Squaretable Seminars

I went to two of the readings during the Wildness Symposium: Mosaic Finding Beauty in a Broken World with Terry Tempest Williams on Saturday and Blood Dazzler with Patricia Smith on Sunday.

Terry Tempest Williams opened with the theme word empathy. She read a letter from a fellow writer to her friend whose 27 yr old daughter had committed suicide this week. The most striking words I remember are “Sing… sing silent if you must, for finally, there are no words.” Then she began reading excerpts from her book, about hearing the word mosaic when her heart was searching for guidance, apprenticing in Italy the trade of mosaics, and working with her hands to form something new out of something broken. She read some and spoke some, a very balanced and meaningful switch between the two forms of sharing and explaining her experience.

There were three major topics: prairie dogs of Utah and how, if they disappear, who will cry for the rain; the survivors of the Genocide in Rwanda and finding a way to properly memorialize and provide burial for the murdered families; and her “adopted” son Louie. In one passage Louie, her translator while in Rwanda, tried to describe what it was like to interpret; he said it was more than words, something like creating a space for two hungers for understanding to come together. Another powerful insight was that he noticed the children in the streets, without opportunity, but waiting to be transformed. She very easily tied everything into the meanings mosaic and empathy.

Patricia Smith opened her reading with a poem about her 6th grade class from Miami Dade County, Florida; their straightforward knowing that they each know someone who’s dead, and their eagerness to learn how to write poetry that somehow can help them with the losses. She then read a more lighthearted poem about her and a friend discovering the Louvre in all their American-ness. Then she read from her book about Hurricane Katrina. She also had three main themes: the personification of Katrina, slowly learning her body and quickly becoming a terrific woman; the dog Luther B; and some of the victims of the storm including the 34 nursing home residents.

She read poem after poem with a minimum of explanation in between. What I like best is that she really embodied her poems and their individual narrators and she really performed them like they were alive. She gave a voice to the devastation so that people can begin to make themselves aware of the events. By imaging these real people, developing their hell through believable characters she allows readers and listeners to feel a sliver of truth that wasn’t shown through the media.