Award-winning poet Lenore Weiss is drawn to the language and music of the words in writing poetry. Weiss was excited to share that language and music when the English department welcomed her to a poetry reading.
Weiss shared a wide range of poetry about speaking Hungarian around her parents as a child, working from home as an adult, going to Istanbul over the summer and a story called “Video Game.”
Weiss sat on a table in the front of the room, and her audience leaned forward to listen as she read from her recent publication “Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island.” It is a personal collection that she divided into three parts of her life.
“The first is about my Hungarian-American background and growing up in New York City. I have always wanted to leave big cities. I have been trying to do that my entire life,” Weiss said. “The second part of it is about my middle period of being a wife and a mother, experiencing life and death and all of the things that shape us as adults into consciousness.”
Weiss’ poems from this collection also celebrate her Jewish culture and the presence of technology. Her other collections include “Tap Dancing on the Silverado Trail” and “Sh’ma Yis’rael.”
Creative writing professor Jack Heflin didn’t even have to find Weiss. She found him.
“She got in touch with me when she got into town. She was looking for opportunities to meet other writers and to read on campus,” Heflin said. “She has a lot of different types of poems. I like poems that come out of common experience, like going into the DMV and coming out with a poem.”
One of the first poems Weiss wrote in Louisiana was called “A Song for Guns and License.” She was applying for a driver’s license when she spotted a sign that made her curious. It was for a raffle to raise money for a school. The prize was a rifle.
Weiss believes that moving from urban cities, such as New York City and Chicago, to a more rural area has changed her approach to writing. Being here has allowed her to put herself and her writing as a priority in a way that she couldn’t before. She can hear herself better.
“I think writing and being a person is always a balancing act,” Weiss said. “We all have to find our own balance.”
Sophomore occupational therapy major Logan Mclean went to Weiss’ reading for 10 bonus points. But she was soon leaning forward with the rest of the audience, eager to hear more poems.
“It was different because it was so modern,” Mclean said. “It was funny to hear poems with references to iPods and computers.”
Weiss is now living in Sterlington and is working on a memoir called “Breakdance.” A tale of her survival, ancestry and growing up under difficult circumstances.
