of yore

The book will give voice to those who were living during the once-thriving steel industry.

SALEM — The voice of scholar and poet Dr. Craig Paulenich will speak to many.

Paulenich, 57, of Guilford Lake, is an associate professor of English at Kent State University whose new book, “Blood Will Tell,” will soon be in print.

His poems are based on the work he, his father and thousands of others did in the steel industry during its heyday.

Paulenich said his father worked for 52 years at the former National Malleable Foundry in Sharon, Pa. The professor also worked in the foundry to make money to go to college.

“My family worked in the mills,” he said. “The mills fed us, and they ate us.”

Today, he lives near Guilford Lake on a 27-acre farm where he and his wife, Karla Krodel, an administrator at Youngstown State University, have horses.

The author is now working on the final details of his manuscript.

The Mahoning and Shenango valleys have much history in common, he said.

The mills, like his family, were full of people from a Slavic background. The activity of the mills created a lot of energy, he said.

His poems deal with transmutation — turning one element into something else; and the intuitive and supernatural, transcendental experience.

“I really center around the eye of the poem,” Paulenich.

Paulenich said that while he was in the mill, workers above were welding and sending sparks down on him and others. The first time it happened, he took cover. No one else did. After that, he ignored the sparks them like everyone else.

One worker, he recalled, never wore gloves in the mill and could roll a cigarette with one hand without missing a beat.

The educator has a photograph of four workers, three of whom are standing around a cart holding drinks. A fourth man, who is seated on the cart, was his grandfather.

“It really was an otherworldly type of place,” Paulenich said. “You both loved and hated it.”

That world ended with the local collapse of the steel industry. Now with National gone, it has become a mythic place, Paulenich said.

The foundry, he said, “is an empty lot.”

He has also published two works, “Beneath A Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry” and “Drift for the Hunt,” which focuses on an ugly character who combines folk-tale qualities.

When he’s not teaching English at Kent State, he is an instructor with the Northeast Ohio Masters of Fine Art of Creative Writing program, a consortium of KSU, Cleveland University, University of Akron and Youngstown State University.

wilkinson@vindy.com