[CW-Grad] "THE SEARCHERS POETRY READING SERIES RENATO ROSALDO" again today!

[Robin Russin]

> I strongly recommend you all come to this if possible. I went to  
> Renato's reading yesterday, and he's terrific.

Robin


>
> --------------------
> Subject: Last chance to hear Renato Rosaldo: "How Poetry Chose Me" @  
> CHASS INTS 1109 @ UC Riverside!
>
> Come hear more about Renato Rosaldo's process as a poet:
>
> A little taste from "How I Write":
> (http://www.facebook.com/l/ae318;www.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Rosaldo_transcript.html for the entire interview 
> )
>
> "What happened was September 26, 1996 I suffered a stroke, and within 
> —I’d like to think within a week, but it must have been a little bit  
> longer than that—within a short time, a couple of weeks, poems  
> started coming to me and I was sitting there and these lines would  
> start coming to me. I didn’t know exactly what they were and so what  
> I started doing was I started writing them down because I thought I  
> should do that. And I started doing paintings with every poem that  
> would come to me and I was just loving these things that would come  
> to me, I was cherishing them. And I was hearing from people that not  
> only would I have to do physical therapy, I’d have to do cognitive  
> therapy, and I thought, “Well, a poem, that’s something I’ve never  
> done before.” I had never written poetry before. I’d written a lot  
> of prose with a lot of attention to writing, so I thought of myself  
> as a writer and a teacher, rarely as an administrator, a writer and  
> a teacher. It had occurred to me to try to write a novel or a short  
> story, but I’d never done it because it was too much like writing  
> ethnography, the creative nonfiction I was writing, or whatever you  
> call it. On my 40 th birthday I started painting and drawing. And I  
> remember my first class where they showed us a grapefruit and I drew  
> a circle. But I had loved to draw when I was a kid and so I would  
> just get completely absorbed in this. And so I worked at that for  
> quite some time—since I was 40.
>
> But the last thing I expected to do was for poems to start coming to  
> me. It was not out of my slate of ambitions, it was just something  
> that happened to me. I don’t think I sort of said set out to always  
> want to write that artificial stuff nobody could understand. I never  
> thought that. So, as I began healing my fantasy was that I would  
> write a book of poems called “Healing Songs.” Because I saw the  
> poetry as healing, deeply healing for me, and it was just  
> brightening my day. Even now I think I’ve become addicted to writing  
> poetry. And what I’ve found is I can’t stop, and when I don't write,  
> my day is grayer. I wouldn’t say the old functionalists in  
> anthropology said, “If you don’t do it, the whole machine will break  
> down”: the world just gets grayer, it just gets grayer."
> --------------------
>
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