Word: trethewey
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Bunting Fellows Poetry Reading took place on April 2, in the Cronkhite Living room on Ash Street, and featured the two poets Natasha Trethewey and Brenda Shaughnessy. Each poet has recently published her first book, Domestic Work and Interior With Sudden Joy, respectively. Trethewey read first. Her poems dealt, from many points of view, with a woman in a photograph projected on a screen for the audience. The woman was a prostitute, photographed in Storyville in 1912. Trethewey’s poems reconstructed a life around this woman, superimposing emotions and experience onto the subject images. Her reading style...
...While she read, a dry sense of the absurd rose out of many of her poems, making me realize that I had probably read them unfairly. She showed us where the jokes were, and her relaxed and earnest reading style contrasted well with that of Trethewey. Shaughnessy did read some of her characteristic sticky-wicket phrases with the undue candor that I was afraid of, but at times her reading fully vindicated her work by confirming a tone of levity instead of bravado...
Then came the question and answer period, where the audience rather naively put it to the poets: What do they think of reading poetry aloud? It happened to be a terrific, obvious question to ask. Trethewey indicated that she needed to hear poetry with her ears, whether she was writing her own or reading that of students. Like her reading, it was a conventional treatment which offered striking contrast to Shaughnessy’s. Shaughnessy claimed otherwise, saying that she didn’t need to hear poetry, that she got everything she wanted out of it silently, that...