Poetry on Campus

            Bradley University recently hosted a reading by poet Bob Hicok, celebrating their 30^th annual writers series. Hicok, after being introduced by Bradley professor and Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein, read a selection of his work, some Hicok was even surprised to find he never titled. His poems were about a wide range of topics, from the personality of tattoos, insecurities, family, immigration, and our very own Peoria.

            Even though the poems in Hicok’s poetry books are just text, when giving a reading, poetry turns into a performance, which can add or subtract from the audience’s interpretations. Hicok showed this by adding commentary in between poems, like describing the poem or situation and cracking some jokes. Hicok also performed in the way he read his poems, his volume raising and lowering based off what he was reading. This can either help the audience understand the words with emphasis in his poems, or it can distract audiences from other important parts and they can misunderstand the meaning of the piece.

            This phenomenon is similar to when writers write plays that are only meant to be read. If someone directed their work, the director or actors could perform it in a way unintended and add some of their own interpretations. The text is pure, but other people’s interpretations, like the way actors say certain lines and present their characters, can fool people from the meaning of the original text, just like the performer’s volume in a poetry reading, even if the one reading is the poet himself.

            Another phenomenon Hicok might have used was drawing your work from other works, and being inspired by those before him. One of Hicok’s poems, “Peoria,” was a lot like Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” since they both had a physical storm and an emotional storm. Hicok’s “Peoria” is about the narrator at an airport where he meets a girl named Caroline. Caroline was worried about her mother and anxious to get to her, and her emotional storm was seen in the way Caroline’s eyes butterflied across the room and the narrator even said he saw the storm in her face. The physical storm was hurricane Katrina, which was going on at that very time.

            This is similar to “The Storm” because the mother and wife of the story, Calixta, had an affair, which definitely “stormed” away from what was acceptable in the nineteenth century, which this story takes place in. The physical storm, the thunder and rain, was why her husband and child were still out of the house. These two stories are similar enough that Hicok may have been inspired by Chopin.

            Bob Hicok closed his reading with a poem about Michigan, and how their February is 13 months long, with a sky gray and angry. After his reading he signed books and talked with some of the audience members, and after the Wyckoff room was empty again, Bradley’s 30^th annual writers series was over, with any un-purification of text and inspired writing leaving with it.