First Artistic Event: The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series

 On April 5, 2012, I attended the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at Foster Auditorium in the Paterno Library.  It featured readings from Nicole Cooley and Julia Spicher Kasdorf from their book Breach and Poetry in America respectively.  I have never been to a reading before and because of the idea of sitting down and listening to someone read, I thought that it was going to be boring.  Yea, I thought there would be part that I would find intriguing but overall I thought I would end up falling asleep during the reading.  However, this was not the case at all.  I ended up enjoying the readings and most of it was quite humorous.  I’ll admit there were some dull parts, but the majority of it was entertaining. 

The part that stood out to me was Nicole Cooley’s poem entitled, “Evacuation”.  I loved her tone as she read and the emotion she added to the reading.  It was very descriptive, for example when she explained how she pictured her parent’s objects floating on the water and her childhood memories of riding her bike through the levees.  I felt as if I was actually in the scene while she was reading.  I felt a lot of emotion through her reading.  You can feel her pain as she talked about how worried she was as she waited to hear from her parents anxiously for three days.  Also, her emotion was expressed when she read how she was constantly calling FEMA to check the location of her parents only to get no response each time.  I felt sympathy when she talked about how she had to hide from her daughters so that they would not hear her talking to her brother on the phone about finding their parents.  I loved how the somberness of her voice changed to relief when she read that she finally received a call from her parents saying that they were safe.  A part that shocked me was hearing how a stadium in New Orleans that held survivors of the hurricane was dark and when the president came to say a speech, a bright light was shone on him then soon after they was turned off again when the president left.  I thought that this was inconsiderate to the survivors because they must feel as if they are not important because they were going through distress and they were denied light on top of that.    I learned a lot from this experience such as that there was another hurricane that happened in New Orleans and the levees were broken to protect the White neighborhoods while the waters invaded the Black neighborhoods.  In the end I thought that this was a good event and I will consider attending another.