Wednesday, 1:00 p.m.
Jeanne Emmons read her poetry at 1:00 p.m. We're in the Whipple Gallery now, in SWSU's library. I first met Jeanne when I was on book tour in Sioux City, Iowa, some years ago. She teaches at Briar Cliff University and is poetry editor of The Briar Cliff Review. Rootbound is a published collection of her poems, and Baseball Nights and DDT and The Glove of the World are in press.
"A brief convergence of sphere and hollow...." Emmons read.
"A spring wound up to drive a whole living running down...."
"I was a rather introverted poetry-writing teenager...."
"Straining through air that was always on the point of raining...."
"It was lonely and warm and damp...."
"On the night of their wedding, they saw the movie Fantasia...."
"... as if he had grown and deepened into his secret self...."
"... the purple plum of my brother ripening in the dark...."
"The Wizard of Oz - the great mythic story of my generation...."
"And I felt a slash darkening in me...."
"I grew up with the King James Bible in the First Baptist Church in Beaumont, Texas...."
Emmons told about "Bethseba's bath," about King David's having Bethseba's husband killed: "It's one of the low points of David's biography...."
"She could feel the stirrings of kings within her.... the whole line pulled from between her open thighs...."
Which poem she showed to a friend who was a theologian, who showed it to her son, whose son said: "Mom, that's pornographic...."
"I always knew more than was good for me...."
"I felt flat as the moon on the impregnable sky...."
Of her father: "He was very smart and very opinionated.... He was an intellectual and scholar, and he loved to build things with his hands...."
"... a thimble dimpled like the chin of a child on the verge of tears...."
"Your smile a giving way to gravity...."
"... under the slow ring of the releasing chisel...."
"So the Buddha was always reduced to himself...."
"... yellow walls the exact color of his skin...."
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