Toby Daspit and Liz Burk read their poetry Wednesday, 6-8 p.m., at Taunt Marie in Breaux Bridge, La. Open mic to follow.
by Dominick Cross
BREAUX BRIDGE — Writing a poem is one thing. Reading it aloud to an audience, another.
Liz Burk, who with fellow poet Toby Daspit, having done the former will do the latter, 6-8 p.m., today, July 27, 2022, at Tante Marie, 107 N Main St., Downtown Breaux Bridge. Sponsored by The Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective, an open mic will follow their reading.
Burk explains the writing/reading distinction.
“It’s an enormous difference between writing and reading,” said Burk. “The reading is really a performance. Sometimes I even change it just a little bit so that it kind of reads easier to an audience.
“The writing involves different parts of your brain; it involves thought, you know, what do you want to say, what are you trying to create,” Burk said. “And once it’s written, then it’s a question of how are you going to read it.”
And the answer is: Find the groove.
“People say that if you really want to know how good a poem is, the poet themselves should read it out loud to themselves because poetry, no matter how political and how didactic, it’s supposed to have a kind of rhythmic and musical quality to it,” said Burk. “And you really can’t tell about that until you read it out loud to yourself. If it doesn’t sound right, no matter what I’m saying in it, I have to go back and edit it.
“But the reading it aloud, even to one’s self, that’s not so much the performance part,” she said. “The performance is more when you read it to an audience and you slow down and you read it so that it’s understandable. But not everybody does.
“And I try to remember to do it that way,” Burk continued. “To read it out loud to yourself, you can see a lot of things that need editing.”
Burk has three books out and we may hear a couple of poems from the two earlier ones, Learning to Love Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase. There will also be new works in the reading.
“They’re mostly about how I ended up in Louisiana. Some of it is my reaction to Louisiana,” Burk said of her first two books.
In her third book, Duet, Burk wrote poetry based on photographs by her husband, Leo Touchet. (Editor’s note: A really cool concept that works.)
Burk has been writing poetry for two decades.
“I took my first writing class about 20 years ago,” said Burk. “Sometimes it feels like longer to me, but I didn’t write poetry up until then. After I finished my dissertation, I was done with putting words on paper for the next 40 years. You know, done with it.”
That all changed when she returned to school and enrolled in a writing class.
“Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to start writing poetry,” Burk said, adding she hadn’t read much poetry, nor was she an English major. “But poetry suited my short attention span. I was able to focus and pool that divergent mind into a straight and narrow path. So it worked well for me to tell my stories in poetry. That’s how I got to writing poetry.”
In addition to her three published collections, Burk’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Rattle, Calyx, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Passager, The Literary Nest, Pithead Chapel, PANK, and elsewhere.
Burk has now branched out into creative non-fiction, creative fiction.
“I’m writing prose,” she said. “Some people say my poems are so ‘prosey,’ I thought, well, I might just go ahead and write prose.”
As a result, “I write poems and I have too many words and I write prose and I don’t have enough words. So I’m kind of juggling between the two right now.”
The upside is that as COVID wanes, there’s no shortage of inspiration.
“Everything got kind of stale and dried up around COVID. We were just so isolated. I just really, during COVID, I wasn’t inspired. But now, I’m writing more now that I’m getting out and it feels like life is beginning again.”