Friday, May 8, 2009

Blueberry-Pomegranate Juice Will Lure Me To Any Given Event

The Gerber Lounge in the EPB is bustling with chipper creative writing students when I walk in for the first annual reading by the Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellows. There is an abundance of cardigans and thick spectacles. It is four o’clock exactly and I take the last available seat; the turnout is fuller than I expected, perhaps due to the table of refreshments in the back of the room (blueberry-pomegranate juice, F yeah). The audience seems to consist mostly of the first semester writing-track students, which makes sense, because their teachers—Ben Hale, Kevin Holden, Andre Perry, and Diana Thow— are the evening’s readers.

Robyn Schiff, poet and founder of the undergraduate writing track, opens the reading by remarking upon its celebratory nature—it is, as I said, the first annual reading of the Writing Fellows at the conclusion of the writing track's first semester, which seems to have been a success. Schiff introduces each reader with a short bio of their history accomplishments and then some brief warm comments about their personalities.

Kevin Holden, the poet of the group, is the second reader. He, like many in the audience, is thickly bespectacled. His list of accomplishments is impressive—he’s a Harvard graduate with an MFA from Iowa, and his poems have been published in a series of well-known Reviews. He has published two chapbooks, Alpine and Identity. Upon taking the podium, he makes a joke about a combination letter press/cider press. Chuckles abound.

Holden’s first poem is a dream-narrative tribute to John Ashbery, published in the Colorado Review. Before reading, he announces that he wrote it before attending the Writer’s Workshop. The poem is typically lyric in structure, and is funny and wistful and bittersweet. At the end, Holden informs us that he actually sent the poem to Ashbery, who replied with something like “I’m always glad to make an appearance in your dreams.”

Holden’s second poem, “Geode,” was, he announces, written during his time in the Workshop. This poem is markedly more experimental; the enjambment is what my own poetry teacher would call “aggressive,” and I notice that Holden takes pains to pause slightly between lines so the enjambment is audible to the audience. The third poem continues in this same vein. It is an excerpt from a much longer poem (sixty pages!) called “Aspen.” It is written, so Holden tells us, in tercets, and this too is apparent from his reading. His style relies a lot on the interplay of sounds in his carefully selected words.

Because there are three other readers, Holden is cut a bit short. I felt that Ben Hale, the fiction writer who preceded Holden, was allowed more time to read. This makes sense, of course; prose typically takes longer to read aloud than poetry. But still, I would have liked to hear more from Holden; I felt that the short timeslot allotted for each reader pressured into finishing quickly and a bit breathlessly. Perhaps I can see Holden at a later date—I’m sure this was not the last reading he will give in Iowa City.

By Madeleine Wurm

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