Seeing the (In)visible in language

By Kirstie Hettinga

The Collegian

THOUGH SHE IS not nervous about speaking, Sharon Bryan thinks she must have been crazy when she chose to speak about poetry and painting.

Bryan, the current distinguished poet in residence at Fresno State, will speak about ekphrastic poetry, or poetry about paintings, on Tuesday.

Her talk, entitled, “The (In)visible” came about because when she began to write seriously she felt that she had more in common with painters than with fiction writers. She said she wanted to bring this into her speech.

“I don’t paint and don’t really know much about it, so I wanted to think more about why poetry had more in common with painting than with fiction writing,” she said.

Bryan is a traveling writer and professor. She has taught in states all over the country including Washington, Michigan and Kansas. Her constant moving is enhanced by her reluctance to settle into a singular academic position. “I really don’t like academic life, I love teaching. But I’m a writer not an academic,” Bryan said.

Bryan makes Washington her home when she is not teaching, but doesn’t know if she would be returning because of the increased residential and commercial development that she sees.

“I don’t know where to go,” she said. After her semester at Fresno State she may teach at San Diego State. Bryan was thrilled when she was asked to come to Fresno. “Every spring they invite a poet to come and be distinguished poet in residence and I never got to be distinguished before,” she said. Bryan said Fresno is well known as a poetry community.

Bryan is not from a poetic community. She grew up in a small town outside Salt Lake City. She said through her love of reading, poetry was a natural thing, but that her first works were sentimental and terrible.

Today Bryan is inspired by conversations with friends and students. “Language is really at the heart of it for me. It’s all how do we say what we say, how does language shape what we see,” she said. One of her books, “Flying Blind,” was published around the time she lost three friends to cancer.

Bryan was living in Seattle and didn’t realize until after “Flying Blind” was printed how the loss of her friends had influenced her work. “It’s really just steeped in those deaths, I think in the face of all that death and that sadness, they were all so, in different ways, heroic,” she said.

Bryan who studied anthropology as a graduate student said a lot of her poetry focuses on life and “what it means to be human.”

She said humans are the only animals that know they are mortal. “How do you live knowing you’re going to die?” she asked.

Bryan said she is aware of the finite nature of her life. “I only have so much time left, I feel like I have to spend my time where it matters, doing what I know how to do,” she said.

Bryan knows poetry but her talk is also based on art, of which she admits she is a novice. “Why did I pick a topic I know so little about? I’m not an art history major, but that’s partly why I’m really interested in what we don’t know,” she said. “I’m not nervous about speaking, now I am curious to see if I can pull it all together.”

Bryan believes listening is more important than seeing which is why her talk is “(In)visible.”

“I more interested in what we can’t see than what we can see. I think that’s what art is about,” Bryan said.

Bryan said her speech would be about the interaction of art and poetry. It will focus on “how poetry and painting bounce off each other, the conversation between painting and poetry and what kind of sparks that throws off.”

Bryan’s “(In)visible” is this Tuesday, Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. in the Smittcamp Alumni House.

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