The Last Reading

Norman Minnick came to USI yesterday. He attended our Poetry Workshop class, taught by none other than Matthew Graham, and gave us advice about the writing process, and, more pressing, graduate school and what to expect. He seemed like a pretty chill guy, if I must use slang, and I was pretty excited about the reading.

After I went to Poetry Workshop and Psychology of Gender, I immediately went to my friend Jenn's place where she cut and colored my hair for $5. I'm not a really picky person, so I just said, "Keep it shoulder length or longer," and let her have her way. I like the way it turned out, and got a couple compliments while at the reception. At first, it seemed the professors were going to hog all our Norman Minnick time, but he was able to make his way over to us sooner or later and we had some pretty fun discussions.

The reading itself was wonderful. Minnick has a great personality; he was very funny and I found myself laughing most of the time. I really enjoyed hearing his poetry read aloud. His poetry is very simplistic but beautiful. He lets us know exactly what we're looking at in our imagination, but invites us to see below the surface. I borrowed some money from Ron to buy a book (I grabbed all the cash I had in my room but that was only like seven dollars... Poor college student is poor) and asked him to sign it. He wrote me a very nice message on the inside. It said, "To Crystal, and the author who will blossom and continue to blossom." Reading that made me smile.

On a side note, I had chosen "Her Image" as the poem to go on the poster, and I was surprised to learn that he saw it as a sad poem. I believe he even called himself a "jerk" for not playing with his daughter.Basically what happens in the poem is that his daughter is playing with a spoon, looking at her image in it and flipping it over and back as if she's trying to trick the spoon. The last line of the poem is "Eat, I tell her." I saw it as a funny and cute picture of his daughter, and the last line elicited more of a lighthearted laugh than scorn. To each his or her own, I suppose.

In any case, I imagine that since the Ropewalk Reading Series has come to an end (for the semester anyway), most of our work will be focused on working on the next issue of SIR, logging submissions, and making sure stuff goes to the right place. That really doesn't sound too bad, though this is the time of the semester where everyone starts freaking out about final projects (thank you, Research Methods and Statistics I), papers (thank you, 20th Century Poetry), tests (thank you, German 204 and Psychology of Gender), portfolios (thank you, Poetry Workshop), and finals (thank you, Research Methods and Statistics, German 204, and Psychology of Gender). We can manage, I'm sure. We're college students; we don't need sleep!

Oh and blogging. We have to do some of that too.