Podcast: Poetry students write with an eye toward audience
Bringing their work out of the classroom and into the public realm, advanced poetry students will share their poems in a reading on campus on Tuesday, April 21. The culmination of an extensive writing and revision process, the public reading will feature 12 students who have worked closely with Assistant Professor of English Mary Szybist.
“I’m pleased to see these poems emerge from the classroom into a public space where more readers will have access to them,” Szybist said. “Through the revision process, these poems have been carefully shaped with readers in mind. I often quote something the poet Mark Strand once said to my students: ‘The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language.’ While these poets aim to use language in a way that is their own, in a way that is unique, they are also aiming to write poems that will reach and move their readers.”
Listen to a recording of each student reading his or her work below. The text of each poem also appears in the accompanying slideshow. However, Szybist warns, these poems may not yet be in their final form.
“Some of the poems featured here have already been transformed through further revisions,” she said. “That is part of what is exciting about a small workshop seminar like this: the emphasis in on process. We try to see new possibilities, new relations, new ways to face the things that frighten us.”
To learn more about the event, visit the Department of English website.
Ben Bateman: “Theopolis Munch’s First (Last) Poem” (mp3)
Mayme Berman, “Lulled” (mp3)
Molly Conroy, “On brown hair” (mp3)
Isobel Crittenden, “Prayer” (mp3)
Lewis Feuer: “I’ll start this way” (mp3)
Karen Glass, “Words Too Fixed” (mp3)
Charlie Macquarie: “I do not call it Loneliness” (mp3)
Alex Martin: “Fragment of an imagined court proceeding into a fatal police shooting” (mp3)
Jodi McLaren: “Saturday Morning” (mp3)
Alyssa Perkins: “Catalog of Scents” (mp3)
Consuelo Wise: “Prelude to Night Conversation” (mp3)
