Poetry

Each semester, the EHP program hosts a visiting scholar from RISD's liberal arts department to lead week-long workshops on any topic they desire. The 24 of us were lucky to have Mairead Byrne, a poetry professor in the english department at RISD, and my former professor from the fall semester! We had 3 hour long workshops everyday this week, culminating in a final performance that was held in the Cenci last night. There were poems, music, a barbershop quartet, performance pieces, and everything you might expect from a group of RISD students.

I only got a couple videos - the first is an acoustic interpretation of a Ludacris song by Astrid and me, which we threw together 2 hours beforehand! And the second is Eliot, Jamie, Susie, and Youbin performing their "Ode to Per Diem", mustaches and accordion included!





The third is an audio file that in order to listen to, I recommend you turn your speakers as loud as they can go, turn all the lights off and close your eyes.

And finally, here are some other poems that I wrote during the workshop!




love poem to a tree

everything is so big when you're small
i loved that baby tree in our backyard
our backyard was a football field
it stretched the entire length of quinnipiac avenue
and i was the receiver on the opposite end,
sledding horseshoes around my little pine tree,
shaping igloos into barricades
to protect its branches
from the icicles that always fell from the roof
during the winter
it grew so slowly, my baby tree
but i was only a baby too
we grew together
until we were forced to grow apart

i left it there

then bought a new baby tree

that baby tree grew into a toddler tree
it's pine needles shed into the garden
that my mother had to clean,
throwing mothballs under the patio
so the skunks wouldn't move in again
it was a beautiful tree but I also

left it there

i never planted a third baby tree

three years ago i drove past the football field
it had shrunken to a parking space
i didn't see my tree
i saw the boarded up windows
and the whites of someone's eyes
as my camera flashed a memory
but i didn't see my baby tree
it should have been a teenager tree
an almost-twenty-something tree
and i nearly cried,
standing there in a prom dress,
long fabric brushing the asphalt
where i used to play,
because what kind of person
leaves behind two babies

and never watches them grow

--------------------------------

"neve"

back home this would be nothing

no slipping on buttered basalt
greased for take-off
landing on my ass
while the belle figure
pass in their stiletto heels
making headlines worldwide,
or so my dad said, sitting in his
recliner chair, watching the news
an ocean away
they were born that way, baby
came out of the womb
strutting on cobblestones
laughing at the first black ice in a decade

back home this would be nothing

I could show them a runway walk
through 15 inches of a backyard avalanche
but throw me in the middle of Rome
and I'll show you how bad I was at ice skating

tip-toe through the slush
baby step on la dolce vita
this would have been a normal day in providence