Award-winning poets Laton Carter and Dorianne Laux read selections from their own publications Tuesday night in front of an group of people who ranged from students to senior citizens seated in folding chairs, couches and on the floor all around the Gerlinger Alumni Lounge.
“Have you ever checked out a library book and taken it somewhere you thought was exotic? I did once,” said Carter, Eugene poet and winner of the 2005 Oregon Book Award. “I mean, if you consider California to be exotic.”
The library book anecdote, Carter explained, was the inspiration for an untitled poem within his manuscript titled “Patience.”
The poem, one of the ten he read from the manuscript, depicted a book as an “inanimate thing never to know its own touch…on its way to California.”
Most of Carter’s poetry was characterized by descriptions of seemingly ordinary objects or people that opened up into profound philosophical musings.
Carter said that he “lets the world go on breaking” and then ponders connections and distances between breaks in an otherworldly way. To illustrate an example of this, Carter read “Finding One’s Way,” a sonnet sequence from his newest book “Leaving,” which connected the lives of a bird, a single woman, and a single man with a daughter. The connections of all three lives led to his conclusion that “one’s way becomes one’s two ways;” that everyone has two separate entities within.
Laux, winner of the 2006 Oregon Book Award and a professor of creative writing at the University, said she bases her poems on the interactions between people and the endless contradictions of life.
“My interior world was something I would attach to a domestic landscape – one I knew well,” said Laux.
Much of her poetry contains an innate optimism, exploring people’s possibilities and aspirations.
Laux read from all four of her books, including her most recent publication, titled “Facts About the Moon.” “I never read from my other books anymore, and they were feeling lonely,” she said.
The poem “Death comes to me again, a girl” from her book “Smoke”, a na’ve and optimistic outlook on life after death, momentarily stunned the audience. In contrast, the audience burst into fits of laughter when the poet recounted a recent interview with a reporter in which she was asked whether people were surprised to meet her after reading her sexually charged poem “Vacation Sucks.”
“I didn’t quite know how to respond to that,” Laux admitted. “I told her, ’55-year-old people do have sex, you know, and you can put that in your newspaper!’”
After the readings, time was set aside for members of the audience to ask the two poets about their work. When asked what time of day she found best to write poetry, Laux answered that she always found inspiration while amongst other people.
“I always think of things while I’m sitting on the bus,” she said. “Faculty meetings are the best time, because you can appear to be studiously taking notes when really you’re writing poetry.”
Carter talked about his beginnings as a poet.
“I tried not to be (a poet). I tried to be a fiction writer, but the classes filled up, so I was forced to take poetry classes,” he said. “I thought I was rebellious when I turned in short stories instead of poems, but gradually those stories started taking the shape of poems.”
Undergraduate students Alex Gabriel and Rachel White enjoyed Laux’s poetry the most.
White said that her poems were “easier to relate to,” and Gabriel agreed, adding that “‘Vacation Sucks’ made me chuckle.”
University student Megan Gex agreed. “I thought that Dorianne’s poetry was personal, while Carter’s was more general.”
Creative Writing grad student Vanessa Norton said she has “heard Dorianne a number of times and I think she’s amazing,” but was also “glad that Laton Carter was recognized.”
“We have two recent Oregon Book Award winners living here in Eugene,” said Cecilia Hagen, Alignment Project Manager for the Oregon University System. “Is it in the water or what?”