The Ohio Poetry Day Association has named David Lee Garrison, Wright State University Professor Emeritus in Modern Languages, and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Ohio native and Professor of English at Pine Manor College in Massachusetts, Ohio Poets of the Year in honor of their recent books. Garrison’s is Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro, Orlowsky’s is Silvertone.
The poets will give presentations and read from their work at the Ohio Poetry Day celebration on October 24th and 25th at the Troy Hayner Cultural Center in Troy, Ohio. The celebration is free and open to the public; details will be announced in mid-September on the Ohio Poetry Day Association website and released to the press.
One poem by Garrison and one by Orlowsky will appear in the anthology, Ohio Poetry Day: Best of 2014. This volume will include winning poems from thirty-six poetry contests administered by the Association and sponsored by individuals and organizations from all over the state.
The Poet of the Year award is decided by judges appointed by the Association. Past winners from Dayton include Deanna Pickard (2004) and Herbert Woodward Martin (2005). Last year’s winner was Lianne Spidel of Greenville.
The State of Ohio designated the third Friday of every October as Ohio Poetry Day in 1938, the first state to dedicate a day for poetry; eventually many other states followed suit.
The title poem from Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro was featured by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser on his website, American Life in Poetry, and other poems by David Lee Garrison have been read by Garrison Keillor on his radio program, The Writer’s Almanac.
“My main goal as a poet is to communicate, so my poems are not hard to understand with a first reading,” Garrison says. “In all of them, however, I try to achieve a depth that invites a second or third reading as well.”
“Most of my poems stem from everyday situations that bring deep emotions to the surface. Some are humorous, and reviewers invariably notice the comic elements in my work. The humor is whimsical at times, but not frivolous; it almost always reveals a hint of darkness reminiscent of that thin line between laughing and crying.”
The following poem by Garrison has been selected as the title poem for an anthology about Ohio that will be published early next year by Ohio University Press.
Every River on Earth
I look out the window and see
through the neighbor’s window
to an Amish buggy
where three children are peeping back,
and in their eyes I see the darkness
of plowed earth hiding seed.
Wind pokes the land in winter,
trying to waken it,
and in the melting snow
I see rainbows and in them
every river on earth. I see all the way
to the ocean, where sand and stones
embrace each falling wave
and reach back to gather it in.
David Lee Garrison taught Spanish and Portuguese at Wright State from 1979 to 2009 and chaired the Department of Modern Languages from 1999 to 2007. He lives in Oakwood with his wife, Suzanne Kelly-Garrison, a lecturer in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State and a novelist.
