Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Professor performs at Player's Pub spoken word event

IU Media School professor Joan Hawkins introduces the next act in Player's Pub "Spoken Word,"  event Thursday evening. Hawkins also preformed two pieces, "The Ballad of Renee and Buzz" and "Leonard Cohen and Edie Sedgwick at the Chelsea Hotel."  

When professor Joan Hawkins writes, she sits at her desk surrounded by bookshelves, near a large window that overlooks the forest behind her house.

She types on her laptop and peers up the wall at a large drawing of Virginia Woolf her husband made for her. Photos of singer-songwriter Patti Smith and poet Jorie Graham sit on the desk.

Hawkins said she writes by looking at those women.

Hawkins performed two longer pieces at Thursday’s spoken word performance at Player’s Pub along with poets Tony Brewer and poet Eric Rensberger. Shakespeare’s Monkey, an Evansville poetry band, also performed.

The spoken word night takes place on second Thursday of the month. It is sponsored by the Bloomington Writers Guild and organized by Hawkins and Brewer, who is the chairperson of the 
Writers Guild.

Hawkins is an IU film studies professor and writer. Hawkins performed two pieces. The first, a jazz poem titled “Leonard Cohen and Edie Sedgwick at the Chelsea Hotel,” was a tribute to the late singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen she wrote on his last birthday, Sept. 21.

The second was a humorous prose piece, titled “The Ballad of Renee and Buzz,” that detailed Hawkins’ helping a 17-year-old girl and 21-year-old man elope when Hawkins was 12. She kept their suitcase in her room for the couple whenever they were ready to leave town.

Hawkins has a building writing process. She comes up with one line then uses that to create a full poem. Content with her piece, Hawkins walks away from the poem. When she returns to the work a couple days later, Hawkins agonizes over the piece, pulling it apart. She reorganizes the words, often cutting much of it until she gets to the most basic message of the poem.

“It’s not an easy process,” Hawkins said. “I get great feelings of energy and enthusiasm, then I’m plunged into despair and self-loathing. I crawl out with something I can actually read.”

Hawkins said she has written two books as a professor and is working on a third. She is collaborating with another author on longer piece about people who have narrowly escaped rape. She also collected seven pieces for an extended 
memoir.

“I’ve always liked it and I’ve always wanted to write,” Hawkins said. “I read a lot as a kid. Books spoke to me in a particular kind of way.”

When Brewer took the stage, he set his glass of beer to the right of stand. He stood in front of a black music sheet stand. He performed four pieces and read from part of a book about crows. One of his poems, “Hey Baby”, was about a baby with a 150-year life expectancy, among other themes.

“I thought their optimism odd because babies are either happy or sad,” Brewer said.

Rensberger followed Brewer. He stood up right below the stage’s spotlight wearing a pumpkin colored shirt. His hands gently shook as he held a large book of his poems.

Rensberger featured much of his recent poetry, expressing his feelings in the wake of the election which he referred to as the “great national disaster.”

“Part of my struggle during that time has been to maintain what the personal is in relation to the communal, political life,” Rensberger said.

Joy Shayne Laughter, secretary of the Writers Guild and a novelist, attended to perform a tribute to her high school English teacher, Carolyn Joan Ryser at Bloomington High School South, during the open mic portion of the night. She read the first couple of pages from her book “Yu: A Ross Lamos Mystery.”

Laughter said she liked Ryser because she let her write book reports and essays in the style she wanted, often dropping in funny lines.

“It’s a way to say thank you,” Laughter said.

Poetry in particular is an expressive art for Hawkins.

“It’s the reason I like it as a forum,” Hawkins said. “It’s like hyperlinks. It allows you to make connections.”

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe