Notes from the Road: the Doubleheader

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of visiting the students at Calvin College in their poetry class with L.S. Klatt and giving a reading at their art museum before returning to Kalamazoo to do a benefit reading for a local literary magazine, Black Tongue Review.

I always enjoy visiting classes. I love talking to students about their own writing and find their questions about my work interesting and insightful. One student asked what I do for inspiration. I often feel the itch to write and don’t know what will come out when I sit down with a pen and a notebook, but I thought about this question and realized this—when I talk about a character’s motivation with students, I always tell them to look for what the character wants or what they’re afraid of because desire and fear are the two emotions that most often motivate people’s actions. When I thought about my own poems, I realized this was also true. Whether I know where I’m going to start when I sit down to write or not, I’m always trying to say something about desire or fear.

After class, I got a bite to eat and then got ready for the reading, which was set up in Calvin College’s lovely art museum. A handful of students from the class showed up to the event, as well as some students I hadn’t met before. I tried to select work that wasn’t discussed in class so that the students could hear something new and also perhaps think of it in the context of the discussion we had earlier. After the reading, there was a Q&A. Much like my pleasure at class discussions, I love a post-reading Q&A because I like interacting with people. Someone asked about the personal nature of many of the poems I’ve read, and I talked about the function of the second person in poetry. I love using the “you” because I can achieve the intimacy I want without exposing the name or identity of someone I care about. Inferences about the “yous” in my poems could certainly be made, but I like the protection the word offers. People often talk about persona as using a mask to say something true, but I think “you” accomplishes much the same thing. I can disguise a friend, beloved, enemy or family so I can say things to them I can’t in real life.

After an hour drive home and a forty-five minute nap, I went to a beer garden to meet the other reader at the benefit reading, Matt Hart, and our host, Smarie Clay. From the beer garden we moved on to a wine bar, where the reading was actually held. The ambiance wasn’t exactly the total opposite of the art museum where I’d previously read, but instead of lithographs, there were tea lights. Instead of students on plastic chairs, there were friends on couches. Instead of the hushed atmosphere and white walls of a gallery, there was the Friday night enthusiasm of people two drinks into their evening. It was intimidating to read in a space that wasn’t set up for such an event. There was no microphone or podium, just me with a book in one hand and a drink in the other, trying to project my voice. One of the best aspects of the reading was that I decided to read some new work and poems from the book I almost never read aloud. In part, I knew some people had heard me read before, and in part because it seemed like a safe space to take some risks. There was no Q&A, but there were a few more drinks and a lot of good laughs.

I started writing poetry because when I read poetry it made me feel less alone. However, poems that made me feel less alone were sometimes written by dead poets and often were written by strangers. Sometimes I write to poets whose work affects me, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to receive an email from someone who enjoyed my poems. One of the greatest joys about readings is finding people to connect with minutes after the poem has finished being read, and this week I was lucky enough to do it twice in one day.

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