Wednesday Night Poetry to feature award-winning poet
Award-winning and nationally acclaimed Oklahoma poet Ken Hada will be the feature for Wednesday Night Poetry this week at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave. The weekly open mic session for all poets begins at 6:30 p.m. and Hada will perform at 7 p.m., followed by a second round of open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Four of Hada’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s nationally syndicated program “The Writer’s Almanac” on National Public Radio. In 2010, a collection of his poems, “Spare Parts,” won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Western Heritage Museum and Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. His works have been finalists three times for Oklahoma Book Award, and he recently received the SCMLA Prize for Poetry. In 2017 he won the Glenda Carlile Distinguished Service Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. He has published six volumes of his poetry, most recently “Bring An Extry Mule,” released in 2017 by Purple Flag Press.
Hada received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 2000, and currently teaches courses in Humanities, American and Ethnic Literature at East Central University in Ada, Okla. He also directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival on the campus each April.
Although a native of northeast Oklahoma, Hada spent most of his youth in Boone and Newton counties in North Arkansas. “My family moved from Oklahoma when was I 4 months old,” said Hada. “So for all practical purposes my roots are in Arkansas.” And that is where he wrote his first poem when he was in the eighth grade. It was an assignment for English class, and while he doesn’t remember the whole poem, one line from it has stayed with him: “The teacher could paddle your butt faster than a chainsaw could cut.” Hada recalls, “Each student had to get up and read their poem in front of the class. That line cracked the whole class up, and I liked how that felt. I’ve been writing poetry ever since.”
Most of his work is narrative, and he describes himself as a “vernacular poet” who uses a lot of the colloquialism of the southwest in his works. “I’m not a confessional poet. Most of mine tell stories or reflect nature. I write a lot of landscape poetry,” he said.
In 2011 Mongrel Empire Press published “The River White: A Confluence of Brush & Quill,” which is a collaboration with his brother Duane who is a watercolor artist. In painting and verse the book traces the White River from its source in Dewitt, 700 miles downstream to the Mississippi River. “My brother used the water from the river for his paintings, and the poems are my response to those scenes,” Hada said.
Hada will have copies of his books available for purchase on Wednesday night.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.