Benjamin Garcia

I Attended the event Distinguished voices with Benjamin Garcia. Benjamin Garcia is a poet who shared his poems in the Corey Union Fireplace lounge. He shared the book Thrown in the Throat which is an award winning book. This book won the National Poetry series and the Eugene Paul Nassau Poetry Prize. Garcia read a few of his poems from this book but then also jumped into some new work that he was working on. Garcia was a very good speaker and gave background on each poem before reading them to help people get an understanding of them. This was great because many people even myself struggle to understand some poems and it gave a better understanding to what as going on and what it was about. Garcia said his main objective when righting is that people get something from it like excitement even if they don’t understand the poem. 

One common theme I found from all of his writings was language. Garcia talks about how profanity to him his hate and discrimination. I found this interesting because most profanities are used in those situations but I also understand how most of the time it isn’t used for that. Language is a big aspect in writing because that can take a simple topic into a more complex topic. Each one of his topics were worded in a way that made more light be shed to a topic he questioned. I found it interesting that he would use profanity because that causes a smaller group that you can sell to. I found this interesting because if he wanted to shed more light on these topics you would want a larger group to sell to. 

I liked the Q and A because he talked a lot about writing advice which can go for anything. I also liked this because you can hear his responses to ordinary everyday people. This is good because usually a question you have someone else ends up asking.