The cool thing about Redlands is that we have many different organizations bringing really famous or interesting people to speak on campus. Whereas Tuesday I had the pleasure to listen to Sherman Alexie (and before that Temple Grandin, autistic scientist and public speaker), tonight Redlands hosted the poet and editor Kurt Brown as the first event for the Visiting Writer’s Series for the Spring 2013 semester.

My first impression of Brown was that he is very soft spoken. His voice is quite soothing, to the point where in an overheated room, I started having trouble staying awake. The poems that he shared (from two of his books) were a combination of humorous poems and serious/beautiful and elegant poems.

I remember the first poem he read quite clearly, which was titled Bologna. It was a humorous tirade on what bologna actually is, (a combination of different meats) and other not-so-pleasant aspects about it. It really was quite funny. But he also had some hauntingly beautiful images written in his poems. My favorite one was something along the lines of the fog settled on the bunkers like a blanket around a corpse.

But then we got to my favorite part of the evening (as always), which is the QandA. I couldn’t hear some of the questions, but I’ll do my best to reflect upon the answers I do remember.

One thing he talked about was, even as a professional poet, he has no idea what he’s going to do when he sits down to write a poem. Each time is different. One piece of advice he had for writers was when you start working on a poem, and you start with a topic on your mind, get off the topic as fast as you can. He said the odds of the new topic being something much more interesting to explore are great.

Another question he answered was if he had ever gone back to revise or continued working on a poem that was already published. The answer, yes. Multiple times. The two reactions he’s had going back to poems is, “my God, that’s brilliant!” and “this absolutely must be revised, even though it’s already published!” It’s comforting to know that even published writers are sometimes insecure about their work, which (if it’s popular) is deemed polished and successful by the public.

The last piece of advice that Brown had for writers was to get involved. Get involved with independent presses and magazines, because that market is not vanishing, it is not going away, and if you want to do something bad enough as a writer you can make anything work for you.

Overall, I really enjoyed the night, it had both humor and elegance, comforting insights for the up and coming writer (good thing, as he was speaking to a lecture hall-ful of them) and interesting advice to up and coming writers as well.

Until next time,

Joe