Response to Evie Shockley’s poetry reading 4/12/12

            First of all, I found going to a poetry reading was a lot more lively at 4:40 than it was in the Foster Auditorium at 7:30. I think purely because it was generally before dinner time, the sun was still out, and afterwards I had more time to think about what Evie said and do research on her poetry. Where as 7:30 reading I have to do other homework and find it difficult to stay focused.

            But I digress… Evie does a lot of experimentation with form which I really could relate to. I am a very visual personal so not only do the words matter deeply to me when writing poetry but the way it looks on the page I think can really add the poem and its meaning. I wrote a poem for another class about something at the time I was really struggling with – the idea of plastic surgery. Essentially plastic surgery is about remodeling, sculpting, and shaping so I had the idea of morphing my poem into a shape.

Underneath It All

I

was

14 the

first time

I realized that

I didn't have boobs

and when I saw a third

grader wearing a training bra.

And she needed it. I was never

told that my breasts were non-existent,

I was never even tormented by boys who

teased I was flat. Well, that's because Vicki

has a secret for that. I’d look at other girls with

fun bags and boys drooling over their bountiful

body parts but I never felt that I was lacking some

crucial perky problem or missing some marvelous

milkshake that brought all the boys to the yard

because no boy is going to be wishing for

someone with bigger tits if he is  lucky

enough to get me topless. But my

sister, who has been told she

is my twin does not feel

the same way about

her twins and has

a date set for

when she will

go under the

lights and

under the

knife to

be stuffed

with plastic

goo and I

can’t tell

her that

there is no

way I am

letting her

go through

with it. How

can I instead

implant my

thoughts

into her?

Shockley mentioned that she meditated a lot about how race affects her, how it molded her, and what it is going to be like for a new generation, like her nieces, to live in a world that claims racism is dead. She shows this in her poems “ode to my blackness” and “post white”.

            My favorite poem that she read was called “celestial”. It was about the friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald. She writes about things they have in common, even if at first glance you wouldn’t be able to find one similarity. I am very fascinated with what seems to be a new appreciation for Marilyn. That is with the movie “My Week With Marilyn” that came out, the TV show “Smash” which is about making a musical about Marilyn, Megan Fox’s tattoo on her forearm of Marilyn’s face, and of course by being in college I come across countless posters in apartments with quotes and famous photographs of her. Her poem was just a completely different way of looking at her.

            Another poem that I really liked out of Evie’s collection was “Post White”. She incorporated music lyrics and was even brave enough to actually sing the lyrics when reading her poem, which I found very brave and very captivating. And she read a prose poem called “Never After” that used references of Disney princesses and see’s their image in a negative light the way I experimented with one of my own poems I put up for workshop. She quotes Haryette Mullen  “was she enchanted or was she dragged?” in the begging of the prose poem, which I thought was really interesting.

            She also mentioned that she revises her poems constantly, even ones that are published. Like her poem “In Property Behavior” she added the killing of the young boy, from Florida, who was shot because he was black and wearing a hoodie and cops thought his iced tea and skittles were weapons. This really inspired me to return to my older poems and work out a couple of lines or take out some things.