Fall for the Book

On Thursday, September 22 I listened to an outstanding panel discuss their experience with poetry and writing about race. The panel discussion took place at 3pm in the Johnson Center Cinema. The panel was made up of R. Dwayne Betts, Martha Collins, Fanny Howe, Claudia Rankine, and Natasha Trethewey.

I attended this event because we are now reading poetry and just finished a novel that had different aspects of race. I thought it would go along with some of the ideas we have already discussed in class and ideas we have not yet covered in poetry. I wanted to understand different messages authors were trying to write about when they were talking about race in their poems. However, I was very surprised with what many of the authors had to say. Most of them said, they do not write about race. It's the reader that finds the connection to race. They believe they are just writing about things they know. It's the reader that always finds the connection between race. If it is a black author writing about a boy, the reader will almost always assume the boy is black even if there is nowhere that says he is.

This really opened my eyes, and after reading some poetry in high school, I couldn't agree more. From now on when I read of poems I will not think about race, unless the poems call for that. I thought it was a great experience and learned a lot.