People passing by the main entrance of Bartlett Hall today may be wondering why there is a gathering of over 30 to 50 students and professors reading and listening to lines of racial, sexual, and political humor and terror.
The Creative Writing Honors course taught by Eric Abbott organized this reading of nearly 20,000 lines of epic poetry from “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” by Frank Stanford. Other UMass faculty and students will be joining in the reading, which is estimated to take over 16 hours and 30 participants to complete. The event will begin today at 8 a.m. and will continue until after midnight.
The reading was inspired by a similar event years ago, and brought to life again by Abbott who is also currently a Master of Fine Arts graduate student.
“Poetry, especially an epic poem, is about community,” Abbott said. “Being a part of something, being involved in something beautiful…as opposed to implicated in something like war. This is something we can be proud of as a culture.”
Abbott, with the help of his creative writing students, decided to organize the event after reading about a similar all-night marathon reading of “The Battlefield” at Brown University in 1983. Today, 19 years later, students and professors, similar to those huddled around a campfire years ago at Brown University, are reciting Stanford’s story. The story is actually a nearly 400-page narrative poem with little punctuation and no chapter breaks.
The students and professors are reading, as poet C.D. Wright wrote in the foreword of the book, “in an African-American vernacular of the rural South,” and from the viewpoint of a generation or two before ours. They are attempting to keep Stanford’s tone while reciting his stories about “freaks” as he calls them, such as the “world’s smallest man,” and moments from his journeys, “where the country is silent and the water is still,” and “death that points out your undone fly and wants to zip it up.”
People interested in hearing the poem are welcome to go inside the main entrance of Bartlett Hall and listen to the reading.
