Poetry Reading Event

Tonight I went to the poetry reading at the Outlands café. It was a really fun, interesting, relaxing time and feeling. There were four different local poets there who read a collection of each of their poems. Not only was it interesting and nice to hear the poetry, but it was also interesting to be in that coffee shop with the different people around and the different personalities of the poets. It had a really safe and cozy feel to it. It wasn’t very organized which I liked. Each author had a lot of different themes to their poems including love, loneliness, suicide, Bible stories, time, random things like avocado colored toilets, and a bunch of other things. For me, it was really interesting to watch the authors as they read or recited their poems. Each had a different expression and style of reciting their poems. One man was very animated in how he read his poems and was really funny and got the audience into his poems. Another man was very different. He had his poems all memorized and looked a lot more serious with a more solemn appearance about him. This affected my mood and how I would react to each of their poems. It was a lot more difficult for me to understand the more solemn man because his poems were more deep, but it was almost like I could relate with him in some instances when he was talking about love or loneliness because it is something universal that happens with all of us, and we do not need to even fully understand what he says, we can feel it in the way he says the words. I could relate with some of the other poems that were really simple and seemed to resemble some aspects of my childhood. I could visualize the memories from my childhood Sunday school classes when one author read about the feelings of certain Bible characters and their stories. Another poem was about playing the game “Heads Up Seven Up” which I played as a child in elementary and middle school. When the author was explaining the senses involved in this game, I could specifically remember and almost smell and feel the situation happening over again at that moment. My experience at the poetry reading was simply really good for me to relax and get away from all the stress going on in my life and listen and experience the words of different people in my community.

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