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A final Review By Jess Goode     Wayne Dodd and 'The Ohio Review' have retired. Cases crammed with books and wooden shelves that have been relieved of the weight of their contents provide evidence that this room is being packed. After more than 30 years as one of the nation's pre-eminent literary journals, The Ohio Review has ceased publication with the retirement of its founder and editor, Wayne Dodd. Seated near his desk in Scott Quad, the poet and Ohio University English professor is making a forceful argument for the relevance of poetry in contemporary America. "There are people who say that the public recognizes it's irrelevant and therefore they don't read it," Dodd says. "And these people would say that it's because poets have stopped writing about significant social and political matters. I think those people are dead wrong. Serious literary artists are the only people who are going to talk straight to you about their lives." Dodd was born and raised among the straight-talking people of Oklahoma. He studied at the University of Oklahoma and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and he taught for several years at the University of Colorado in Boulder before coming to Ohio University in 1968. Here, Dodd taught English, and he directed the creative writing program from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 1990. In 1971, he and fellow poet Stanley Plumly founded The Ohio Review, a quarterly literary journal with an eventual circulation of 3,400. They set out to celebrate and chronicle a particularly productive time in American poetry and literature. The journal broke new ground from the start. It innovated the practice of publishing chapbooks by little-known poets in each issue. And Dodd and Plumly conducted interviews with notable poets but eschewed the journalist's dry point of view for a more organic, poetic perspective. Dodd remains stubbornly confident that people need to spend more time reading quality literature - "simply to experience the beauty of the language, the music of the language." "All good poetry is musical," he says. "Poetry focuses on - and makes an issue of - the physicality of words. And so poetry is always telling you what an idea or a thought feels like. What it feels like in the mouth, in the ear, in the throat. And, therefore it has a pretty powerful emotional force about it."