It is said that Plato believed poets lived among phantoms and so distrusted their interpretations of reality. Ironically, long after the philosopher’s death, it has come to the poet to inherit his ontological struggles, his contemplation of reality and what is.

An over-capacity crowd showed up at the FAVA Gallery on September 28 to hear two Oberlin College poets, creative writing professor Martha Collins and class of ‘84 writer Jonah Winter.

Collins opened the reading with several American sonnets from her 1998 book, Some Things Words Can Do. Instead of the sonnet’s traditional rhyme scheme, these 14 line poems incorporate repetition of a single word; obsessions, according to Collins. Pivoting on small fragments of speech, but carrying heavy social commentary, these dexterous, graceful poems acquainted Sunday night’s listeners with Collins’ tendency to flirt with the disjuncture of language, its meanings and limitations.

Sunday marked the first public reading of Collins’ latest work, a book-length poem called The Blue Front. Completed late this summer, the poet’s fifth book narrates a public lynching her father, William Collins, witnessed as a five-year old child living in Cairo, Illinois. Named after the Cairo restaurant where he sold fruit the summer of the lynching, The Blue Front moves between publicly recorded fact, the gleanings of two years archival research and the tersely imagined experience of five-year old fruit seller William. As listeners hunched in the doorway of the gallery and sought walls for leaning, Collins read excerpts from the 82- page historic text.

In her spare omniscient narration, Collins communicated historical details and sharply imagined scenes of the brutal 1909 lynching of Will “Froggie” James. Like her American sonnets, The Blue Front pushes at the limitations of language to create a striking social commentary, catching listeners in looping, slippery meanings and perspectives and challenging our ability to understand events as they occur. At points, Collins simulated the staccato, pronoun heavy authority of a newspaper report:

Her assailant who gagged with such
cruel force it is thought he carried
her into the alley assisted

the ground showed she was dragged

it is known she was outraged not a doubt
and strangled a virgin unquestionably pure

(Italics indicate these word have been lifted directly from newspaper reports)

Her enjambments of news-clip narrations draw attention to the tenuous nature of “fact.” At other moments in her reading, a minimal lyricism took over, sweeping listeners into last century’s Midwest, a reality where:

The victim hanged, though not on a tree this
was not the country, they used a steel arch
with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this
was a modern event, the trees were not involved.

Collins dedicated her reading to William E. Collins and Will “Froggie” James. The Blue Front is her first book-length poem.

If Plato is right and poets do in fact speak with phantoms, then the next poet who read Sunday night, Brooklyn poet Jonah Winter, must be in touch with an eclectic assemblage of romantic literati, cowboys and plain, un-famous enraged folk.

Creative writing professor David Young introduced Winter, a former student, as a wonderfully imaginative poet who wrote wild, ridiculous and sometimes perfectly awful poetry in his years at Oberlin’s creative writing program. Upon first glance at the smiling poet, a man wearing a fedora, feather sticking crooked from band, a tie patterned like a tropical fish and the jacket of a gray, flannel three-piece suit, this seemed probable. To the students, professors and townspeople in the FAVA, Winter was a familiar sort of crazy: unhinged and temporarily returned from New York.

He began his reading by revisiting John Keats’s “Ode to an Nightingale.” In this poem, “John,” a “slightly pale, effeminate Englishman staying sober one day at a time,” muses on the drinking habits — and thus happiness — of birds to an Alcoholics Anonymous audience. Compulsively sipping from a hand-held ceramic cup, Winter only got more absurd as the night went on, invoking not only dead romantics but a hated, fat academic named Bob, several nineteenth century cowboys, Snow White and the cerebral disease amnesia.

Assuming the rasp of a man who did not know the harm of unfiltered cigarettes, Winters read several of his cowboy ballads. A fusion of romantic lyric ballad and cowboy whisky-wail, these poems dealt with favorite themes of the poet such as unrequited love, sounds like yucc-yucca, mortality and spite.

Winter is the author of several books for children, a few apparently under pseudonym, and one book of poetry titled Maine. The winner of the 2003 Field Poetry Prize, Winter’s latest volume of poetry, Amnesia, will be published this year by Oberlin College Press in the Field Poetry Series.
This was the first reading in the Main Street reading series at the FAVA Gallery. The series, organized by Margaret Young, hosted both local and visiting writers on Sunday nights at the FAVA gallery throughout the year.