by: Jenna Merony
At Central Michigan University, there are many English readings and events that happen throughout the year. One of those events is the Meijer Visiting Writers Series, which was founded through a gift from the Meijer Foundation, and hosts readings each semester. The final reading in this series for the Spring 2023 semester was on April 6th and presented poet, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter. This event took place at 7:00pm in the Sarah and Daniel Opperman Auditorium in Park Library.
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is a NEA Fellow in Poetry, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and author of the poetry collections, Spectacle (2022) and a lesson in smallness (2015). Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in Image, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, and 32 Poems, among many other places. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literacy journal that publishes writing by women. Slaughter also got her MFA at the University of Alabama where CMU’s very own creative writing professor Jeffery Bean got his MFA.
Slaughter was very pleased and honored to do this reading. She had planned to come to CMU in 2020 but COVID canceled those plans. Three years later though, those plans were made back into a reality. Slaughter was very welcoming to all those who came to hear her read from her newest book, Spectacle. Bean’s ENG 492 class actually studied this book this semester so it was cool for those students to get to meet one of the poets they were getting inspiration from.
The main aspects presented in this book were Ekphrastic poems, poems that looked deeper into scientific findings, poems about family, and many more. The first poem of the collection, “Alice the Corpse Flower Blooms at the Chicago Botanic Garden,” was what inspired the cover of the book which is a corpse flower. This poem was inspired from a news article that Slaughter had read about a corpse flower. However, at the time she began to write this poem, the Me Too Movement was also going on and some of the aspects of women’s rights also bled into this poem. It was a great and powerful piece to kick start the book and was one of my personal favorites.
Then, like mentioned above, there were many Ekphrastic poems throughout the collection all using photographs from the artists, Rineke Dijkstra. Slaughter was grateful to have met the artist and got approved to use her photographs in the book. There are some really great pieces, one that she discussed at the reading was called, “Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992,” and was an image of a girl on a beach with socks of sand. The photo is reminiscent of the painting, “The Birth of Venus.”
To end the reading, Slaughter answered some questions that students in the crowd had about her book. One question that stood out to me was the advice asked about assembling a book and publishing a collection of poems. Slaughter thought hard about her answers and gave some great responses. She really emphasized the importance of patients when it came to publishing a book, and made it clear to focus on publishing individual poems first then making you way to a full collection. When addressing the question about assembling your own collection, she opened my eyes to the idea of not having a plan to set in stone. Slaughter told us that with Spectacle, she thought she wanted to only write about a certain theme. With that idea in her mind, she found that her poems began to be too forced, so instead she just wrote and let the book form itself, which it did.
Slaughter was very open in discussing her book making process, her writing process, and even some personal aspects of her book. At the end of the night, she had some copies for sale and was signing them for those who wanted one. I went up and got myself a copy and was able to have a short conversation with her. She was fantastic, very talkative, kind, and inspiring. If you have not yet read any of her collections, I highly recommend you get yourself a copy and dive deep into her world of interesting facts and fantastic imagery.
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