Chris Wick: His Talk About Wick Poetry

Chris Wick gave a thoughtful -- and very personal -- talk during the dinner Friday night (April 24) that celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center.

We wanted to share his remarks with you.

Hello, it’s very good to be here.

First I’d like to thank everyone involved here in Kent and the surrounding areas who contribute to the Wick Poetry Center and the outreach program, the students, their instructors and other faculty, and it bears repeating this especially includes Maggie Anderson and David Hassler and their office. It has been a joy to know them and not only be invited to participate but hustled into writing poetry just like everyone else.

I struggled with what to say on this momentous occasion. And for anyone who knows me, being who I am, I wanted to talk about myself. So I will start with that and move on to what I believe this program is really about.

When I was a kid, I used to turn down the sound and the picture on the television as if it were off and leave it to the next person to figure out. I imagined my dad, who has very little technical ability, cursing, wondering what was wrong with the “damn thing.” It was a social experiment I suppose and a mischievous way of expressing myself.

But today what the image represents to me is a metaphor for what so many of us chose to do to ourselves because we fear being heard and seen for who we are. We turn down the sound and the picture as a way of coping with everyday life, perhaps to avoid confrontation, to temper our wild enthusiasm, to control our fear of the unknown and certainly to avoid feelings of loss and grief.

I believe this was the case for myself, I lost my brother and my cousin and in a strange way I didn’t know that I wouldn’t die as well somewhere in the same sea of my teenage years. But when I was sixteen I started to turn up the sound, so to speak.

In a poetry class in Northern Michigan, far from my home, I wrote something that my teacher said was very good. In fact what he said was, “Up until now, Chris, I didn’t think you were ever going to write a good poem, but this one,” and he closed his fist in his typical expression of grit and power, “this one is really something.”

It was about Interstate 10, a flat, barren stretch of asphalt across the Arizona desert. It proves what my Uncle Bob has said to me, "Chris, if you don't write it no one else ever will." It was a cornerstone to my identity at the time and allowed me to distance myself from the illusion of my own demise. Poetry saved my life.

Poetry is in the words of the woman who gathers her family to her death bed to speak one last time, it is the defiant language of a child who speaks truth to power, and every line we’ve ever struggled over to let our voice be known. It’s critical to our society that poetry have it’s place so those who choose to can claim their identity through it and Kent has proven to be an undeniable foothold in our journey forward.

The Wick Poetry Program has been a 25 year investment and we can attribute the great returns, not to the money invested, but to the willingness and courage of those who write and listen to, read and teach poetry here in Kent and the surrounding areas.
All of the people who choose to invest in the expression of their own identities and listen to the words that laid open the identities of others - the one thing beyond food, shelter and clothing that I believe empowers us to make progress in whatever else we do.

One of the most profound examples, for me, occurred last spring. A guidance counselor who worked at the Maplewood Career Center , Lori Bryte, who had attended each of the Giving Voice performances of the outreach program became ill suddenly the semester before and died shortly afterward.

Despite the heartache of loss that I witnessed in the faces of the students and other teachers, there was a drive to claim the experience as their own. They would not ignore or turn down the sound of their sorrow. They called out to the teacher, wrote poems addressed to her, stood up on stage and cried to claim their ownership of grief. It was sublime.

Standing here for Stan and Tom, I am honored by the endeavors of those who write their own poetry here in this corner of Ohio. To any of you who couldn’t help but write a poem because David walked into your classroom and dragged it out of you, to any one who wandered into a reading and was caught by the cool bearing of Maggie’s introduction of a poet, to any of you here today – thank you.

I am honored to be in your presence and speaking for my family on this occasion celebrating 25 years of the Wick Poetry Program, we are grateful for the opportunity to be of service. Thank you.