What are you doing this Sunday evening? Well cancel it, because at 7PM on December 8, Broad Ripple’s Indiana Writers Center is hosting a new reading in their series An Evening with the Muse: The Inter Urban Poets, the roster of which includes two talented, veteran poets from our MFA program, Tracy Mishkin and Allyson Horton. The other poets on the bill include Linda Lee, Jeffrey Owen Pearson, Helen Townsend, Ali Birge, Mike Brockley and Pat Cupp. The event is free, open to the public, and will feed both your soul and your body. Because poems… and refreshments.
Those of you who got out to our first annual Writers’ Harvest already know Allyson and her poetry, and how her performance was able to visibly arrest hundreds of teenage girls who had pretty much explicitly come for John Green–like the local band at a concert that turns the heads of the headliner’s fans. Allyson’s poetry is limber: it rhymes when it needs to, it plays when it needs to, but when you’ve been won by the warmth of her timbre and the rhythm of her words, it drops hammers on your head and heart. Here’s her poem “The Makeover of Uncle Ben”:
“Uncle Ben, who first appeared in ads in 1946, is being reborn as Ben, an accomplished businessman with an opulent office, a busy schedule, an extensive travel itinerary and a penchant for sharing what the company calls his “grains of wisdom” about rice and life. A crucial aspect of his biography remains the same, though: He has no last name.”
—The New York Times (March 30, 2007)
So wise of them
to remove the baggage
from underneath his stirring brown eyes
unfetter him from one chain then
bow & tie him to the image of a self-made man
one who has learned the art of “skin”
& grin to keep from rotting
like the seedless corpse
of a watermelon.
So very wise of the man-
ufacturers of Uncle B’s rice
to cook up something 21st century for the brother
boil down the fat from hamhock’d grits
peppered with salty lies
on the tongues of those salivating
over antebellum days
of shuck & shuffle: yessuh no suh yassum boss.
I see—we here to stay even if
America remains lost at sea
in the shipwrecked bowels of Columbus
the myth of Uncle Tom & his refurbished cabin
world-renowned recipe books
of Aunt Jemima look
now you can just add water
to your transatlantic-flavored-flapjacks
of course a little syrup
‘cause who wants to eat a dry
American history.
Tracy’s poetry is more like a barb, or a splinter–on first exposure it’s piercing and quick, deceptively simple, something you feel as though you’ve diagnosed right there. But you feel a handful of those words hours later, throbbing under your skin, still digging. You can read Tracy’s “A Personal History of the Carrot” right here:
Clenched ignorant against the sky,
a carrot top in my toddler fist.
Every day the ritual. Water, then
the uprooting to see if it has grown.
I tell my dad I am a rabbit.
At ten, I experiment. Into the freezer
goes a bag of carrots, like ice cream.
Rubbery disappointment follows.
Mom says, “Experiment with just one.”
I split carrots with my teeth, nibble
around the pale core, believe the old lie
about night vision. Hypercarotinemia.
My skin could be turning orange.
I check the mirror daily.
Now my son is old enough for solid food.
Sturdy troops with leafy green helmets
stand at attention. I puree them.
He turns away from the spoon. What folly
to think such fierce love could be passed on.
So, if being attacked with poetic hammers and verbal splinters is your definition of lovely evening, then on this Sunday, December 8 at 7PM, head to the Arts Complex Building just off 67th and College and take in An Evening with the Muse. Partake in a spread of refreshments, discover local poets, and most importantly, support your endlessly talented classmates.