Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum hosted a poetic symposium last Thursday featuring 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Auburn University faculty member Natasha Tretheway.
In addition to Tretheway, two other published poets gave readings at the symposium.
The event focused on the poetic concept ekphrasis.
John Albergotti and Jake Adam York joined Tretheway to share works that reflected the symposium’s theme of ekphrasis, or poetry that incorporates visual arts, art objects or highly visual scenes as its subjects.
The symposium, “Ekphrasis : Word and Image,” provided the poets an avenue to express their poetry in a wide variety of ways.
The poets all share a history with the Auburn English department.
The three served on Auburn’s faculty in the late ‘90s, and many current English faculty members attended the symposium in support of their former colleagues.
The reading was funded partially by a grant from the Alabama State Council of the Arts and by the Auburn University Special Lectures Committee.
Poets read their work to the audience in the museum’s auditorium room.
Afterward, they attended a book signing reception sponsored by the Auburn University Bookstore.
Albergotti initiated the ephrastik poetry experience by reading portions of his collections that were inspired by classic Life Magazine photographs.
Pop culture was an ever-present theme in Albergotti’s poetry that pulled references from film and music as inspiration for the poems.
In his poem “Afterlife,” Albergotti responded to the ending of the movie “American Beauty.”
He followed with a reading of a poem that examines the song “The End” by the Beatles.
For the Auburn graduate and former instructor York, artistic work involving civil rights is clearly an area of importance for his poetry.
He read aloud from his first collection “Murder Ballads,” and responded to, what he referred to as the various “martyrs of the civil rights movement.”
In York’s final readings, he referred to newspaper reports about the racially driven murder of Emmett Till in the poems “Substantiation” and “Collect.”
Finally, Tretheway read from a book she wrote at Auburn called “Bellocq’s Ophelia” in which she reacted to both a Millais portrait of Ophelia and a group of photographs taken by E.J. Bellocq.
The collection was an attempt by the poet to “give voices to those who had no voice.”
New Orleans’s prostitutes of the early twentieth century were both the subject of Bullocq’s photographs as well as Tretheway’s poems.
Jana Busby, a junior in math education, attended the symposium at the museum as an opportunity for extra credit for her World Literature II class.
Busby wasn’t too familiar with Tretheway or the poets featured at the symposium prior to the reading.
“The first time I ever heard of Tretheway was in class,” Busby said.
Brittany Whitlock, a senior in communication disorders, is a long-time fan of Tretheway and “was looking forward to hearing her read.”
Although Shelby Pope, a senior in special education, was unfamiliar with Tretheway before attending the event, she enjoyed the experience and was “glad that she was able to hear the reading of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.”
