Literary Event: Levinthal Reading

Last Wednesday, I attended the Levinthal Reading, in which students - writers who had worked on their own creative writing pieces with visiting Stegner Fellows - read excerpts from their own works. It's been over a week since that event because I wasn't sure how to write the blog post concerning it. I guess I have some idea of how to do so now, so behold, the blog post.

To my dismay and eternal embarrassment, I have a pretty short attention span sometimes, and when forced to sit for an extended period of time to listen to a lecture, say, or a reading, more often than not, I fall asleep. Shame on me, I know. I am very happy to report that I in fact did not doze off during the Levinthal Reading last week - probably because a couple of my friends were reading at this event - and so I was able to enjoy the rich artistic talent that each writer brought to the reading. 

A lot of the readings, I was surprised to discover, were of poetry. Although I have some sort of background in poetry, I was never really able to develop an appreciation of it. This is especially the case with poetry that tends to follow in Walt Whitman's footsteps, with his long, meandering, descriptive lines. When I'm reading such poetry, I usually get distracted. Not so the case as I sat there in the Terrace Room, listening to student poet after student poet read their works. At first, I paid attention to the sound of their voices. Then I started actually paying attention to the words that they spoke, and the images that were conjured up through their words. Sometimes a particular line of poetry will stick with you long after you've read or heard it. Maybe you don't remember the exact turn of phrase, but at least the emotions evoked by it will linger somewhere in your mind. Though it's been a week since the reading, that's exactly the case for me: I remember a soft, diffused glimpse of beauty from one poet, a frenzied snapshot of tumult from another. I wish I had thought to write down some of the verses that I enjoyed.

A couple other readings that stood out to me were of fiction. I was very impressed by the strength of the different voices that I heard, and the way that each author read their excerpts in very particular ways. For example, one writer, reading a scene from his novel-in-progress, did so in a way that perfectly captured the mood that he must have imagined while writing the scene. I think that if I had read that particular excerpts, in which the main character sets off on an extended rant to vociferously defend his proposal to study a long looked-over tribe in the Amazon, my eyes would have glazed over, if not skipped the passage entirely. I'm not even sure if my mind would have allocated the same degree of emotion to this particular rant. Sitting there in person, though, and having no choice but to listen to this writer dive straight into his protagonist's psyche - it was only then that I really got a sense of how engaging readings could be.