“Feast Your Ears Soiree”
On Friday, December 2nd 2022, Bennington students spanning from first-years to seniors flocked into Leigh’s common room for a student-created-and-led literature reading. The event was called Feast Your Ears Soirée with a lineup of 15 of Bennington’s top-tier literature students. Only 13 of the 15 ended up reading due to scheduling conflicts. The hosts of this evening were Sophie Jefferies and Severn Davies, two literature students in their senior year at Bennington.
From the get-go, the event felt so classically Bennington. The audience congregated on couches and got comfortable on the floor with glasses of boxed wine. When reading, the writers sat in an armchair with a grand piano behind them, talking into a microphone. Sarah Lore started the night off with a fast-spoken stream-of-consciousness essay as people kept gathering inside. Next, Finbar Labelle read some poetry, prefacing, “I thought about doing the more polished things but decided I would do the things I am excited to keep writing,” a statement that seemed to echo amongst the readers. The reading was fun and scrappy, in typical Bennington fashion. Labelle’s standout poem was “A Crying Robot” about feeling like a robot– too perfect to live. Then, Gerardo Azpiri-Iglesias proceeded with a series of strong poems dealing with intense personal relations, ranging from the familial to the traumatic.
Feast Your Ears co-host Sophie Jefferies read a few poems that reminisced about youth and nostalgic pasts. Before her first poem, she warned the audience that Bennington Director of Poetry , “Michael (Dumanis) has been getting mad at me for not writing poems with genders, so here’s a gendered poem.” Laughter erupted across the room as she read on. Co-host Severn Davies followed with a short story “fresh off the presses.” The excerpt she read told a slice-of-life story about a young couple.
Everyone who read looked excited to be there and the crowd maintained that energy. Eliza Henderson shared an amusing poem taking on a bug’s persona. Her poems were entertaining and energetic, and in one she proclaimed, “Ruby’s hot but I don’t fuck with redheads” and later, “my shame is immaculate.”
Toward the end, Karoli Esparza read from a large sketch pad. Starting, she said, “These next two poems are dedicated to my institutionalized education.” As she read the words, “The war of tomorrow is coming to school,” the statement was felt by every student in the audience currently experiencing finals season.
After the reading, I stood outside shivering in the brisk cold and got the chance to ask Jefferies and Davies about creating Feast Your Ears. I asked them why, in their senior years and at the end of the term, they decided to host this event. Jefferies tells me, “There were no readings for a really long time and we went to this one literature reading and were like, “You know what? The poets that come to visit to read are of a different generation and the poetry that inspires me the most are our contemporaries’. I’m inspired by my peers and I’m inspired by my classmates.” Davies corroborates this adding, “There was really a deficit of literature events. A lot of our friends are literature students and a reading is really fun. It’s a celebration and it’s not in a classroom setting.” They both tell me about the Bennington phenomenon of most Literature students rotating through the same teachers and how it spawns interesting content amongst their peers. “We are on similar pages but have different voices that come off differently,” Jefferies tells me.
I ask them about their feelings on the turnout and completion of the reading: “I think it was a success. I’m really happy with the people who read, and it was exciting to have certain people who don’t usually read,” Jefferies says. They both affirm that they want the spirit of this event to live on, with more readings like this. Because this reading featured heavily upperclassmen writers, the two share a desire for another student-led reading with more underclassmen students. Davies adds, “Silo is coming back, thank God! When I was a freshman, those readings really inspired me to pursue poetry here. It’s inspiring as an underclassmen to see what your peers are doing.”
The general consensus of the evening seems to be the importance of sharing amongst the community and network of writers at Bennington. “It’s wonderful to have that world,” Jefferies says, continuing, “We work alongside people we respect. That is such an amazing thing.” As some of the audience lingered on Leigh’s front lawn, bundled up with their friends and their Franzia, Davies concluded to me: “We just pulled it together as buddies celebrating each other.”
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