Students, community members and faculty filled seats at the Reece Museum to listen to three poets participate in readings of their work as part of the “Three Emerging Poets” event last Tuesday.
Featuring these emerging writers and poets has been an ongoing effort since 2011, according to Dr. Jesse Graves, an associate English professor at ETSU.
“The common thread has always been to showcase writers who are near the beginning of their publishing careers,” Graves said. “Way back then, we thought it would be a great idea for students and all members of the community to have access to the insights of writers who are just breaking through. They are finding a way in a super competitive literary world of the present to get their work published and get their work out to an audience.”
The poets this year included J. Scott Brownlee, Kristin Robertson and Matthew Wimberley. Each with their own accolades and personal achievements, they brought their own experiences and life stories with them as part of their poetry reading. For Brownlee and Wimberley, that meant sharing about their fathers.
“I think [Wimberley] can agree that parents end up accidentally in poems a lot,” Brownlee said. “One thing that his first book is really about is relationships between men, particularly fathers, so I am going to read two poems from my full-length book that are about my father.”
“When my dad was alive, he never visited me,” Wimberley said. “A lot of thinking about this landscape was figuring out what it might have looked like if he had come and lived on the mountain with me for a little while.”
Robertson mentioned some of the events in her life that made appearances in her writing.
“My mother used to show cats,” Robertson said. “It is not like dog shows, you know, run around in circles and do the whole thing. So we had a lot of cats when we were little in our house, dozens of cats. This is a poem about my mother who accidentally put one of those kittens in the clothes dryer.”
After the reading, guests were invited to stick around and ask the poets questions. The panel of poets offered advice to those looking to pursue writing in the future.
“Any time you get rejection back, go write. Go work on something,” Robertson said. “If you get some news that your friend has gotten some big contract or prize or something, go back to your work and keep working. That is what it is all about.”
The next poetry reading is “A Prayer to Talk to Animals.” It will feature poet Nikole Brown, who will discuss animal ethics on March 26 at the Reece Museum at 11:30 a.m.
