Greg Brownderville’s Poems Wow Crowd

0 Commentsby   |  02.23.13  |  Events and Readings

 

Last Thursday night the appearance of the “bard of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas”, Greg Browderville filled the Core Classroom with interested students, poetry lovers, and English faculty.

 

 

Within minutes the poet, who teaches at SMU, had the crowd laughing with his reading of the epically entitled “From a Nationally Televised Press Conference Starring the Poetic Sheriff, Hjoseph Kilpatrick Conway, after a van Gogh Painting Is Stolen from a Little Rock Exhibit and Recovered in Monroe County.”

Further selections from Brownderville’s 2011 volume Gust followed as well poems that were written in “just the few weeks and no one’s ever heard them.”

 

 

The evening ended with an extensive and freewheeling Q & A session in which Brownderville confessed an early, almost obsessive fascination with words and how they sound, including one of his favorites, “Swiss”. A final piece of advice to aspiring poets was to discover a “sweet spot” or state of mind that allows them to write at a peak state of creativity.

 

 

Brownderville stayed an extra day and took in the art at the Old Jail Art Museum in Albany, enjoyed a milkshake in the old soda shop (below)  with Prof. Al Haley , and on Saturday held a different crowd in rapt attention. This time he read poems for the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) at their annual meeting. Another new poem broke the air waves, again a crowd pleaser, this one about an existentially surreal customer defeating every effort of Madison the waitress to take his order.

 

 

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