Monday, 10:30 a.m.
Patrick Hicks read from his poetry. Hicks teaches Creative Writing at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and was recently a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. His first collection of poems, Traveling Thrugh History, was published recently.
"The first question I got on campus when I pulled up here," he said, "was 'Do you know where you're going?' What a wonderful welcome."
"I'm the proud product of Catholic education, which means I was taught by nuns...."
As a child, for me, he said, "Letters were made of stories, not the other way around...."
At the telephone museum he found on a drive between Sioux Falls and the Twin Cities: "Those telephones - what would they say if they could speak?"
"The stories still flow like grain...."
"Maps are fluid and restless," Hicks said. Nonetheless, "I placed an X over our home. We live here. It is ours."
He recalled talking to his father about the peonies, "how they are defying gravity, how they are bursting with color...."
At a World War I museum in London: "These soldiers rise in my imagination and step into an abyss of lead...."
Comments