Iain Haley Pollock stands at the front of Gifford Auditorium behind a podium, staring out at his audience. Students queue the aisles behind microphones, ready and waiting to question him about his recent published book of poems, ‘Spit Back a Boy.’

He was wearing a gray blazer and jeans, with black-rimmed glasses that cut across his face, framed by his scraggly beard and layered, waist-length dreadlocks. With a nervous glance at the students, Pollock grips the podium and nods his head at the first student, motioning the beginning of the Q-and-A session.

A 2007 alumnus of Syracuse University’s graduate creative writing program, Pollock spoke Wednesday evening in Huntington Beard Crouse, continuing the university’s Raymond Carver Reading Series. Students in the ETS 107: ‘Living Writers’ course conducted the Q-and-A with Pollock starting at 3:45 p.m., followed by a reading at 5:30 p.m. The event was free and open to the public.

Pollock began his reading by saying thank you to the university and his old professors, without whom, he said, he could not have written this book.

‘I can’t imagine being the writer I am without coming here,’ he said.

Pollock, smiling, described himself as laid-back. During the Q-and-A, he often gave comical short answers to students’ questions before taking the time to thoroughly answer them. However, when Pollock read his poetry, he became serious and adapted a storytelling voice to emphasize a poem’s meaning, complete with the occasional singing of lyrics or punctuated yelling of words.

‘He was a lot more animated than I thought he would be,’ said Whitney Hoblit, a freshman communications and rhetorical studies major. ‘He almost read it like he wanted it to be slam poetry, but didn’t quite go there.’

Hoblit came to the event because she is currently taking the ETS 107: ‘Living Writers’ course, but said she is glad she came.

‘This was definitely one of the more entertaining readings, and one of my favorites,’ she said. ‘There have been ones where I have been sitting here almost asleep, but this one was enjoyable. He kept it lively and made jokes, and he was an engaging person.’

The collection of Pollock’s poems in ‘Spit Back a Boy’ range in subject matter and meaning, from a lighthearted poem of a father giving his son a haircut in ‘Affection’ to a more thought-provoking poem of a young boy scraping at his mixed, light-colored skin tone with a knife, hoping to find a darker skin color below that he wished he resembled instead in ‘The Recessive Gene.’

Pollock said many of his poems are autobiographical, inspired by personal events from his life. Several of Pollock’s poems in ‘Spit Back a Boy’ reference his identity struggle because of his mixed racial background. Now, he said, he identifies mainly as black.

‘Because of my subject matter, I tend to get many personal questions or questions about race,’ Pollock said. ‘I’m happy to answer those questions, but I’m also a little bit uncomfortable with it because I don’t speak for all African-Americans. I don’t speak for all mixed-race people. I don’t speak for all men. This is my particular experience of something.’

Even though his work is now published, Pollock said he is never completely satisfied with a poem, which is something he learned from his graduate professors at SU. He said his poems went through countless drafts before the book was finally published early this year.

‘I would say I spend more time revising than writing poems,’ Pollock said. ‘I knew it would be five or six years to write the book so that I could spend time tinkering with line breaks, tinkering with images and phrases, adding images that strengthened the logic of the poem.’

klross01@syr.edu 

Published on October 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Kristin: klross01@syr.edu | @kriskross22