Collard Poetry
This article describes the poetry competition organized by ECU professors Alex Albright and Luke Whisnant. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: "Collard Poetry," Pieces of Eight, September 15, 1984.
When Alex Albright and Luke Whisnant (English) offered to organize a "collard poetry" competition for the 10th annual Ayden Collard Festival last June, they envisioned a pleasant summer pastime and, at most, a couple of hundred entries from eastern North Carolina to sort through.
But the event sprouted and quickly grew like weeds in a springtime collard patch. News of the contest rapidly spread through regional radio and TV and in newspapers throughout the south. The major wire services carried a collard poetry contest item; then it appeared in U.S.A. Today and in Europe via the International Herald Tribune.
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation aired a telephone interview, and poems of all types and sentiments from more than 30 states and three foreign countries were crammed daily into the judges' tiny mailboxes in Austin.
Hundreds of collard-lovers (and haters), aged seven through 89, responded to a chance to express their feelings about the well-known leafy edible, an intrinsic part of Southern cookery and folklore and the focal point of Ayden's annual early fall festival.
The unexpectedly heavy response to the collard poetry competition resulted in larger-than planned cash prizes for winners in adult and student categories and a bumper crop of some 500 poems from which Whisnant and Albright made their choises for a contest anthology, LEAVES OF GREENS: THE COLLARD POEMS, designed for distribution at the festival.
Both contest organizers are North Carolinians born and bred, typically polarized on the subject of collards. Whisnant loves collards; Albright loathes them. But both agreed that after sampling collard poems all summer, they won't be ready to organize a second collard poem contest until at least the year 2000.
