Poetry Reading - Ianna Hawkins Owen

I was able to hear poet Ianna Hawkins Owen read from her chapbook earlier this semester (and I probably should have blogged about it then but I spaced) and was really struck by the way she performed her piece. The piece was exploring her own mixed race identity as someone existing between the identities of black and white and within the identity of a mixed-race person. On top of this she is navigating moving to a new town who only the year before had repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. This of course plays into the dialogue around her identity, how does she exist in this place where only a little while back people such as her were legally barred from existing? What is the culture in that location like when this is it's recent history?

There's a lot going on there, a lot of violence both political and personal, a lot of questions of belonging and identity. After hearing so many poems that deal with identity and navigating the space of being marginalized in some way I've always been aware of what seems like a push of aggressive emotion behind the pieces that I've heard, not necessarily an anger but a realization of the way they were viewed and had to deal with themselves around their position. There is general a taking up of space, a exploration of the body in a way that is allowing it to expand into a position normally not allowed to it growing up. This is not to say that Ianna did not have a powerful or effective reading it was simply a different kind of power and emotional exchange.

When Ianna read she folded herself into a chair, leg up, arm wrapped around it. She shrank into a smaller ball, a smaller position, and read in a quiet voice. The fact that we as the audience had to stay silent, had to control our urges to whisper, cry, snap, emote in any way allowed for us to surrender to her reading more fully. There was no ability to disengage, to distract from what she was saying, from the past that she was conjuring for us to exist within. She used the quiet of her voice and the smallness of her position to take not only us but herself back to that time, her folding made us think of youth and her youth specifically in conjunction with the history and ideas she was speaking about/of/with.

It was an amazingly effective reading, as she talked about the small suburban town and referenced such things as "Serial Mom" we were carried along with her on this emotional and physical journey. We start to occupy the same space as her, to walk in her place just a little and to be drawn into her headspace.

I don't know for sure if these actions were purposeful or if that might just be the way the poet reads all her works but the interaction between this particular piece and her reading of it was especially powerful, it forced us to sit in silence, to engage fully or to be excluded from the energy and emotion that Ianna weaved about us.