Interruptions of Daily Life

Blog 5: Interruptions of Daily Life

            As I sat at my event for my final blog of the semester, I just filled with excitement. Now hopefully, that did not come across the wrong way; I was not excited because this is my final blog but instead, because I had attended the perfect event for our class. On November 1^st, I attended ‘Writers at Work’ that is a newly initiated program at Loyola that gives students access to different writers and their insight on what goes on behind the scenes of writing. The speaker for this event was Eduardo Corral, who is currently a professor at North Carolina State, and came to share his book of poems, Slow Lightening. The lessons and insight he had to offer were messages that had been deeply rooted in our class conversations. Unfortunately, my excitement diminished a little when I realized our reading was not a poem this time, but instead a play. While for class we read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, I will focus on how Eduardo Corral’s techniques and viewpoint of writing connected to the Jesuit tradition valued by our class and entire Loyola community.

            Eduardo Corral is the oldest of three Mexican immigrants. Because of his role as the son of two undocumented Hispanic parents, Eduardo assumed the new role of being a translator for this parents everywhere they went. Through this responsibility, Eduardo developed a heightened awareness of language. As a writer, he realized the need for silence between words and the need to listen to surroundings. This mirrors the Jesuit tradition of appreciating everything around you. In his poems, he uses his language as a way to view the world and as a result his works include English, Spanish, and song lyrics. He is not able to appreciate one more than the others because this is what is natural for him.

 Poetry was the last thing that Corral expected to do with his life. However, he, like many writers, was content in his own solitude. Prior to writing, Eduardo Corral was an outsider and thought he was destined for death; He was a gay man coming of age in the time of aids. Eduardo described his childhood as being blindfolded, unable to see what the rest of the world had to offer. He began to break through this barrier when he began to write through which he was able to project imagery and his imagination. What I felt was really keen to our class discussions was when Eduardo explained that his “Poems begin as interruptions of daily life.” He used triggers throughout his daily life and explored these connections. This is exactly what we have done throughout our class. To Eduardo, at the heart of writing is paying attention to the world because we are surrounded by information. He provided an example for this, by sharing with us a poem he had written which was inspired by a conversation he had eavesdropped on while riding the train. From “Mending Wall,” the very first poem we read, to “The Times They Are A-Changin,” the final poem we read- every poem told a story of an interruption of everyday life. In line with the Jesuit Tradition, poetry has enabled a way to immortalize the appreciation for our surroundings. The poems we have read have taken the smallest moment or smallest object and made it an object of discernment.

Now, with my luck, our reading for today was not a poem but a play- The Twelfth Night. The first two acts of the play depict the scene of a love triangle- or quite frankly, maybe even a different shape, with more characters. Orsino is in love with Olivia, who is in love with Cesario (actually Viola), and Viola is in love with Orsino. The play thus far has shared an explicit message about love and has used writing to convey it complexities. In this way, the play is similar to the poems we have read and the message Eduardo shares about the writing of poems.

This class has developed in myself and my classmates the value of everyday life and our surroundings just like the writing themselves do. Each class we dissect a different reading to discover the message it conveys about the environment, human beings, and our world. By attending the talk by Eduardo Corral, it is obvious that writers write with the intention of sharing their works for this purpose.