Rae Armantrout Poetry Reading
Sitting in my seat in Foster Auditorium on September 11th, 2012, I awaited the beginning of my very first poetry reading. I contemplated whether I should attend or not, but I was already in the library, and it couldn’t be more than an hour at least. I couldn’t help but overhear the mother behind me tell her neighbor that this was her young daughters’ first poetry reading as well. I thought that was a little ironic, seeing as I was 18 and the little girl looked about 6.
As the small auditorium continued to gain spectators, I glanced around trying to spot this Rae Armantrout. I knew nothing of her except what I learned from Google, such as her winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2010. Suddenly, the man who put this reading together stood up, and after discussing Ms. Armantrout’s numerous awards and background information, signaled for her to begin. A short, bespectacled woman walked to the podium, and began to recite her poems.
Before each poem, she discussed where her inspiration came from. Though she read many cleverly constructed poems from her new book called “Money Shot”, most of which were about the stock market crash and Bush presidency, I personally enjoyed her more comic poems.
She began one poem by telling the audience about how she began to enjoy reading physics books for leisure. She wanted a more in-depth look at physics, so she invited a physicist to lunch, to discuss some of her questions. She began asking questions about the space time continuum and Galileo’s Law of Conservation. She admitted to posing the questions in such a way that the even the most celebrated physicist could probably not answering them perfectly. Soon enough, this particular physicist grew frustrated with the above mentioned questions and could not conjure up a plausible answer to them. Her poem “Dress Up” addresses that disastrous lunchtime discussion.
However, I gained the most entertainment from another poem, an interpretation on Shakespeare’s 3rd Sonnet. She was asked to recreate one of Shakespeare’s sonnets for the new book entitled, “The Sonnets”, where 154 modern poets try their hand at modernizing them for a new audience.
Her modern, hilarious twist on one of Shakespeare’s “procreation sonnets” produced many laughs within the auditorium. Shakespeare’s 3rd Sonnet involves Shakespeare telling a young man to hurry up and make children to make his father happy before his youth and beauty escapes him. It’s a funny thing to hear an old man telling a young man to hurry up and procreate before he becomes ugly. It’s even funnier hearing a woman speak as an old man telling a young man to procreate. Her tone of voice and modern use of language, especially in this poem, really stood out to me and opened my eyes to the world of modern language.
Sitting in my seat in Foster Auditorium on September 11th, 2012, I awaited the beginning of my very first poetry reading. I contemplated whether I should attend or not, but I was already in the library, and it couldn’t be more than an hour at least. I couldn’t help but overhear the mother behind me tell her neighbor that this was her young daughters’ first poetry reading as well. I thought that was a little ironic, seeing as I was 18 and the little girl looked about 6.
As the small auditorium continued to gain spectators, I glanced around trying to spot this Rae Armantrout. I knew nothing of her except what I learned from Google, such as her winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2010. Suddenly, the man who put this reading together stood up, and after discussing Ms. Armantrout’s numerous awards and background information, signaled for her to begin. A short, bespectacled woman walked to the podium, and began to recite her poems.
Before each poem, she discussed where her inspiration came from. Though she read many cleverly constructed poems from her new book called “Money Shot”, most of which were about the stock market crash and Bush presidency, I personally enjoyed her more comic poems.
She began one poem by telling the audience about how she began to enjoy reading physics books for leisure. She wanted a more in-depth look at physics, so she invited a physicist to lunch, to discuss some of her questions. She began asking questions about the space time continuum and Galileo’s Law of Conservation. She admitted to posing the questions in such a way that the even the most celebrated physicist could probably not answering them perfectly. Soon enough, this particular physicist grew frustrated with the above mentioned questions and could not conjure up a plausible answer to them. Her poem “Dress Up” addresses that disastrous lunchtime discussion.
However, I gained the most entertainment from another poem, an interpretation on Shakespeare’s 3rd Sonnet. She was asked to recreate one of Shakespeare’s sonnets for the new book entitled, “The Sonnets”, where 154 modern poets try their hand at modernizing them for a new audience.
Her modern, hilarious twist on one of Shakespeare’s “procreation sonnets” produced many laughs within the auditorium. Shakespeare’s 3rd Sonnet involves Shakespeare telling a young man to hurry up and make children to make his father happy before his youth and beauty escapes him. It’s a funny thing to hear an old man telling a young man to hurry up and procreate before he becomes ugly. It’s even funnier hearing a woman speak as an old man telling a young man to procreate. Her tone of voice and modern use of language, especially in this poem, really stood out to me and opened my eyes to the world of modern language.
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