Creative Writing Event Response: Third Thursday Poetry Series (8/18)

            Last week I attended the Third Thursday Poetry event held monthly at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. The theme of the night was “Coming Home: Poets of Auburn.” At the event a variety of poets, from Auburn students and professors to local poets in the Auburn community, read their work. 

Seeing other writers (especially poets, as I am primarily a poet) showcase their work is inspiring to me, primarily because if forces me to reflect on my own work and its improvement. Maybe it’s just my competitive nature, but when I see someone my own age showcase their poetry, I applaud their bravery and talent, but, at the same time, I’m kicking myself for not having done the same! Thus, I’m determined to force myself, social anxiety and all, to read at least one of my own pieces during the next Third Thursday event.

This event encouraged me to experiment with new forms and modes in my writing. I was struck by one of the first readers, who read poetry written in the style of tweets, all of them being less than 140 characters. I think this is a great way of taking poetry, which I know many of my generation consider to be an outdated form of expression, into the digital age, where increasingly people are losing interest in it in favor of other mediums. I also enjoyed one of the student readers’ blending of the literal and the metaphoric in his work referencing the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I haven’t attempted to write anything approaching the almost-absurdism of his piece, but now I realize that employing techniques like this can make a piece unexpected and intriguing, as each listener adds her own layer of interpretation that give agency to the reader almost more so than the writer’s original intent. 

One of the first speakers read a piece which described the nostalgia she felt for her mother and the simplicity of the life she led. Writing poems about nostalgic experiences is a frequent habit of mine, but I find it encourages one of the major faults I find in my writing, whether poetry or prose: that of only writing of subjects within the realm of my own experience. As a consequence, whenever I attempt to write about wider social issues I observe in the world, the tone can come off as moralistic and, ultimately, boring. With this fault in mind, when I hear other writers read their work, I am intrigued as to where they glean their inspiration, and how I can learn from their processes and adapt them to my own work.