Over the course of what has been a crazy summer and will soon become a totally unprecedented year, I’ve been looking for ways to stay involved with the literary community from the comfort and safety of my own home. I’ve recently been introduced to Chautauqua Institution and their literary magazine, and I’ve found their online resources provide that comforting sense of community. Chautauqua Institution has been welcoming people to their virtual “Front Porch” this summer, allowing the normal thousands of visitors to attend lectures, workshops and so much more online.
For my first lecture, I attended Writer’s Center Brown Bag with Poet-in-Residence Ralph Black. At the beginning of each lecture, a student chosen from the writing workshop reads their piece for the virtual audience. For this lecture, Susan Nusbaum read her poem, “After the Fires”. Her first few lines “there is no peace here, hunched black against blue, the malleable hills smolder with waves of weeping,” conveyed emotion within the imagery. The color pallet and personification of the hills as weeping waves of smoke was hauntingly beautiful. Her poem segued into Ralph Black’s talk about politics and speakers in writing.
He did a really interesting talk on the role of the “I” or the speaker of a poem and how they use their voice and writing to speak to the political context of now. Just as Susan Nusbaum did in her poem about wildfires. To further drive his talk, he read some of the work from one of my personal favorite poets Ross Gay who is known for the strength of his voice in his writing. “Marionette” by Ross Gay written for shooting victim Amadou Diallo is a beautiful and heart-wrenching example of this sort of powerful and vivid way of writing a piece with a political context. The end of the poem still gives me chills, “and that last wheeze, an escaping, you’ve heard it, drops the floodgates for the real ghosts, a bouquet of them, a blitzkrieg of black orchids roaring. And they blaze.”
I’m so grateful to have found this online community and to be introduced to such beautiful work. If you would like to join in on them virtually, consider listening to this lecture as well as the many more incredible lectures and programs listed on Chautauqua at https://porch.chq.org/
