Hosted on April 15 in the Overman Student Center from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. was a reading given by Poet David Lee. The event was sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and the Student Fee Council.
Professor of English Laura Washburn, who set up the event, spoke about her first introduction with Lee’s work, “When I was in graduate school my teacher Alberto Ríos assigned his book and then my friend Jeanie Clark liked it so much that she’s interviewing him for a publication so she’s friends with him.”
Later, Washburn discussed meeting Lee in person. “There was The Associated Writing Program’s conference. It was gonna be in Arizona, and by then I was in Missouri, so I flew there, and he was there, and all my friends were working. He and I just hung out for the whole conference going to panels together so that’s how I first met Dave, that was in the ‘90s.”
She has also invited him to speak multiple times. “I invited him to read at a different university I used to work at and here, this is his second time, and also Lori Martin, who’s our editor of the Midwest Quarterly and a professor here she used to be in Independence and she had him at the Ad Astra festival.”
Washburn finds a lot of Lee’s poems hilarious “His poems about John Sims and himself, which loosely based or maybe more than loosely based on reality, are just really funny. They’re outrageous and hilarious. But you never feel like somebody’s being made fun of; you’re laughing with them you can identify with them.
Finally, she spoke of her students’ reactions to his poems. “Like I said, a lot of my students will say, ‘I’ve got to share this with my uncle, my uncle’s a farmer, my dad’s a farmer and you don’t have to be from a farming community. I’m not, you don’t have to be that to enjoy that because it’s like real people doing real things that you just go, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
Erin Kreibach, a Senior English major with a minor in art, shared why she came to the event.
“We read his book ‘The Porcine Canticles’ the previous semester, and I thought it would be really fun to be here.”
She then discussed why she enjoyed his work “It blends the casual and the informal in a very entertaining way like mixing the mythological elements for example the dialogue and quotes about pagans.”
“John Milton” were the two words that Lee said when explaining the poet who influenced him the most. “He mentally wrote and dictated a twelve thousand line long poem in a state of almost complete perfection, when he was stone blind and then five years later realized he had made a mistake in the structuring and writing of it and called scribes in and redacted the poem, revising and amending and dividing it into a 12 body sequence rather than the 10 volumes.”
He further discussed his amazement with Milton. “That’s an amazing achievement, that kind of a mind, but also tremendous ability he could write beautiful sonnets when he was 12 years old. Am I like John Milton? No, any more than I’m like Rock Hudson. I mean no, he’s a hero but I don’t emulate.”
Lee then explained how environments shape who we are as people and writers. “By confining us, environment defines us, we become who we are because of the world around us. We have a natural environment, we have a social environment, right now a really sorted political environment, but it makes us who we are in our reactions to it and our living with it.”
Lee ended with a message to aspiring poets: “Never give up. People will try to get you to throw in the towel and just say, ‘It’s not worth it kid, it’s just too hard for you.’ No, don’t listen to them, stay with it, believe in yourself, and believe in your strength. Ability only goes so far, strength can take you the rest of the way.”