Today, I went to the Turnstyle Reading Series, which features many students and established writers. Although I couldn’t stay until the very end, I kind of found a new appreciation for poetry. I always had a confused relationship with poetry. I always thought of it to be a brain-scattered word vomit onto paper, which was often hard for me to decipher. I mean..I don’t know what is exactly going on in the minds of these people, so how am I supposed to get where they are coming from? But then I learned that maybe I’m not really supposed to get it. Maybe these poems or even short stories were a means of meditation for writers, something that allowed them to let go of experiences, feelings, and attitudes that have been bottled up inside them for so long. You see-I tend to view poets and a lot of writers as broken souls. You could say the same for a lot of other people, but when I think of writers I always just get this feeling that they have been through a lot, they’ve seen a lot of things they maybe shouldn’t have seen, and they are brave enough to take these things and share them with the world. And a lot of the time these brave writers and poets play with different styles of writing to maybe mask their insecurities and inner pains. For example, there was one writer named Johnathan who had a very funny and jokey way of conveying his message. Unlike any form of writing I’ve heard, he took more of an interpretive approach where it was almost like a play. I don’t know if he was ever broken inside, but I just thought that he was outwardly so humorous and full of life that it made me think of what made him that way. I also thought his piece was very unique and unexpected. I never knew writing could take such a form.
On another note, I also wanted to talk about the first speaker, Florangel, who had a piece entitled, Harlem. I found it to be extremely relevant to what we have been discussing in class in respect to the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. In the James Baldwin piece, we got this grim description of a opportunity-less Harlem for African Americans. There was this sense that nobody could really change the way they were and hope was foolery. Yet, in Florangel’s piece, Harlem is completely different. She uses the word “gentrified” (she hates the word herself) and I found that to be quite an extreme change. I thought that to was so interesting because over the course of several decades, we have come such a long way. And to think that in maybe 10 or 20 years, things will be even more different than how they are now is just as amazing to me. And if I were to take Florangel’s poem and somehow mail it back in time to James Baldwin or Langston Hughes, I wonder what they’d say. Would they laugh? Cry?
