Maurice Kilwein Guevara

I went to a Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore reading on 19APR2010. It was a poetry reading. I wasn’t thrilled about this fact. There were many undergraduate students, there to fulfill a requirement for a class, and there were several colleagues of his also in attendance. The general conversation was that of complaining about being there. The poet was introduced to us in the crowded back café of the bookstore. His name was Maurice Kilwein Guevara, a poet from Colombia who teaches University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I did my freshman year of college at UW-Madison, so I immediately perked up. I was like, okay, this guy’s legit, he’s from Wisconsin. But then he walked up to the podium where he would read from, and he was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, a big black and orange Harley Davidson t-shirt, and was kind of scraggly in appearance. He looked exactly like my elementary school principal, but under-dressed. I was surprised by his appearance. When I knew I was going to a poetry reading, I expected some prissy guy in a suit and a light blue button-down shirt. This wasn’t that.

I’ll take you in chronological order of what I was thinking during this reading. First, he started by saying that he knew we were here because we had to be, but that his goal was for us to have fun by the end of his time at the podium. Kind of a good icebreaker, but right off the bat, I felt like he was trying too hard. Anyway…on to his poems. He read from his post-mortem collection a poem from the point-of-view of a pathologist. It was morbid and gross, and the description was phenomenal. I knew exactly what he was describing, and the overall quality of the poem was very smooth and lyrical, as a poem should be. When he was done reading this gruesome poem, and everyone around me had disgusted looks on their faces, Maurice Guevara said playfully, “Yay!” It was kind of awkward, and kind of funny.

He read a poem called “Dorothy Dear,” which was the Wizard of Oz, but set in New York. He read “When the Light Turns Red.” This poem had a lot of description, and this description focused highly on the senses. Maurice told the audience after this poem that “the poet is the professor of the five senses.” His poetry, especially this one, had a lot of Spanish influence. Some lines or phrases would be entirely in Spanish. A student asked him afterward how he decides what will be in Spanish, he just said it depends, and sometimes the Spanish just fits lyrically better out loud.

Then he chewed us out for not clapping. [He explained that at most poetry readings, it’s considered distasteful to applaud between poems, but his philosophy was that if you liked it, you should clap. So then we clapped awkwardly after each poem.]

Then he kind of switched genres into prose poems. He described these as being more lyrical than flash fiction, but longer and more story-like than some other poetry. He read “Augury of my Death,” then a poem a about ants, then “Sometimes I Listen to a Song 6 Times,” and ended with a funny poem about Hector the Colombian.

His advice and insights about poetry included Live the poem. He thought we should really feel the poem and integrate it into our being. He also said, Rhyme if you wanna rhyme. He basically said that any poetry teachers who think rhyming is corny or elementary are wrong, and that rhyming definitely has its place in good poetry. And finally, fittingly with his somewhat off-the-wall character, his message to us was that our responsibility as human beings is to resist the school system whacking out our imaginations. He figures that our American school system ruins the creative minds of a lot of young people by molding it into certain of way of thinking, and following a certain routine all the time. And we should resist this, and write poetry, and be happier people. Interesting—that has some merit, but overall, I don’t really buy it. We can be routine-loving Americans with not a ton of creativity, and still be happy people.