Ohio's longest-running poetry series says goodbye after 39 years
It’s a Monday evening at Bossy Grrls Pin-Up Joint, and the Old North bar is filled with poets and poetry-lovers. They’re here for the Poetry Forum, a weekly reading series and longstanding Columbus institution.
Steve Abbott, the group’s de facto leader, takes the stage and explains the rules. The event always starts with a featured poet. (Tonight’s guest is Sayuri Ayers, who recently released the poetry collection “Mother/Wound.”) After that, there’s an open mic. Twelve people read, and each is allotted five minutes or two poems — whichever comes first.
Abbott opens the evening with a reading of “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
It’s a beautiful poem about finding joy in difficult moments, and the role memories play in one’s happiness. It’s also a fitting poem for the Poetry Forum as it wraps up its final run. After 39 years, the Poetry Forum is ending. By Abbott’s estimate, it’s the second-longest running weekly poetry series in the country. (First place goes to the poetry night at Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans.)
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The Poetry’s Forum final show is July 31. The decision to end wasn’t made lightly, said Abbott, 73, of the North Side. He mentioned the difficulties of finding people to keep the Poetry Forum going, the amount of work hosting a weekly event entails and the lingering effects of the pandemic.
“Everything has a lifespan,” Abbott said. “This thing was started to provide a specific kind of service. Maybe it's time to just let that down.”
The Poetry Forum was started in 1984 by a group of friends and poets. At the time, the Columbus Museum of Art hosted Poets in the Gallery, and local poet Michael Vander Does ran the summer program Poetry in the Park. But the group wanted to establish an ongoing weekly poetry reading.
At the time, Abbott was just getting off the ground as a poet. In the summer of 1984, Ellen Carter featured his poem “Elijah Pierce Wood Carver” in her Columbus Dispatch column, “The Poet’s Corner.” It was Abbott’s first published poem.
When Abbott was asked if he’d be interested in helping to establish a weekly reading, he immediately said yes. Abbott, along with Cheryl Abdullah, John Cropp, Mary Kenney Rumm, Homer Weathers, Elizabeth Ann James, Jack Boenninghofen and William Redding, hosted the first Poetry Forum in October 1984 at the now-shuttered campus bar Larry’s.
“It was a real funky place,” Abbott said of the beloved local spot. “It had the most interesting jukebox on High Street. … And the graffiti — at least on the men's room wall; I never visited the women's — was some of the most weirdly intellectual offbeat kinds of things that I've ever seen. So, it was just a perfect place for a poetry reading.”
After its first year, the Poetry Forum applied for an Ohio Arts Council grant in order to pay its featured poets. After about 10 years, the group was able to raise enough money on its own to pay performers. The team also published a couple of chapbooks called “Larry’s Poetry Review.”
When Larry’s closed in 2008, the Poetry Forum moved to Rumba Cafe, then Kobo before finally settling at Bossy Grrls in 2013. The event has hosted about 1,000 readers — including repeat performers. The lineup has featured well-known poets such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Maggie Smith, Terrance Hayes, Gordon Grigsby and Scott Woods.
“For me, going to the Forum is like going to the gym,” said Woods, of Columbus, who also owns Streetlight Guild, a performance space and gallery on the Near East Side. “It worked different creative muscles for me. And so, the things that I saw, books that I maybe didn't understand, I could go to the Forum and get some clarity. There's something about seeing that kind of work in the real world that makes it come alive for you, and the Forum was really good for that.”
Columbus-based writer Hanif Abdurraqib first learned about the Poetry Forum around 2011. At the time, there was a poetry reading happening almost every night in the city, he said. There was Writing Wrongs on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, there was Writers' Block Poetry Night, co-founded by Woods. (It wrapped in December after 24 years.) Abdurraqib hosted Pen & Palette on Thursdays. Every third Friday, there was the Writers' Block offshoot First Draft. And on Mondays, there was the Poetry Forum.
“Poetry Forum is interesting to me because people go there, for real, to hear poems,” said Abdurraqib, a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, who first read at the Poetry Forum in 2014 and will read again July 24. “People are just waiting to hear what you can do. There’s a real interest in, 'Can you write? What is your work sounding like?' That was vital to me.”
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Somewhere along the way, Abbott became the unofficial leader of the Poetry Forum. “Partly truth here, partly in jest: I outlived everybody,” he said. “I was just into this thing that we'd started as kind of a cultural public service, and now it had become an institution.”
As the Poetry Forum prepares to say goodbye, Abbott has mixed feelings. He will miss the weekly camaraderie. There are some nights he’ll never forget, like when Amit Majmudar read at the Poetry Forum two weeks after he was selected as the state’s first poet laureate. Or hearing Maggie Smith, a childhood friend of his niece, make her Poetry Forum debut.
“We were ragtag, and we were loosey-goosey, and we had to come up with rules, like, ‘You cannot use a poem to attack a member of the audience,’” he said. “So, you know, it was an adventure.”
It’s an institution that makes Abbott proud. And he’s happy to pass the reins to the next generation of Columbus poets.
“People saw what was possible, because a number of people came together and they said, 'This is what the city needs,’” Abbott said. “And my personal dictum is, 'Look for what needs to be done, then do it.' And that's what I'm hoping will happen in the wake of the Poetry Forum.”
@britt_moseley
At a glance
The Poetry Forum takes place 7 p.m. on July 10, 17, 24 and 31 at Bossy Grrls Pin-Up Joint, 2598 N. High St. Free admission. For more information, visit columbuspoetryforum.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Poetry Forum to end after 39 years
