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SPEAKER: A Saint Paul poet has been named this year's Most Promising Young Poet. A 20-year-old Augsburg College student, Donte Collins, was given the Academy of American Poets Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, for his work written last fall. His award winning poem is called What The Dead Know By Heart. And Donte Collins joins me now in the studio. Donte you're editor of Button Poetry, a spoken word distributor as well, and you've worked with True Arts Speaks. You're a graduate of that program, right?

DONTE COLLINS: I am, yeah.

SPEAKER: Working with youth in poetry and spoken word?

DONTE COLLINS: I am. Yeah, I sit on the Youth Advisory Board.

SPEAKER: So it's great to have you here. Thanks for coming in and congratulations.

DONTE COLLINS: Thank you so much.

SPEAKER: So tell me about the circumstances that inspired this poem, this winning one, What The Dead Know By Heart. You said this one came to you fairly quickly.

DONTE COLLINS: It did, yeah. It was last fall, I was in a production at Augsburg College. And before rehearsal, I'm just sitting eating, and that week, I believe it was, Jamar Clark had been murdered. Yeah, I was really set back by that, and I decided to write. Because I knew I had to go to rehearsal, and I didn't want to miss that. But I was also in a state of grief, right?

SPEAKER: Right.

DONTE COLLINS: And so I had to process something, and that's what came of that, yeah.

SPEAKER: And is that the way it usually works for you? That something, an event triggers it, and you have to write it down, or are these poems that you write more of a process you're thinking about for weeks or months.

DONTE COLLINS: Right. It's like a combination. And when something that horrible happens, yes, it triggers the process. But poems, poems can take really long to write. And sometimes, I mean, lines or images that I've created years ago now have a home in a poem, you know what I mean? It's that process. It's slow. It's deliberate.

SPEAKER: So you'll come up with something, a line, let's say, or an image, and say, that's a good one I'll keep that.

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah, exactly. Like what poem does that belong in? You know what I mean. It's a memory, almost.

SPEAKER: But this one just flowed.

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah, this one took not more than 15 minutes. And it was just, it was a free write. Yeah.

SPEAKER: Well, let's hear it. What The Dead Know By Heart.

DONTE COLLINS: Lately, when asked how are you? I respond with a name no longer living. Rekia, Jamar, Sandra. I am alive by luck at this point. I wonder often if the gun that will unmake me is yet made. What white earth will bury me. How many bullets like a flock of Blue Jays will come carry my black to its final bed. Which photo will be used to water down my blood.

Today, I did not die, and there is no God or law to thank. The bullet missed my head and landed in another. Today, I passed a mirror and did not see a body. Instead, a suggestion. A debate. A blank post-it note there looking back. I haven't enough room to both rage and weep. I go to cry and each tear turns to steam. I say, I matter, and a ghost white hand appears over my mouth.

SPEAKER: What The Dead Know By Heart. Written and performed here by Donte Collins, Saint Paul poet, who has won the Most Promising Young Poet Award for that work, written last fall, you were telling us. And in that poem, I noticed you use the first person, and that can be a poetic device. We are in the mind of a character, or are we in the mind of poet Donte Collins, in 2015, in Saint Paul?

DONTE COLLINS: Right. It's both. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's the beautiful part. Is that I recently reread an essay by Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. And we talk about the written work, The Archive, the intangible things like papers, and bones, and video recordings, and then the repertoire like embodied knowledge. And I think that's important in the work, is that we are, especially when talking about grief and shared grief between People of Color, and Black people specifically, is that we are ourselves. But when something happens to someone who looks like us, we are them too.

SPEAKER: The way you just performed that, you didn't have the text in front of you. Do you write for the ear or for the page?

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah, that's a question. Yeah, I do consider my audience. And that's the thing, I'm so new to this. So as a younger writer and performer, I was writing for the ear. I was writing for the ear. And that's fun, and that's cool. And being in college and studying poetry, and getting more familiar with different forms and the page, I now can begin to write for the page. And so now it's like a marriage, it's like I do both.

SPEAKER: Is there a difference between spoken word, which is so common, and younger people who wouldn't necessarily pick up a book and read poetry, would listen to rap, listen to hip hop, let's go to poetry slams. Do you see a difference between the two?

DONTE COLLINS: Well, yeah. So I should say, in the quality of writing, or the form of writing, any poem can be a spoken word poem, right? You have text and you perform it in a theatrical way, and that's the repertoire part that I referenced before. So and some poems demand, there's something about the writing that demands to be heard aloud.

SPEAKER: Right.

DONTE COLLINS: And so that's then spoken word right? Yeah.

SPEAKER: So the lines blurred? There isn't a line, maybe.

DONTE COLLINS: There isn't a line, I would say there isn't a line, yeah.

SPEAKER: When the people who gave you this award encountered your poem, did they hear it, was there a video, or did they just have the words on the page?

DONTE COLLINS: They just had the page.

SPEAKER: The page.

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah.

SPEAKER: And how did you find out you won the award?

DONTE COLLINS: So through Augsburg. I submitted a few poems for awards through the Academy. And then I won those, or I got second place in one, and I got first place in another one. And because I am under 23, I believe, that they automatically submitted one of my poems to this larger competition.

SPEAKER: OK. This is a national competition, I assume.

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah. And the Academy, Patricia Guzman, I believe her is, called me and said that I won the award, and I was actually at work at Button. And yeah, she called me and told me, and then told me not to tell anyone, so yeah.

SPEAKER: So now what does it do? There are expectations here, the Most Promising Young Poet, you've got to produce now.

DONTE COLLINS: Well--

SPEAKER: You've got to live up to that promise, right?

DONTE COLLINS: Yeah. If I choose to. No, definitely, definitely.

[LAUGHS]

So currently I'm working on my first collection of poems. It's a small chapbook and I'm self publishing it, and with the award money that I received through the Academy. It's called Autopsies. And it's due to be out November 1. Yeah, so this award highly encouraged that, me to continue and like yeah.

SPEAKER: Poet Donte Collins. Thanks for coming in and talking with us. I appreciate it.

DONTE COLLINS: Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER: Well, Donte Collins of Saint Paul is 20 years old, and the winner of this year's most promising Young Poet Award, from the Academy of American Poets. Now, you can catch Donte Collins performing his latest works yourself, in person, the evening of October 25. He'll be at Five Watt Coffee in Minneapolis.