We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They'll provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work. Experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 14, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.
Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, June 29
On Tuesday the 29th of June, after a spate of blistering days, the heat broke just as the audience took their seats for Bryant Park's Word for Word poetry program.
Paul Romero introduced the readers and announced a change in the evening's lineup—Suzanne Gardinier would be replacing
Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who had been scheduled to read, but who had recently relocated to California and so could not make the trip back. Laure-Anne was missed, and honored by her friends. Each of the three readers, along with Laure-Anne, have been part of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program as either students or teachers, and the evening's reading was a testament to the program's diversity of voices.
Kamilah Aisha Moon, known as Aisha to her friends, kicked off the reading with Laure-Anne's poem, "Friends," to much applause. Aisha's reading took a firmly narrative stance, offering poems that often seemed to share space with a rich, intimate memoir. Many of her poems centered around the specter of her sister's autism, the first poem, "11/1/77" describing the indelicacy of her sister's birthing physician, an excruciating poem that plumbed the violence of childbirth and the long shadows cast by a careless delivery. She followed with "Borderless Country," a lyric poem with a statistical refrain: "1 in 150" (according to the Washington Post, the number of children who suffer from autism). But the bulk of Aisha's reading was taken up with a long poem in the voices of various family members. Forging an intersticial space between the character-driven theatricality of a play and the lyric interiority of a poem, Aisha offered a series of meditations on difficulty, leaving her audience with a palpable sense of the shape of the family dynamic and how it had formed itself around its most difficult endeavor— the raising of her autistic sister. The poem was unflinchingly honest, and reminded me of Amy Lemmon's recent book, Saint Nobody, which takes on the complexity of raising a child with Down's Syndrome. One of Aisha's last lines on the subject veered toward an earnest confession, a kind of lament— "each visit home frays me / the price I pay for being able to drive away." This type of poem can, I think, open up dialogues about disease and treatment, and I was grateful to hear such a complex rendering of such a (for most) unimaginable task.
