Thrown in the Throat

For the Distinguished Voices in Literature Event, the author for this event was Benjamin Garcia. He is a poet and most commonly known for his book, Thrown in the Throat, which was a winner of The National Poetry Series. During this event, he read many of his poems from this particular book and then he read a few new things that he has been working on. One thing he kept mentioning throughout the event was about how he likes to make his writing fun or bring some type of enjoyment to it. Even if the reader cannot relate to or understand his writing, he wants people to get something out of it. I did end up enjoying all of his poems and I really liked his writing style. Before each poem, he would give a little background about it, which definitely made a difference when it came to understanding his writing. 

One thing that really stood out in his writing was the different messages he was trying to get across. In the poems from Thrown in the Throat, he included a lot of profanity. To me, I thought it brought humor to his poems. He went on to explain how to use these words were profanity but profanity to him was discrimination and violence in the world. I really loved the way he compared these. This really made me think about how there are so many bigger issues in the world and something as little as a curse word could be a huge problem for someone. Additionally, I thought that having a book of poems with so many curse words could be a huge risk. When I say risk, I mean a risk in the sense of the ability to be able to sell the book. He said that having poems with this much profanity narrows down the market to which he can sell to. I found it brave that he was willing to  still include the profanity to his poems because he thought that it belonged and gave a stronger message and in return, he had a smaller market of people who would buy his book. 

At the end of the event, there was a Q and A. I really loved this part because I was able to hear him answer questions from other people and there was some stuff that hadn’t even crossed my mind yet. One part I found very interesting was when he was talking about how he got published. Originally, I had not realized how hard and expensive it was to become a published author. He said that each time he went to submit his writing, he had to pay at least twenty dollars. For someone who isn’t even published yet, that has to be very difficult financially. I can see where for many authors this can be frustrating and make you lose hope. But for Garcia, he talked about how after he realized that it was reasonable to keep paying that much to submit his writing, he would only submit his writing one time a year and it was only for a prize that he really wanted. After ten years of doing this, he finally had his work published. I found it really inspiring that he was willing to keep doing this for such a long period of time. For myself, I feel like after just a year or two, I would feel extremely discouraged and probably would stop trying. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the event and am looking forward to more events like this in the future.