Award-winning poets Julia Levine and Murray Silverstein show off the power of poetry at the event
By YUENJO FAN — city@theaggie.org
The John Natsoulas Gallery featured its Poetry Night Reading Series on Thursday, Nov. 7 with special guests Julia Levine and Murray Silverstein.
An event for local poets hosted by Dr. Andy Jones, the Poetry Night Reading Series allows a platform for expression and creativity through poetry. Thursday’s reading commenced with the works of both Levine and Silverstein and ended with an open mic for audience members to share their poems.
Levine, the poet laureate emerita of the city of Davis, and Silverstein, an Independent Publisher Bronze Medal for Poetry winner, both shared their works, providing a strong demonstration of poetry’s role in expressing oneself.
“[Poetry] gives a home for people who are sort of on the march and don’t feel that anyone’s listening to them, and here’s a place where people listen,” Levine said. “For some people, this is one of the places where they might feel heard [when] they don’t otherwise.”
To a room full of avid listeners, Levine used her poetry to discuss passionate and personal topics like the painful cancer diagnosis of her infant grandson to broader topics such as the recent election results.
Levine’s poem “The Dove” recalled her observations of a lone dove and drew metaphors from its characteristics and movements to life, its problems and her relationship with her father. Her poem “Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse” drew on the importance of sticking to the feelings in one’s heart and embracing those emotions instead of running from them.
“It’s a powerful tool for helping you make sense of painful, emotional realities, and that has a lot of beauty,” Levine said. “[There’s] a lot of beauty in poetry. The problem is, people don’t trust themselves. If you read something you don’t like, don’t read any more of it. Find something that speaks to you. I went through an entire high school education and college education and never wrote a poem […] When I graduated college, I was literally sweeping my porch and I heard Sylvia Plath on a radio station, and I felt like I was lifted out of my body. It was such a phenomenally powerful experience.”
For Silverstein, the road of a poet also presented itself later on in life. Only when he was in his 60s did Silverstein begin trying his hand at writing. Prior to this, it had never occurred to him that any serious attempt at literature would warrant success.
“I turned to poetry after my career as an architect was pretty much coming to an end,” Silverstein said. “I started writing in my 60s, and I found my way into some writing groups where poets meet to sort of share their work and critique each other.”
While reading his notable poem “Any Old Wolf,” a piece partly inspired by the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” the witty wordplay drew smiles from the audience and, eventually, a strong applause. Other poems from Silverstein drew a more melancholic tone such as a dream with his deceased father or love as a difficult instrument to learn, in need of constant practice.
Silverstein revealed how a large motivation for his poetry was to simply make his mother laugh as she suffered from lifelong depression. The other part of his motivation was writing his life’s story.
“When writing poems you find yourself writing about your own life story,” Silverstein said. “But you’re trying to find things that make you understand humanity better by plumbing your own life story. And actually, it’s taken me a long time to understand that.”
The poems from the open mic followed suit with Silverstein’s observation. Audience members read poetry or haiku about past love, assimilation to a new country, generational curses or even frustration with the judicial branch. Each one drew from a unique life story, and each took a small step forward in understanding humanity better.
Michael Gallowglas was an open mic speaker and emphasized the importance of writing poetry.
“Keep writing poems, because even if one person sees it, it can make the difference in believing that you can keep going on,” Gallowglas said.
The Poetry Night Reading Series is hosted biweekly at the John Natsoulas Gallery on the first and third Thursday of the month and starts at 7 p.m., beginning with the featured reader and closing with an open mic session.
Written By Yuenjo Fan — city@theaggie.org
