This event took place at the Charleston Library Society on lower King Street at 7pm on Friday, November 14th, 2014. I was really glad my English teacher mom Cheri and my boyfriend Justin got to join me.
This reading was extremely powerful. Roger Reeves, is a clearly highly intelligent and passionate poet whose work addresses social issues such as race and emotional experiences including loss. He dedicated the reading of a poem that discusses the hanging of young Emmett Till from the perspective of a mare to Trayvon Martin.
He discussed (commenting in between his poems) research of which I was not aware including a study that reports that black men who graduate college as a group die almost a decade younger than their counterparts in jail and that this reminded him of the tall tale of John Henry who expired after attempting to beat the machine (the steam railroad). One of Reeve’s poems took the form of a “gandy man” song. These songs were used by “gandy men”who worked to realign the railroad tracks before the steam system to cheer and comfort each other in their difficult work. One of my favorite images from one of his amazing poems was the “trains green breath” which is an example of sensory mixing and personification.
At one moment, Reeves’ responded to an event described by Gary Jackson in one of his poems about teaching students what an elegy is by noting that “An elegy is the highest form of praise” because it can capture the love a person through the negative image of loss. In Reeves’ elegy for his brother he used the amazing image “winter’s light pulling at my ankle”- an amazing image mixing personification, detail, touch sense, and objective correlative: how the light of this season made him feel.
I thoroughly enjoyed the event and speaking with both gracious and fun poets.
Isabel