Nicole Sealey talks unfinished poems, writing process in Q&A at SU
Dan Lyon | Staff Photographer
More than 60 people attended a Q&A with Nicole Sealey, the first of six artists coming to SU during the fall semester.
More than 60 people attended a Q&A session with writer Nicole Sealey at the Gifford Auditorium at Syracuse University on Wednesday.
Poetry enthusiasts lined up at one of three microphones in the front of the auditorium to ask Sealey about her work. The session, which lasted about an hour and a half, was presented as the first part of the Raymond Carver Reading Series, hosted by the MFA program in creative writing in the department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The icebreaker of the Q&A session was about the 1990 LGBTQ documentary “Paris Is Burning” and its presence in Sealey’s book, “Ordinary Beast.” The book is a collection of poems about topics such as sexuality, race, gender, myth and history.
“You’re starting with the hard ones,” Sealey said. “The personalities, the women featured — they’re all so brilliant, talented and wise. I was attracted to that immediately upon seeing it and decided to honor them in the only way I knew how.”
Sealey said she feels that most of her poems are unfinished.
She was also asked about the reasoning behind a note at the back of her book as a reference for her poem “Virginia for Lovers.” Sealey said she included the note because she didn’t want her readers to think that the speaker of the poem, which includes a Native American tribe raiding a settlement, was alluding to racist ideas.
Sealey said that it is easier to disregard public perception of her work as she gets older. She’s more afraid of her mother reading her poems than anyone else, she said.
Sealey, who has been published in The New Yorker and The New York Times, won the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize in 2015 for her book “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named.” She was also a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award.
Sealey is the first of six authors who will appear in the fall half of the Raymond Carver Reading Series. The next author, novelist, essayist and performance poet, Arthur Flowers, will come to SU on Wednesday.
Published on September 19, 2018 at 9:40 pm
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