Between the Lines: Poetry Reading Review

Literary Event Blog and Letter
Dear Professor Armendinger,
I recently attended your poetry reading at the Claremont Library and as your introducer promised, I was able to experience the “lyrically electric” nature of your work. I was especially struck by the way your work not only reaches the reader or listener in an intellectually meaningful way, but also - and most impressionably - in a way that conveys complex feelings and allows for the exchange of emotions on behalf of both the poet and the receiver of the poetry.
A person’s interaction with literature is conventionally viewed as an independent interaction between the reader and the text; simply words on paper, literature is seen too often as something static without the potential for expansion or the ability for transformation. Perhaps in poetry more than in any other medium, one is able to challenge this belief and to experience literature as a tool for building a relationship. Poetry is an kind of offertory, where the reader is able to respond to, contemplate, and then receive the poet’s work. As you said during your reading, there is a lot that happens between the written lines of poetry; it is between the lines that the poet and listener exist together and interact with one another to create a multi-dimensional relationship from something that exits physically in one dimension.
In particular, the oral presentation of your work amplified for me the emotionally interactive nature of poetry. The combination of your lyricism and vibrant imagery allowed me to be moved by the general feeling elicited by the spoken sound and rhythm of your words, so that as the listener to your poetry, I was able to experience your work beyond the confines of syntactic logic. Your work therefore affected me in a more profound, multi-dimensional manner simply because of the event’s focus on oral presentation.
There were certain lines of your poetry that especially affected me: “mile and molecule,” “leaf as a crumpled telegram,” “I sink into the calendar on the wall as if it were sand,” “my body is a silver parachute,” “there is so much space between my bed and bones.” Once again, I am reminded of the way that poetry transforms a personal relationship between the writer and his or her own experiences into a relationship accessible to the reader. It is interesting to me that your poetry was able to affect me on a personal level despite the fact that we were coming to the reading from different places and perspectives. Whether your poem used lyrical metaphors or precise language to reference your own individual experiences, I was able to relate to the ideas and images of your poetry in a personally meaningful manner.
In this way, your poetry exists in many different forms. Most fundamentally, your work is the product of your own creativity and writing process. However, your work also exists independently and autonomously from its original form - not only in the spaces between the lines, but in the spaces between people and their individual experiences. Therefore, the relationship you have as a writer with your words and the connection I find to your words through my own personal experiences culminates collectively to realize a new poem.
In addition to your presentation, I enjoyed the work by Marcyn Del Clements. Documenting her backpacking and climbing treks around the world, Del Clements’ work could be classified as travel-poetry. Her poems were narrative in form and based less in metaphors and more in detailed descriptions of things seen and mountains conquered. As poets, however, you both used personal experiences to artistically convey complex emotions like awe, remorse, grief, pleasure and pain. The contrast between your work and Del Clements’ work also exemplified for me the way that extremely different points of inspiration can produce similar emotional responses to create myriad relationships in their wake.
I look forward to reading your forthcoming chapbook, Archipelago.
Thank you,
Leah Milne Wright