Pages

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Honeyfishing with Poet Lauren Alleyne

https://laurenkalleyne.com/wp-content/uploads/book-cover-honeyfish-by-lauren-k-alleyne-uai-258x387.jpg


The Creative Writing Minor at Washington and Lee University was pleased to host Lauren K. Alleyne yesterday! Pleased? We were lucky, blessed, gifted with her presence...all of the above. It was a moment of sheer joy for all of us, faculty and students alike. Lesley Wheeler's beginning poetry class joined my advanced poetry workshop for Lauren, tea and cookies, and later for an outstanding reading. Books were signed, questions asked, and words of wisdom bestowed. I've sprinkled some of those gems below, in between my somewhat fuzzy photographs (sometimes the phone camera loves me, sometimes it acts like we never met).

Lauren K. Alleyne hails from the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women's Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, Crab Orchard Review, among many others. She is author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues (US) & Peepal Tree (UK), 2019).


With Professor and Poet Lesley Wheeler


 "Punctuation doesn't have meaning - it has uses."

 


 "If I were a lawyer and saw an injustice, I'd drop everything, fly to that location, and offer to help people pro bono. But I'm not a lawyer (something my mother still regrets). But I still have an expertise - in words, with language. That's how I can help others who have experienced injustice."




 "A poem will come back to you when it's ready. And sometimes we're not ready for our poems! It can take ten years or more. But rather than put a bad poem out there, wait. The poem you want to write will come back for you when it's ready, and when you're ready."


 "Image, sensory experiences - your brain stores what it needs, whatever it is you need in order to go on from a particular moment. Later, during a freewrite, you push past what you know - and then you have access to those images and sensory memories that inform you, inform your writing."


 "What your life is determines what your relationship with words is, and will be."






One of my favorite poems from Lauren's reading last night was "Variations in Blue," - a poem about a kind of freedom or privilege we don't think about very often.   



Lauren ended our session by giving us this guided freewrite prompt:

1. think of a place.
2. Think of a story that happened there.
3. Now think of a memory or story of yours that is unrelated to that place.
4. Ask a question to the you (or subject or object) from the 1st place you thought of.
5. Answer the question.


Where the prompt led me:

Up in the Tehachapi Mountains
the dry earth is home
to ants, gophers,
gila monsters. Once,
at my Aunt Sally's 
house, I sat down
beside a black widow,
her geometric warning
bright as a glass bead.
What is it about the color red
that looks so pretty
to a four-year-old-child
who hasn't seen her parents
in a year? Perhaps the memory
of her mother's favorite
lipstick, skillfully applied  -
a ruby promise left behind 
on her cheek.

Deborah A. Miranda 

 

THANK YOU, LAUREN!

Saturday, October 12, 2019

"Living Poets Society" Drops!




Last weekend I walked into my favorite writing café, Pronto, to find two of my students seated at a table across from one another, earphones on, intent on their screens. They’re both excellent scholars and poets, and I had a brief moment of compassion that they were spending their weekend sweating over some assignment. But hey, at least they were here at Pronto, studying in solidarity.

“Professor Miranda!” Joëlle and makayla called me over to their table, faces illuminated with joy. No, it wasn’t because they saw me – it was what they were working on. “We’re editing our first podcast!! It’s called Living Poets Society and we’re having too much fun.”

I didn’t know it was possible, but these two just went up several more notches on my respect meter. A podcast?! When did they have time? One woman is a single mom of a 2-year-old (at a university where that’s rarer than hen’s teeth), and both are seriously engaged in senior projects and full-time classes and trying to get by. Both have taken several classes with me, and are in my current advanced poetry workshop.

We talked a little, and I asked for the link when the podcast dropped. I’d just mentioned to someone else about how the time for listening to podcasts has faded now that I live so close to work that my commute is a 10-minute walk or a 5-minute drive. But this podcast? This one, I’d make time for.

I was not disappointed. The link appeared in my inbox yesterday. I waited until this morning to listen. What. A. Treat. to eavesdrop on the thoughts and talents of Joëlle and makayla! This conversation is everything: manifesto, vulnerability, motherhood, sexual joy, ars poetica, black hair, eyebrows, softboys, and love. I mean, who talks about love anymore and means companionship, tenderness, sexual compatibility? These two women do.

Ya’ll should take a listen to Living Poets Society. You might learn something you didn't know. You will definitely learn something about being alive, 20-something, black, woman, poet, in a small private PWI in the un-fucking-believable year that is 2019. [p.s. the "Why I Write" piece that makayla refers to hearing in class is from Stephen Graham Jones. Sadly, a video of Jones reading this manifesto with a delightfully manic, feral, delicious gleam in his eye has since been removed from the internet. We can only hope it returns one day.]

I can't wait for the next episode.

Excerpt from Living Poets Society: 

“…What is your favorite hair style? Black. Black hairstyle.”

“Black. Cuz we’re black, black, blackity black black black unashamedly black unapologetically black, we don’t care, k?”

“Black and multi-faceted.”

“Yes...We contain multitudes.” [whispered]

“WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES.” [chanted]

“And probably way more than Walt Whitman.”

“Amen.”