Email: "Ohio’s Poet of the Year speaks in Tiffin"
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The highlight of Ohio Poetry Day activities Friday and Saturday at Heidelberg College was an appearance by Martha Collins, Ohio’s Poet of the Year.

Collins spoke about her most recent collection of poems, “Blue Front,” published in 2006 by Graywolf.

About two dozen people from Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin gathered at Heidelberg for the 70th annual Ohio Poetry Day. Faculty member and poet Bill Reyer hosted the event in Pfleiderer Hall on the Tiffin campus.

Friday evening, poets gave readings and participated in writing exercises. An overnight contest challenged the writers to respond to a poem each had chosen from past issues of the journal, “Poetry.” David Kimmel and Ruth Wahlstrom of the Heidelberg English Department judged the submissions Saturday morning.

The winners included: first place, Amy Jo Zook of Mechanicsburg, Ohio; and second and third were Geoffrey Landis and Mary Turzillo, respectively, both of Berea.

Marilyn Tullys, president of Ohio Poetry Day, gave Reyer a decorative plate for making arrangements for the group and presented Zook with a plaque for more than 30 years of dedicated service to Ohio Poetry Day.

Also Saturday, those who had come discussed the winning poems from the Evan Lodge Contest sponsored by Ohio Poetry Day. A book room was open for poets to sell their books and CDs and to purchase the works of other poets.

Participants heard Collins speak about her latest book, “Blue Front,” and read selected poems from its pages. Recently retired from Oberlin College, Collins is the author of four previous poetry books and co-translator for two others. Collins began by explaining the inspiration for the book.

“A few years ago, an African-American friend … told me about a trip that she had taken to Alabama to see the sites of the Civil Rights movement. I was so moved by her account that the following summer, I took that trip, too,” Collins said.

Some of the poems describe the Alabama cities such as Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery. When she returned from the trip, Collins went to New York where another friend suggested she view an exhibit of lynching postcards that was on display.

Collins said she was appalled by what she saw. The cards featured photographs of lynchings with images of bodies that had been hanged or burned. Seeing the postcards brought on a wave of realization about what her father had experienced. She said she was surprised people wanted souvenirs from such gruesome events to share with families and friends.

“They were also shocking to me because they provided me, for the first time, with some background of something my father had told me when I was a kid. We were visiting Cairo, Ill., where he grew up, and he pointed to an intersection in the town and said, ‘I saw a man hanged there when I was a kid,” Collins said.

The poet devoted one poem to Cairo and used her father’s lifetime as a loose framework for the book. The poems chronicle segregation, with its “separate but equal” facilities and services, and the civil rights movement from its early days to the present.

“‘Blue Front’ is the name of the restaurant where my father worked when he was 5 years old. His uncle owned the restaurant, his father was the assistant, and he sold fruit in front of the restaurant. He was so good at making change that people would come just to see him do that,” Collins said.

The lynching took place in 1909, near the business. A white woman had been raped and murdered and a black man had been accused of the crimes. Collins said she researched what her father had seen and learned that about two-thirds of the town’s population of 15,000 had turned out for the public lynching.

“The book is not straightforward narrative of those events. It’s a collage of a lot of components,” Collins said.

In addition to the city poems, Collins included some 14-line, unrhymed poems that focus on the varied definitions of certain words. She also uses confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at Cairo as a metaphor for the mingling of Americans of different races and ethnic backgrounds. At the end of the book is poetic advice for readers to “make change.”

Collins sold and signed copies of “Blue Front” after her presentation. Ohio Poetry Day contest winners received their awards and read their winning poems. The activities concluded with an open poetry reading.

 

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