On Tuesday the Eastern Michigan University creative writing program held its Bathhouse Reading Series featuring authors Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant in the Student Center Auditorium.
Bryant’s first readings came from her book “Unexplained Presence,” which is a collection of hybrid essays punctuated by ekphrastic poems.
“There’s a little fiction in the essays, a little speculation, as well as interstitial pieces which are little commercial bumps between the essays that kind of comment on the essay that just ended and set up the essay that’s to come,” Bryant said.
The ekphrastic piece describes artifacts depicting Africans from the time of the pharaohs to the fall of the Roman Empire. As Bryant proceeds to read from her next piece, a hybrid essay, much of the imagery from the poem becomes meaningful as the same imagery is scattered through the essay.
Bryant then read from a piece she did in collaboration with Jaime Cortez’s “Universal Remote: On the Absence of Michael Jackson.” Bryant read what sounded like her experience as a young child, from a child’s perspective, with race, sexuality and body image and the special relationship she had with Michael Jackson.
“Michael Jackson was my girlfriend and my boyfriend at the same time,” Bryant said.
Bryant iterated on one idea throughout the piece, “The idea of something being wrong with me or with someone else.”
Douglas Kearney’s style was a sharp contrast to Bryant’s subdued and layered reading and her soft-spoken voice. He read extensively from his book “The Black Automaton” as well as some of his other work.
Kearney alternated between soft whispers and a booming voice as he read from his work. Kearney describes his rationale for his persona during a reading.
“I can allow the personality that animates the poems that I’m writing out during the reading.
Seeing a black guy yell and be angry is like riding on a roller coaster or going to a horror movie,” Kearney said. “I went, so clearly, I’m OK because instead of doing something else on Friday night I went and had a black guy yell at me for like 30 minutes, so I rule.”
Kearney led with a piece called “Abraham, Yahweh, Joseph: Fathers of the Year.” The Joseph in the title refers to the father of The Jackson 5, rather than the biblical Joseph. The piece starts off with a conversation between Abraham and Yahweh culminating in Abraham trying to kill his own son to appease Yahweh. Kearney slanted the narrative by throwing in applicable lyrics from songs by The
Jackson 5.
Kearney continues in his disturbingly funny and unsettling fashion by listing stage euphemisms for miscarriage in another piece, reading a club jam about the Rwandan genocide and then reciting a peppy poem about the Middle Passage.
Jonah Mixon-Webster, creative writing major, commented on Kearney’s reading about miscarriages.
“I didn’t know how to interpret it,” he said. “It made me uncomfortable, and uncomfortable for everyone here.”
Mixon-Webster said that the uncomfortable feeling was what he felt Kearney’s work was about and that his catching the reader off-guard gave him a way into the discomfort that Kearney writes about.
“What struck me was more of the editing process. It influences me, to know what others go through,” said Justin Fluellen, a creative writing major.
Joe Sacksteder is an adjunct instructor for the creative writing department at EMU.
“There are a lot more opportunities out there as far as creative writing as far as writing stories and poems, that there’s a performance aspect, that we can take on big issues of race and otherness,” Sacksteder said.
