An introduction for Laurie Lamon on the occasion of her final reading as the Amy Ryan Professor at Whitworth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurie Lamon is here to read some poems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This semester, she\u2019s finishing up her time as the first Amy Ryan Professor at Whitworth. If you\u2019re keeping up on Amy Ryan news, you\u2019ll know that the next Ryan Prof will be Brent Edstrom in the music department, and this is a wonderful handoff\u2014from artist to artist, honoring and encouraging the work of teachers who are also creators, and who turn their students into creators. The Amy professorship got started on the right foot, and it\u2019s moving forward like a champ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But we\u2019re hearing from the first and original authentic Amy Ryan prof tonight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, let me say there are two books you should get into your library, by Laurie. One is called The Fork Without Hunger<\/em>, and the other is called Without Wings<\/em>. You should have them both, I think, and maybe you already do. But if, after this reading, you think to yourself, \u201cI need to DO something! I have to respond!\u201d, then you should start by purchasing one of these. And then you should start writing the poem you\u2019ve been thinking about writing. Laurie would tell you to start with the writing part, of course. And her advice is probably better than mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laurie\u2019s poems have appeared in The Atlantic<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, Plume<\/em>, Ploughshares<\/em>, The Literary Review<\/em>, and many others. She\u2019s received a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. She received the Graves Award in the Humanities in 2002, and that award gave her the time and space to develop her \u201cPoetry of Witness\u201d course, which carries students deep into the kind of 20th-century poetry that was born in the midst of or in the face of oppression or disaster or extremity, all around the world. The course has been enriching students\u2019 hearts and minds for a couple of decades now. And Laurie brought her interest in this\u2014in the art of artful witness and subtle seeing, of standing and peering and contemplating and saying something about what resists all speech\u2014she brought this to her work with Whitworth\u2019s national literary journal, Rock and Sling. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n About witness, I want to say this thing: Laurie helps her students think about poetry by telling them to think about the ways they move, the swinging of their limbs and the amble of their steps. She has them think about how other people move, too. Poetry has rhythm because people are full of rhythm, breaking out all over, she says. And this is the poet witnessing the every day. And this small stuff is witness, too\u2014the poet\u2019s eye on the daily amble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you teach with Laurie Lamon, one way of getting a glimpse into her heart and mind and witness\u2014and her own daily amble\u2014is to look back on one\u2019s record of texts to<\/em> and from<\/em> her. In recent months, I\u2019ve sent Laurie a video of my dog howling at a harmonica, an article about bees living on top of Notre Dame cathedral, a video of a raccoon reaching out a car window to catch rain, and early twentieth-century advertisements for water pumping windmills. It\u2019s the small witnessing: Look at this little thing that just passed by me. This thing is astounding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And all of you who know Laurie know how she values those small moments of witnessed wonder, and how she reciprocates your sharing of them, in art and in life. This morning I scrolled, with a lot of joy, through about five years of texts from Laurie to me. I\u2019ve been sending her windmill ads. She\u2019s sent me something about the doomsday vault where we store seeds in case of apocalypse. And she sent a picture of the Deadpool figurine she researched and bought for Bill; and images of students who had written poems on pumpkins and cross country race bibs; and shots from the construction of her new bathroom; and advocacy for rats as family pets; and video of a British family rescuing a baby fox they called Softee; and video of a therapy horse; and also videos of a cockatoo, trapped sea turtles, and a hedgehog getting a bath. And lots of dogs. And whales. Friends, there were many, many whales in there. And, among others, there was this text about whales, from Laurie: \u201cWhen they exhale, it\u2019s 300 miles per minute through their blow hole\/nose. And they use 90% of their lung capacity. Humans use less than 20 percent!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Laurie has a poem called \u201dI’ve Stopped Staying Up Late to Write Poems,\u201d and one of the things I love about this title is how much it reminds me of emails she\u2019s sometimes sent me, marking the start or end of something. Or both at once, actually, usually. Because if she stopped staying up late to write, then she started writing at some other times. There\u2019s always a new thing to be made or a new trick to try or a new round of research that will lead to poems and conversation and gestures of friendship. Laurie doesn\u2019t have a poem called, \u201cI Understand Home Renovation Now\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m Learning to Use an Amazing New Camera\u201d or \u201cI Can Make PowerPoints\u201d or \u201cI Know Something Amazing About Whales,\u201d but you can sort of imagine it. She is always beginning, and so pleased to be beginning. And so this is an ending\u2014the final Amy Ryan reading with the first of the Amy Ryan profs. And it is a whole lot of beginning, too, no doubt at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please welcome Laurie Lamon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whitworth University An introduction for Laurie Lamon on the occasion of her final reading as the Amy Ryan Professor at Whitworth. Laurie Lamon is here to read some poems. This semester, she\u2019s finishing up her time as the first Amy Ryan Professor at Whitworth. If you\u2019re keeping up on Amy Ryan news, you\u2019ll know that the next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"full-width-page-template.php","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
April 23, 2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"