Poetry collective builds community with Melanated Metaphors

When Barbara Fant first started writing, she said it was almost solely for personal reasons, describing poetry as a tool she embraced as a means to help move beyond a traumatic past – losing her mother at a young age and growing up in a violent neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio. 

“I was really trying to write to heal myself, and if it helped somebody else, praise the Lord!” Fant said in an early December Zoom call from her home in Los Angeles, where she was struggling with jet lag, having returned the previous night from a whirlwind 10-day trek in Kenya. “But it really wasn’t about anybody else. It was about me using my gift in a way that empowered me.”

Beginning in more recent years, however, this motivation has taken a pronounced outward shift, best evidenced by Fant founding the Columbus-based Black Women Rise Poetry Collective, which this weekend hosts Melanated Metaphors, a youth poetry slam set to take place at Columbus Africentric Early College High School on Saturday, Dec. 9.

“Along the way, it’s really shifted from me telling my own personal story to working to try and equip other people to tell their own personal stories,” Fant said. “There’s more of a communal aspect, asking how we can keep all of this moving forward. … With all the changes we’ve seen in the poetry scene in Columbus, I think part of it is making sure that legacy is continued, and that there’s still a space for people to hear poetry and to heal.”

Melanated Metaphors is another step in this direction, with Fant creating the kind of platform for young, Black, female poets that she wished had been available to her as she was first making her way up through the literary world. Absent any poetry scene of note in Youngstown – at least one she could readily locate as a high school student – Fant said she started by seeking out places online, cold-submitting poems in the hopes of getting work published. Once she landed in Columbus, though, she started to immerse herself in the open mic scene, where she met early mentors such as William Evans and the late Is Said.

“I met Is Said at Black Pearl Poetry, probably back in 2007 or 2008, when I ended up randomly sitting next to him,” said Fant, who used to attend open mics solely to listen, keeping her distance from the stage. “And so, I’m sitting next to this seasoned gentleman, and then Ed Mabrey introduces him, like, ‘Now coming up to the stage, the godfather of Columbus poetry!’ And this guy next to me ends up getting up there, and he does this incredible poem, and then he sits back down like nothing ever happened.”

Following the reading, Fant introduced herself, and Is Said responded by asking her if she was a poet (Fant said she was) and if she ever performed at the open mics (Fant said she didn’t).

“And he told me to bring a poem with me whenever I go to an open mic, just in case, and then he said, ‘How about you come to this spot tomorrow?’” said Fant, who the next day accompanied Is Said to poetry night at Harvest Cafe, where, for the first time in Columbus, she performed one of her poems on the stage. “And he would take me with him wherever he went: Rumba Cafe on Monday nights, Black Pearl Poetry on Tuesday, Harvest Cafe on Wednesday, Zanzibar on Thursday. … And in that he taught me what it means to be a poet, and what it means to consistently work on your craft. And I haven’t left the stage since.”

While Fant said the idea of giving back is already embedded in her DNA, her experiences with Is Said turbocharged this trait. “What Is Said left me is invaluable, and what he poured into me I can’t even put into words,” Fant said. “Everything that I do moving forward – from trying to help my peers to uplifting the younger generation – all of that is really paying honor and homage to him, always.”

Formed in 2020 as a means of remaining creative amid pandemic stasis, Black Women Rise Poetry Collective has since evolved into a space where this type of community uplift can flourish. “There are tons of Black female poets in Columbus, and the question was how can we share resources and build something collectively as opposed to as individuals,” Fant said. “So, yeah, that’s part of the drive for the collective: equipping other people, sharing what we have and making a space for everybody, because there is space for everybody.”