250 response to Symposium: Patricia Smith reading

James Galvan

English 306

Steve Pett

250 response to Symposium: Patricia Smith reading

The event I went to was the readings from Patricia Smith. Patricia didn’t start of by reading her book the Blood Dazzler. Instead she said she would start of with a poem that she has been began with in each of her public readings for the last ten to eleven years. After this she had began to read poems from her book. Patricia had explained that the book the Blood Dazzler was about a personified version of Katrina and you would get to hear how she thinks and feels. Patricia read random poems from here book such as “Won’t be for a minute” which was about a dog named Luther B. As with all her poems she explained she wrote them from things she had read, heard and felt about Katrina. She wrote “Won’t be for a minute” because she knew people considered dogs as part of their families and she had also seen a graphic picture of a dead dog hanging from a telephone pull from the after math of Katrina. This is what inspired her to write not only “Won’t be for a minute” but other poems about dogs left behind in Katrina.

As I had listened to her readings she seamed to have a very passionate way of reading her poems. I had read many of her poems from Blood Dazzler getting a certain feeling from them and Patricia read the same poems with a different tone in her voice changing my feeling of the poem completely. When she read her poems I felt that I could get an accurate feeling of emotions that the poems were suppose to convey. Just by listening to Patricia read her own poems it gave me a new perspective from how I had viewed her poems before