Michael Davidson Reading / November 28, 2007
Event Report
An audience of approximately thirty-five people turned out to hear poet Michael Davidson read in the Arthur Hill Auditorium on the UMaine campus as part of the fall 2007 New Writing Series.
Davidson opened his set with two pieces—”Subject Matter” from Post Hoc and “You Were Saying” from The Arcades—that are scored for two voices (poet & UMaine professor Jennifer Moxley supplied the second voice) on November 28. He then read further from Post Hoc, The Arcades, and “Bad Modernism,” a sequence from a manuscript in process. A question and answer period followed, during which Davidson spoke about the formal and conceptual constraints that shaped his sequence, “Screens,” and about the sources, more generally, of the various projects he’d read from. He also spoke about how the process of losing his hearing forced him to rethink some basic, aural-centered, assumptions he’d had about poetry.
Davidson’s visit to UMaine, which also included a lecture drawn from his forthcoming book, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, was generously co-sponsored by the UMaine Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Study.
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