Showing posts with label Billy Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Billy Harris. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2007

Billy Harris Reads Poetry at the Spencer Art Museum Feb. 15


Billy Harris, KU English professor, read a chronological selection of poetry, including a poem he presented to his teacher Wendell Berry. He read strong poems about his strong mother (the topic was road rage and I wish I could reproduce the sense of narrative conveyed in compressed word bytes) and a science fiction trilogy, which created an eerily familiar and distorted reality. Among the pieces was "The Famous Colored Writer":

"Are you the famous colored writer?"
"No."
"Funny. You look just like him."

Harris writes with clarity, wit, intelligence.