Wednesday Night Poetry features award-winning poet
Award-winning poet Red Hawk will be this week’s feature for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic session for all poets begins at 6:30 p.m. and Red Hawk will perform at 7 p.m., followed by another open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Red Hawk was a 1991-92 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University before receiving his Ph.D. in English at the University of Cincinnati. For the past 21 years, he has taught composition at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
He started writing poetry 56 years ago as a freshman in college. “It opened my eyes and heart to the unknown. My inspiration comes from an unknown but trustworthy source,” he said in a news release.
So far, Red Hawk has had eight books of his poetry published and two nonfiction titles. His latest poetry collection, “Return To The Mother; A Lover’s Handbook,” contains 94 poems inspired by the ancient Chinese spiritual master Lao Tsu. The themes of Red Hawk’s poetry include love, death, “Mother Earth” and attention to inner-life details. His poems have appeared in numerous national publications including the Atlantic and Poetry magazines. The renowned editor of the New York Quarterly, William Packard, said, “Red Hawk is like Walt Whitman because he can contain multitudes, and yet he is always so authentically himself … Red Hawk has the rarest of all virtues … a sense of civilization,” a news release said.
In 1996, Red Hawk was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
His poem, “What Worship Is,” the story of his cousin hitting a rabbit with his car and stopping to bury it, won the 2014 Poetry of the Sacred competition sponsored by the Center for Interfaith Relations in Louisville, Ky. His book “Raven’s Paradise” won the 2009 Bright Press Poetry Prize and his book “Journey of The Medicine Man” was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award in 1983. That book, and several others, were illustrated by Hot Springs artist Gary Simmons.
Of his work, Red Hawk said, “One of my reoccurring themes is man’s relationship to our Mother Earth and the love of our Mother Earth.”
A devotee of meditation master Osho Rajneesh, Red Hawk, who labels himself as a “fiscal conservative, social liberal and environmental radical,” attributes self-remembrance and self-observation as the major influences in his life and poetry. His two nonfiction titles are about those principals.
Red Hawk has performed his poetry in over 80 venues nationally and shared the stage with such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and inaugural poet Miller Williams.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.