How Can I Write Poems About THAT? with Martha Collins (in person at HVWC)

Racism, economic inequality, the climate crisis, trauma: from the global to the personal, from headlines to history, our times and lives present us with troubling issues that may seem hard to address in poems. In the first hour of this four-hour workshop, I’ll use published poems to discuss ways to enter these difficult territories, and poetic strategies to use when you get there. The rest of the workshop will be spent discussing your own poems, which may but need not relate to the workshop theme.

NB: This class will take place in person at HVWC and will be capped at 12 students. All students will be required to show proof of vaccination.

Please e-mail a copy of one one-page poem that you’re not yet satisfied with to me at martha.collins@oberlin.edu by Monday October 17th.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006).Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching the poet’s father witnessed as a child, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library; both Blue Front and White Papers won Ohioana awards. Some of Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). A fifth co-translated volume, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, with Nyugen Ba Chung, will be published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.