I was walking into the Meet the Artists completely clueless, I have to admit. I had no idea who was performing or what they were going to be doing. So we sat down, there weren't enough seats because we didn't know that we had to rsvp outside from the class but we managed. And then this lady gets up, she had awesome hair, by the way, and she introduces herself as Khadijah Queene and begins to read. She had a very soft voice that sort of flowed over her poems. The piece that stood out to me the most from her was a poem that she said was new and unusual for her. It was about a woman who was in love with a man and as they were making love, he bit off her nipple, fully. And then she still went back to him, and still continued to love him.  It was interesting because (I know this sounds weird) but when I looked at her I thought that she might associate herself with the wolf animal.  There was something about her hair, and how she moved, and I thought that it was very interesting that in her poem she refereed to a wolf, biting off the nipple and howling into the sky. 

The next poet was an elderly black woman who is a professor at the College of William and Mary. She was a wise soulful woman and I felt that if i had sat down to drink a cup of coffee  with her, i would leave much more world-wise than I ever dreamed of being. Her last poem, the poem hat she said she makes sure she reads where ever she goes was about her mother's death and the devastating effects that it had on her. Before the poem, she prefaced it by telling the audience that her mother had died in a fire and then she began to sing. While listening to her poem I heard the pain that she felt a child without a mother. I saw the agony that she must have felt watching her father decay before her eyes. And I heard her message at the end:" Just Do What You Gon' Do, No Time to Think, Just Do What You Gon' Do." That message really resonated with me because I always let obstacles get in my way, and here she was saying, throw all that away, if you need to do something, you go and you do it, burn down the barriers in front of you. You have to do what YOU need to do. 

The next poet was a younger man, he seemed to be the youngest of them all but also very savvy because he said that he makes money doing anything. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. His poetry was much more performance based in my opinion. He was a great reader and used imagery incredibly. His poems were called things like "Advice: How to get a gun out of your mouth" and "Advice: How to disappear completely". My favorite line was one from the first poem, I forget the exact words, but something like "mouth, becoming a trap for the truth" and "bend light around your body 'till it colors you clear". I thought that those lines were beautiful. 

The last woman to speak was a Native American and Sarah is right, I felt as if her poems were so personal that I shouldn't be listening to them. They grappled with some very serious issues that were very close to her heart. And because of that I felt sort of ashamed to be listening to them because I wanted to respond to her messages in the right way, but I wasn't sure what the right way was. So, I felt very uncomfortable sitting there and just having her spit her soul out onto the podium for us to just stare at. 

However I learned a lot and I am happy that I was exposed to a poetry reading for the first time. It inspired me to go home and look up poetry slams because I would really like to attend one. I love poetry and although sometimes I think that it would be easier for me to see it on paper, a poetry slam is not like customary poetry and it is meant to be heard.