Using Things: Poetry with Martha Collins (via Zoom)

This four-hour workshop will begin with an hour-long discussion of mostly inanimate (but also some living) objects or “things”: how to pay attention to them, how to use them in poems. We’ll explore several published poems that feature such “things”—as compelling descriptive details, as metaphors, as speakers (or addressees), and as other (sometimes quirky) occupiers of poetic space. The last three hours of the workshop will be spent in careful discussion of your own poems, which need not (but may) address the subject of the workshop. Please send a copy of a poem, no longer than one page, to martha.collins@oberlin.edu by noon on Thursday, March 21.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 12 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, 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 that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). Her awards include an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, two Ohioana awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. Collins has published five volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese, most recently Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung(Milkweed, 2023), and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com