Thursday, March 6, 2008
Poems are like drugs—easy to get hooked on and readily available. This is something I have discovered in my first poetry class.
Poetry isn’t just for love-sick girls waiting for Lloyd Dobbler to show up with a boom-box outside their window or chain-smoking English majors who think they’re the next Shakespeare.
Poetry is change. Poetry is music. Poetry is “gleaming walls of Orangina bottles.” (According to Harryette Mullen).
Poetry is something different for every individual, something you should take the opportunity to explore.
Last week, as part of An Actual Kansas Reading Series run by Robert Baumann and Anne Boyer, Tao Lin and faculty member Deb Olin Unferth read at the 6 Gallery downtown. Lin’s fictional story of Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osmond’s suicide partnership and Unferth’s vivid description of what happens when you leave a prostitute in your apartment were certainly original ideas which made for one of the more entertaining readings I’ve been to.
Also, this past week Paul Muldoon gave a lecture called “The Eternity of the Poem” as part of the Humanities Lecture Series. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” He was described by my poetry professor as quite possibly “one of the highest regarded living poets today.”
As I sat between two of my classmates at his lecture, myriad thoughts crossed my mind such as “I never knew there were so many poems about snails” and “I wonder if he uses hair products?” (Those of you who have seen his wonderfully unique hair lately will understand that one).
I know you must be pretty bummed you missed out on hookers, snails and questionable hair product, but not to fear. Today Lyn Hejinian is reading at the Spencer Art Museum at 4 p.m. and then speaking about poetry at 7:30 p.m. in the Kansas Union.
For further opportunites become a frequenter of anactualblogspot.com. Want to actually write a poem and read it to people? Try Aimee’s open mic night the second and fourth Tuesday of every month at 8 p.m.
For those of you who only think you can handle poetry with a little alcohol in your system, try the Jazzhaus’s Fresh Ink Spoken Word and Poetry. The next one is April 2.
As Muldoon said last week “One of the great things about poetry is that for the most part it doesn’t go on for too long.” So with that in mind, read a poem. You know you can read since you’ve made it this far in the column, and that’s pretty much all the skill it takes. Walt Whitman said “To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” He means you.
Thornburgh is a Lenexa sophomore in women’s studies and creative writing.
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