House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear fresh featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet each Monday. For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.

Our first live recording in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center is tomorrow night – November 2nd at 9 PM. The recording will feature poet Peter Myers ’13. Please join us.

This week’s featured reader: Maya Odim ’10

Maya Odim ’10

From the editor – On Maya’s Poetry:

Maya Odim’s poetry builds itself out of the union of multiple spaces, or out of their convergence. Her poems are both confrontational and accepting. They make a remedy for fear out of themselves, as if they do not wish to change their environment, but only to navigate it. Maya’s command over a clean narrative style and the amalgamation of voices and stories into a poetics with a single, formidable resonance makes the reader, or the listener, metabolically braver by each line.

Bio: Maya is a daughter of Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Carlton Odim, sister to Chaka Patterson and Rashid Johnson. She is class of 2010.What I’m Trying To Tell:

For Chaka and Rashid

i talk white with my size ten feet and my Nigerian hips bouncing wildly north to Cuban salsa’s, screaming this African America (my body born into soil) in the night scaring me into accepting what scares me because I think its part of the dark, when its not. Wearing rings from India and Mexico and mother’s jewelry box and knocking on solid wood mantels like they don’t make them anymore except for the ones in grandmaws house in Youngstown. And knocking on solid wood like my father every time he passes something put together. Looking towards my days with gray hair, spinning grandmaws story from North Carolina and Warren County, jumbling my words all into paragraphs of cotton picking and worms in the fields, and raising fists Biafran like not paying attention to what the news paper says about me. This is my prose piece for all – for all of the essays that didn’t get me into school and the interviews that didn’t get me out; I’m in this with sore hip joints and heavy memories maybe painlessly lifting their scars that leave me wondering about what the points of scars aren’t, which is to leave a mark; that leave me wondering when I will wonder no more. Knowing I will only do that once I stop wondering.

I talk black with my size ten feet and my Nigerian hips bouncing wildly north to Cuban salsa’s, screaming this African American (my body born into soil) screaming how I talk American – how I talk ropa vieja and fufu. Telling this how I talk through the libations I’m leaving; telling this real loud. How my knees bend, how my eyes water in the morning, how my certainty lies in spontaneity and patterns – how if they try and stop you from being you, you get up and be you some where else.

When you work on the core everything else falls into place; don’t need a structure to write a poem, don’t need a template to make life nice – don’t even need these words to carry on, but ya need the ones that came before them cause you have to know where you came from to carry on.

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/speakingwithdistance.mp3″] Speaking with Distance

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/carryon.mp3″] What I’m Trying to Tell

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/loveletter.mp3″] Love Letter to Myself

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/mayafullinterview.mp3″] Full Interview

Note: About eight minutes into the interview, I asked Maya if she thinks that there is space on this campus for all of the styles of writing that are produced here. While Maya didn’t feel comfortable with her answer to the question, I left the question itself in the recording so that we can each think about it, and about how we impact these spaces and their production.