Hannah Baumgardner - Attending Honors Program Events (3 points)
Hannah Baumgardner (C/O '26) - Attending Honors Program Events (3 points)
Last semester, I attended a poetry workshop hosted by the Honors Program and Professor Ariana Benson. During the session, Professor Benson discussed how memory can be a source of beauty, resistance, or comfort, depending on how you bring it back to life. Additionally, we discussed Saidiya Hartman's concept of "critical fabulation," meaning, "the use of storytelling and speculative narration as a means of redressing history's omissions, particularly those in the lives of enslaved people" (MoMA).
With that definition in mind, Professor Benson had participants browse various books of poetry -- Unshuttered: Poems by Patricia Smith and Bluest Nude: Poems by Ama Codjoe, for example -- to see how the poets used critical fabulation, if at all. Professor Benson then had us workshop our own pieces, directing us to reflect on narratives of history that may have been overlooked and to try giving them a voice, whether person, place, object, or event.
It was fascinating to hear what students believed had been overlooked in history. One student wrote a poem about the trees in her front yard that watched her family come and go. Another student wrote a poem about Breonna Taylor's bed, the feeling of being soaked from fear, and then losing its purpose with the loss of her life.
After the workshop, I wrote my own poem from the perspective of hardwood floors, reflecting on how their sound changes over the years. For whatever reason, I have always been intrigued by hardwood floors and the sound of different footsteps traveling through a house. I can always tell the sound of my mother approaching my room versus my sister, and this has always made me wonder how distinguishable everyone's gait is, from tiny, spry feet to sluggish, elderly men. After three years of academic writing and research papers, it was refreshing to engage in creative writing and make something purely for myself.
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