Fern Davye Performs Poetry

"Let's pretend you are all dinner guests at my cottage in the woods," Fern Davye announced after seeing the small turnout for her poetry reading at the Life Science Center's Boyer Auditorium on Friday night.

Davye used the intimacy of the setting to answer many questions from the audience, and engage in discussions of the poems she read. The aura she created capitalized on the emptiness of the auditorium, which consisted of a handful of IDP students and a couple of faculty members. Davye's unique and unrelenting performance was a mixture of reading and theatrics. It was sometimes deeply sorrowful, sometimes intensely angry, and sometimes overtly sexual, but always emotionally charged.

Traveling around the country, reading an eclectic batch of contemporary international poems that span from Belgrade to Buenos Aires, Davye describes her work as "performing poems that lift right off the page. My work exists at that moment where music and language come together." She incorporates singing, facial and bodily gestures, and dancing into her act. Friday night's performance began with her reciting an Adrienne Rich poem through song, screams, body language, and humor.

Borrowing from Rich, Davye said her mission in performing is to "turn pulsations into images for the relief of your body and the reconstruction of your mind."

During a poem by Barbara Kingslover, the performer flaunted her sexuality by swinging her hips and touching herself suggestively. The atmosphere was so intimate that Davye stared at audience members during long dramatic pauses in the poem, causing them to squirm uncomfortably in their seats. She later confessed that she loves reading that poem, because the intense eroticism of it always makes her audience uncomfortable.

Carrying as many as five-hundred poems with her to each reading, Davye spontaneously decides which poems to read through a combination of audience reaction and her own moods. At the Boyer Auditorium, she read poems by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Fransisco Alacorn, and Adrienne Rich among many others.

Her reading of two of Pablo Neruda's love sonnets was very popular, and upon their completion several audience members jumped up and immediately asked how they could get their hands on these poems.

Davye later told her listeners that she has all one hundred of Neruda's love sonnets memorized. The event was cosponsored by The Office of Special Academic Programs, The Sociology Department, The Theatre and Dance Department, and The Women's Center.

The small turnout for the event was attributed to its Friday night staging and lack of publicity. But it still was a charged and unique display, and a rare opportunity to see contemporary poems in performance at Trinity.

Traveling over 250 days a year, Davye is a self-described troubadour. "Poetry to me is not a career, but a way of life," she told her Friday night audience. In addition to bringing her poems to colleges across the nation, Davye also guest lectures in graduate poetry classes, and reads poems on-air for National Public Radio.

She concluded her performance by commenting that she would like to return to Trinity for another reading in the future, but hopefully with a larger audience next time.