I attended the Lucille Clifton Poetry Series reading with E. Ethelbert Miller at HCC.

What
surprised me about this event was that it was not the type of presentation I assumed it would be.
I assumed that it would be involving a poetry reading about social events and problems in
society, but it was just someone presenting their anthology of poems that they themselves.
The only voice that was presented was the speaker themselves. He began by presenting the poem
of another poet, but then the rest of event was him reading his own poems.
Some of the things discussed was changes in culture and society. There was no primary focus on
social justice, and I felt that a lot of what the speaker talked about could be summed up as
things arent the same as when I was young and I dont like it.
I did not connect to anything at all during this experience. Like I stated before, it was mostly
about the author talking about his experiences growing up and what he notices. There were some
poems that did catch my attention emotionally, such as his the loss of his mother and the
difficulty of connecting with family and others. What took me the most out of the immersion was
the atmosphere of the whole event itself. The speaker was making jokes and laughing along with
the audiences. That is not bad, but for what I was expecting of it, there was too much humor.
Overall, it was not a bad event, but it had nothing to do with social justice.