introducing: Arda Collins
i had dinner with a US poet laureate and pulitzer prize winner last night (a lesson in participation)
An email went out last fall, to everyone in the UChicago Creative Writing department (of which I am a part—nonfiction 🆙). It was a call for applications to a new program loosely called the “Art of Introducing mentorship,” where students got the opportunity to write and read our own introductions of the writers coming to our Literary Arts Festival this year.
I ended up in a cohort of talented students spearheaded by a talented professor, honing my own introduction for the poet of my choice: Arda Collins.
I spent my chilly St. Paul spring break hunkered down in a coffee shop on Randolph or in the architecture building at the U of M, reading everything Arda’s ever written, and everything that’s ever been written about her. It was wonderful.
And then I had to figure what to say about her. I settled on this:
Hello and welcome to UChicago’s 2024 Literary Arts Lab. This year’s theme is Art & Wonder. We’re incredibly grateful to be able to put on this event, and I’d like to begin by thanking those who make it possible. The Literary Arts lab is presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. They’re a handful.
My name is Jules Yaeger, and I’m a third year studying in the Creative Writing department, as well as the department of Media, Arts, and Design. My work is primarily in nonfiction, specifically with a focus on digital storytelling, but I also have the privilege of working with the many truly inspired students and faculty in poetry.
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It is an immense blessing to have Arda Collins here with us today. The first work of hers I encountered was her poem “Wuthering Heights,” which I had run across online, while scrolling one of my social media feeds. Yes, I have curated my social media feeds so they show me poetry. I admit, online is a terrible place to run across a poem. You’re almost never in the right mindset to slow down and pay it the attention you ought. But that’s where I found Arda Collins.
“Wuthering Heights,” the poem, is about houses, and what’s inside of them, and outside of them. The poem is about how houses entrap or release or provide or protect. The poem is really about memory, and family, and about how things go on. It is not about Emily Bronte’s gothic novel Wuthering Heights. Except, in its final lines, when it is. They read: “This poem / is called “Wuthering Heights” / because the house in that novel is an ongoing / contraption of consciousness, / time, and space. Now can we / be together?”
This was my introduction to Arda Collins. It was an apt one.
The experience of reading one of Collins’ poems is like taking a long walk around your neighborhood, seeing objects, people, houses that you know, and then lighting upon something so beautiful and unexpected that it halts you. “A butterfly… a painting, / A full sky, a face / pointed up, an angel / with a golden aura…it comes in,” Collins says, “the mammoth particulate reality… A freight / of light, peat, ash; / an ocean, blue, like you.” It suspends you entirely in that instant. That’s what it did for me.
This is to say: Collins’ poems are arresting. She captures your attention, and holds it, for exactly as long as she wants it. Her texts are studded with lines or phrases which shine into your eyes and blind you for a second, lines where you can feel Collins turn up the heat until the poem almost catches flame. Where she moves close to you, or pulls, suddenly, away: “Like a day of old sun, / you can hardly believe the world is still here / under the auspices of an afternoon / with eternity on the perimeter. / A slab of invisible, wide force / makes you envision your parents’ burial / under a two-way cloud. / In the wet grass / the sky lightens.”
You’ll get it.
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Arda Collins received her MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, before getting her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Denver. She presently teaches at Smith College, but has also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Victoria University, and NYU. She is a recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Mary Sarton Award in Poetry. Her writing has been featured in many enviable publications, including, but certainly not limited to: The New Yorker, jubilat, and The American Poetry Review. She has two wonderful books of poetry, which are for sale at half-price for students at this very event, courtesy of our wonderful Creative Writing department. Additionally, there will be a Q&A after the reading moderated by Professor Srikanth “Chiku” Reddy during which you, the audience, will have the opportunity to ask Arda questions.
In 2009, the University of Chicago had the pleasure of hosting Arda Collins, just after her first book had been awarded that Yale Younger Poets Prize. Then, Collins read us poems from her first book, It Is Daylight. Now, 15 years later, she has returned to us, and brought another book of poems with her. Her new book, Star Lake, not only lives up to, but exceeds the promise of her excellent first one. There’s a line I love in writer and translator Anne Carson’s poem The Glass Essay. She says: “I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape.” That’s what Collins’ books do, what her poems do—run underneath one another, each one informing the last, all of them playing off one another, responding, addressing, altering. In Star Lake, she harbors the same obsessions as fifteen years prior. She tells us of time—months, afternoons, mornings, seasons, years, generations. She tells us of distance—closeness, intimacy, coldness, touching, leaving, returning. She tells us of herself—she tells us: “I cried out / and my heart unwound / a part of me / toward the air.”
Let Arda Collins unwind a part of herself, today, towards the air between her and you. Relish in it. Let her capture and keep your attention, for as long as she wants it.
Here’s Arda Collins.
post-script:
Arda was wonderful, by the way. I spoke with her in the green room before her reading, as well as at our luxe dinner (on the department) and she is such a kind, thoughtful, dynamic person. A truly great mind. Buy her books.