Iowa Writer’s Workshop Grads Return with Quirks and Religion

On April 14th, Arda Collins and Jonathan Thirkield, both graduates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, returned to Prairie Lights to read for the ongoing series, Live From Prairie Lights.

They read to a packed house, though the crowd seemed swollen with students required to attend for a class project. The crowd thinned about halfway through the reading, many students leaving after they had made their compulsory appearance. I sat next to two students who made their dashing exit halfway through the show.

Though the ranks dissipated for the reading, I though both poets read remarkably well, though there was a definite contrast in poetic style and their chosen styles of reading as well.

Arda Collins read first, mostly choosing poems from It Is Daylight, which, as her introduction noted, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest in 2008. From the beginning, she seemed nervous reading her poetry, which was only more emphasized by the neurotic quality of her poetry, which frequently placed the speaker of her poems in psychologically restricted dilemmas. At one point, she read a poem in which the speaker thought she was “so ugly I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to drive.” The audience timidly laughed at this self-deprecation, which was very prevalent throughout her reading. Most of her poems seemed to be in free verse form, though her voice fell at the end of each line. This falling voice lent some affection the poems, which gave the reading a sense of intimacy that I do not think would be apparent in simply reading the poems, which are often wrought with savage images and observations of the psychological limitations of basic action in the modern world. The voices of her poems often seemed lonely, though not bitterly lonely. She also seemed perplexed by religion in her poems, saying in one of them “I don’t know how to pray but I would try,” showing that the desire for some sort of spirituality exists though confusion and indecision, like in many other aspects of her poetry, reign supreme. Throughout her reading, Collins’ voice remained in sync with much of her content, and her quirky wit seemed at home in a world where “adorable adults always seem like untrustworthy alcoholics.”

Jonathan Thirkield took the podium after Collins and immediately began to read with very little introduction. His voice and poetry contrasted with that of Collins in a number of ways. His poems had a musical quality that was only emphasized by the various musical references that he made. The lines seemed to bob up and down in their unusually varied iambic forms. His voice had a soft and soothing tone with a modicum of fragility, which commanded a reverent silence from the audience. This only accentuated the ephemeral quality of his disparate images, which came and went just as quickly as his voice did. The most notable poem of his was one done in twelve series based on the mystery plays for York. The mystery plays for York, as Thirkield informed the audience, was a display put on by various guilds in 15th century York of the twelve stations of the cross. Thirkield does twelve sections on the mindset and images surrounding each guild’s representation of the scene. They were all done in present tense, which seemed to beg the audience to contrast the display of religion in these 15th century guildsmen with the portrayal and representation of religion in modern society.

Written by Sean Ehni who loves Mario Kart