Authors read poems of immigration, heartbreak, abuse and parental struggles at a poetry reading Feb. 7 in the James C. Kirkpatrick Library.
The Pleiades Visiting Writers Series hosted poets EJ Koh and Amy Meng for a collaboration of a semester-long examination of the “Me Too” movement by the women, gender and sexuality studies program at UCM.
The “Me Too” movement is a social media campaign creating community between victims of sexual assault and dialogue on rape culture.
Professor Wendy Geiger, who represented the women, gender and sexuality studies program at the reading, said it was the first event in the WGS’s #MeToo program that seeks to explore a variety of issues related to the movement.
“Our poets were kind enough to say, ‘Yeah, we can speak (about) a couple of poems where our poems have a speaker that might address some of these issues as well,’” Geiger said.
Amy Meng read from “Bridled,” her debut collection of poems that won the 2017 Lena Miles Weaver Todd Prize for Poetry. She said her book is about why emotionally intelligent people enter into bad relationships.
Meng said her poem, “Selection From The Catalogue of Gazes,” was written months before the “Me Too” movement began. She said she’s seen many lists posted on social media about where people were assaulted. Her poem had the same structure of these posts.
“It’s sad to me that it repeats, but it’s comforting to know that there was a community and that you’re not alone in feeling these things that are very lonely experiences often,” Meng said.
In Meng’s poem, she writes, “I was looked at in the mornings, slow as a bug / while four-wheelers scalded the air; / during the friend’s wedding, the friend’s birthday, / the friend’s friend bumping into me in the kitchen, / just thought they’d say hello; / and in convenience stores, by the dog food, / by the six packs of mix-and-match beer; / looked at on the platform, having taken the night train / in the wrong direction.”
EJ Koh, author of “A Lesser Love” and winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, read her poem titled, “Beyonce’s Single Ladies English to English Translation.”
“All the big, beautiful women, bondage women, / divorced women, bisexual, transgender women,” Koh read from her poem, “All drug-free, gay, non-religious, Latter Day Saints, / social drinker, straight, widowed-with-kids women.”
Koh finishes the poem with a call to action.
“Remember the blue light,“ Koh read, “Remember the man. / You can hear him thinking / until he forgets who you are. / Call him the president of your body, / then show him how it must be / to be a president without country.”
Geiger said the WGS program is just starting the #MeToo series at UCM and is trying to be as interdisciplinary as possible. The program hosted a viewing of a documentary called “The Mask You Live in” Feb. 13 in the Union. The documentary, according to a news release, studies boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity.
For more information about the WGS program or the #MeToo movement examination program, contact Karen Bradley, director of Women, Gender and Sexualities Studies at [email protected].