[ambi sound of event crowd]
On a Wednesday evening, a collection of people gathered in the Hagstrum Room. Also there was an autoharp, several collections of poetry, and a guitar.
S YARBERRY: Hi everyone. Hi. Thank you all so much for being here. If you don’t know me, I’m S, like the letter for Smith. I’m the graduate assistant of the poetry and poetics cluster and colloquium, and I’m thrilled to welcome you all here tonight.
That was how S Yarberry, the graduate assistant of the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium, introduced the event. Titled “A Night of Poetry and Song,” the event was part of a series of events themed around the concept of “Poetry and its Others.”
They introduced the guest of the night, poet Julian Talamantez Brolaski, with a personal anecdote.
YARBERRY: I’m just thrilled to have Julian visiting us all the way from Santa Barbara. We met a few years back when I was out in California doing kind of a goofy reading the Santa Barbara Public Library, and the rest is history. Here we are. And so when poetry poetics, thought about doing a series organized around these different modalities and shapes of poetry. I knew Julian would be the awesome poet to think with and learn from on this topic.
Brolaski is a poet and country singer who has released an EP with its band, Juan and the Pines, as well as a solo full-length album, It’s Okay, Honey.
Brolaski was in conversation with Musicology Professor Ryan Dohoney, the author of multiple books and Directory of Graduate Music Studies. Dohoney and Brolaski had also met previously in New York, and bonded over a shared interest in folk music.
JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI: we have this shared interest in American American music. So I was so excited when Ness suggested this conversation, and so I prepared a reading, and just thinking about like the availability of poetry to music and the way that music can become poetry and curses, of those things, and this is gonna so I’m gonna display the poems as I read them, and also the lyrics of the songs, which is something I don’t usually do, but I thought would be Interesting, since we’re thinking about like text, poetic text.
Dohoney also brought up the theme of poetry and time.
RYAN DOHONEY: there’s like a kind of, not only the kind of unfolding of time that your poetry does, but register like that. It seems to be sort of like can not always right, but at least I’m thinking of poems and advice for lovers, for instance, this sort of. Compound time on top of it, you’re talking about like, layers of anaphorism, which which makes the sort of affective charge really intense, because it feels like these poems suddenly have this, like historical depth, while they’re also like perceiving phoneme by phoneme.
For Brolaski, the interweaving of poetry and music, and the similarities and perceived differences between them, is an important aspect of its work.
BROLASKI: it’s funny that people often talk about like film and like music as time based media, and I don’t think people talk about poetry as a time based medium, but for me it is
Brolaski also drew comparisons between a variety of inspirations for its songs and poetry, ranging from medieval lyrics to folk tradition.
BROLASKI: I was really interested in medieval lyric, partially because of its relationship to Song tradition and the relationship between like manuscript culture or like poems that are being like performed as songs by like, say, troubling or type of characters get past, you know, either someone hears it and writes it down, or it’s getting changed through dialectical variation. And the relationship to that, of that to folk music, and say, the American tradition, where things are getting like kind of misheard and and fire luck dialects are sort of like pressing on the words to to be changed or altered in certain ways since and and those kind of like mistakes and mishearings or something that are like, like a fruitful poetic space for me.
Yarberry ended a part of their introduction by bringing together poetry, music, and others, while also explaining the theme of the night.
YARBERRY: poetry and its others, shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.
Of course, the night would be incomplete without music. Accompanied by Dohoney on the autoharp, here is Brolaski playing a song.
[live music]
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
