Sitting between the John Elliot Center and the Cleveland Bagel Company, students pass by a seemingly misplaced yellow house.
Behind the house, if students take a closer look, they will find the Maj Ragain Poetry Park that holds a 12-foot sculpture and multiple poems scattered throughout from residents and students of Northeast Ohio. This is the May Prentice house, which was once home to the first female professor at Kent State and is now the headquarters for the Wick Poetry Center. The Wick Poetry Center, once small and working from a filing cabinet in Satterfield Hall, has grown immensely over the last 35 years. The Wick Poetry Center is a haven for both students and community members to be involved in the creative writing process.
I sat down with Gyorgyi Mihalyi, their director of marketing, and Charles Malone, the outreach director, to get more in depth information about the community engagement the center leads in. Recently, Wick held an event to tribute their Poetry Park to a former professor Maj Ragain, where they held community readings both at the park and Last Exist Books. This was an event that let the community’s collective voice be heard.
Charles Malone dove into many of the events that Wick is involved with. One of the main ways Wick is involved within the community is through a class that can be taken through Kent State called “Teaching Poetry in the Schools”. This class helps “remove all the barriers from writing,” Malone said. Wick is also involved throughout the campus; sharing workshops with a variety of classes, most recently having a print-maker from the school of art in their space. Different members of Wick can be found creating workshops that meet with members of mental health support groups at Coleman Health Services, the LGBTQ Center, the Women’s Center and through creating interactive exhibits using the Traveling Stanzas bus.
The newest exhibit from Wick hails all the way in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral, where they helped remove Confederate-themed stained glass and created a community poem where visitors could add a stanza in order to create “interaction and conversation with the installation,” Malone said.
Wick Poetry Center offers many ways to get involved with the Center, including a poetry workshop that is free to both the community and students at 1 p.m. every Friday. This workshop allows students and community members to congregate for an hour to share their poems and ideas, as well as build a stronger sense of community.
The Wick Poetry’s “mission is to bring poetry into everyday life, no matter where they go or what they do,” Mihalyi said. When asking her about what she wants to see in Wick’s future, Mihalyi said that she wants to create “meaningful collaborations on-campus and off-campus” and ultimately wants to continue to see the center “use poetry for the greater good.”
One of the biggest events to look out for at the Wick Poetry Center includes an event held on World Poetry Day, as well as their big poetry reading of the school year, which lands on April 10th. Throughout the semester, Wick holds a variety of events so there is always a way to get involved and share your voice.
