Poet Laynie Browne MFA '90 set truth as her theme when she read her work at the McCormack Family Theater last night.
"This sonnet is sent without cunning," she said in one of her poems.
Browne read her work as part of the Fall 2004 Contemporary Writers Series sponsored by the Graduate Program in Literary Arts. Browne, a three-time winner of the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Literature, graduated from the program in 1990.
Browne's most recent work consists primarily of sonnets and letters and focuses on what Browne calls permeability. "It means that everything is coming in - daily news, my children, voices of people in the street," she said. The poems address issues varying from the war in Iraq to Browne's love affair with light.
One sonnet promises to be a protector "against poetry from the New Yorker/against spiders on the potty," while another chronicles Browne's reluctance to "indulge in gratuitous dramas" as she watches her child, "fencing with chopsticks," turn to her and ask, "'What does oblivious mean?'"
"Laynie Browne has always written - the writing shows that it is a second skin for her," said Professor of English C.D. Wright, who teaches in the Literary Arts program and introduced Browne. "Her dexterity with forms (shows that) hers really is a mind with an eye," Wright said.
Browne's children are the focus of many of her new poems, a shift from the more surreal images that characterize her earlier work. In one of her new poems she mentions her 5-year-old son's girlfriend, whom he calls "nice and good" and serenades with a guitar, cookie bits falling out of his mouth and "diaper bulging."
The crowd of just under two dozen was an enthusiastic one. Many members of the audience were community members familiar with Browne's work and curious to hear her read it aloud.
"I always liked her work - she was different than everyone else, not conventional poetry," said Ray Jordan, a resident of East Providence who knew Browne when she was in the Literary Arts program and has been coming to readings sponsored by the program for 19 years.
Browne also read some of her recently published work, including excerpts from her poetry collection "Pollen Memory" and novel "Acts of Levitation." Her desire for truth and simplicity remained a constant component of the poems she read, culminating in the question she posed to the audience: "Are you having a mental affair with a pack of lies? You will be chastised in the afterlife."
The next poetry reading in the Literary Arts program's series will be Oct. 20 at 8 p.m.
