St. Petersburg College<\/a> Gibbs Music Center. Xie read excerpts from her book \u201cEye Level\u201d to SPC students, faculty, and staff, intermingled with stories from her own childhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\nLiving in Two Worlds<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Xie, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award administered by the Academy of American Poets, was born in China but moved to the US when she was four and grew up in New Jersey. At the reading, she recounted stories of growing up as an immigrant. She talked about the strangeness of visiting a family in China she could hardly remember, an immigrant network searching garage sales on the weekends, and her own travelling abroad in her 20s through Cambodia and Hong Kong. Her poetry reflects on many of these situations, and her unique viewpoint as an immigrant herself. She said she wanted to speak on \u201ccalling up people through our perception of them\u2026and being called upon by their perception of us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Expression of the Soul<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Xie read five poems from her book \u201cEye Level.\u201d Many lines spoke of self-identity, a theme Xie said was a struggle when she lived abroad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen your environment changes,\u201d she said, \u201cit reflects in who you are.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her poems have themes of family bonds, too. She spoke of folk remedies in one poem \u2013 all taught by her mother — and one she learns from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople always come up saying they\u2019ve heard those, or tell me of remedies they\u2019ve heard growing up,\u201d she said with a smile. \u201cMost remedies are about keeping the body invulnerable\u2026so many cultures have ways to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the talk, Xie opened up the floor for questions. When asked how she started writing poetry, she mentioned having trouble with her attention span as a child. She said that because poetry relates fragment and fractures, it weaves together language to make sense, whether or not it was structured with \u201cproper” English. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t need pages upon pages,\u201d she said with a laugh. \u201cI like how it didn\u2019t have to be perfect. There\u2019s a certain wildness to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Xie\u2019s unique viewpoint made for an hour of visual travel. The audience rode with her through time and space, carried along by her words into a place they\u2019ll never know. The poems themselves wove pieces of history into a tapestry of images displayed in a genealogy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you missed the reading, you can still purchase Xie\u2019s book, Eye Level, here<\/a>. You can also get insight to other SPC events via our blogs<\/a>.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poet Jenny Xie read excerpts from her book \u201cEye Level\u201d to SPC students, faculty, and staff, intermingled with stories from her own childhood. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1843,"featured_media":657,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41],"tags":[],"coauthors":[48],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communications","category-featured"],"yoast_head":"\r\n
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