Stegner Reading – Hugh Martin & Monique Wentzel (4/24)

Last Wednesday I went to the last Stegner Reading of the year. I guess the best way to do this is to break this up into two paragraphs: one for Hugh Martin, and one for Monique Wentzel.

Hugh Martin was the poet. Prior to Wednesday, I'd actually never been to a poetry reading. I'd read a little bit in high school, and, since then, I hadn't touched poetry with a ten foot pole, or any length of pole, for that matter. Well, I suppose that's not true – I showed up late to the Stegner reading fall quarter. So, I didn't get a seat, and I ended up awkwardly posted up inside the small kitchenette that connects to the Terrace Room, trying to focus on the Stegner poet reading that night (Christopher Kempf, I believe), but only able to think, "Why the expletive-ing expletive am I in this kitchenette." Anyways, this was the first poetry reading for which I had a seat to sit in. His choppy reading voice made the flow of the poems a bit difficult to digest, but I really enjoyed his style – he was able to take the Iraq War, something big and messy and unrelatable, and capture it through images and narratives (the bullet scarf, the sandwich, the penis picture) that will stick with me, and I'm sure many other people, for a very long time.

Monique read part of a short story that she's been working on, about a woman who falls into a washing machine and is transported to an alternate life, the life that she, presumably, wished she could have had. The separation from reality was a breath of fresh air, because I've been reading a lot of stories that firmly ground themselves in the possible, rather than dabble in the impossible. It was, admittedly, kind of a bummer she didn't have time to finish her story. Don't you hate it when you're reading something and all of a sudden it just