Earlier this year, we took note of several public spaces where poetry has been made permanent in the form of public art pieces, and it’s still happening. Poems have appeared as a permanent part of the urban landscape in St. Paul, Minnesota, and just this week two installations of outdoor poetry-art have opened in my own city, San Francisco.

from The Christian Science Monitor:
“Sidewalk Stanzas,” by Matthew Shaer
“On a damp day this fall, I drove with Marcus Young to Frogtown, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown St. Paul. Mr. Young, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, has spent the past year stamping oversized poems into cement across the city – a public arts project he calls, with something less than poetic flourish, ‘Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk.’”

(For a virtual tour of the project, visit the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk Web site.)

from The San Francisco Chronicle:
“Poetry on Canvas,” by Pam Grady
“The finished project combines painting and spoken word, but it begins with the 18 portraits Bissell painted of Youth Speaks’ young writers.... In addition to the paintings at the Intersection gallery, more of the paintings are displayed on streets throughout the city, including the 16th Street BART station, the Tenderloin’s Cohen Alley, and Lilly’s Bar-B-Que on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition.”

(Evan Bissell’s show is called “Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere*: Youth, Imagination, and Transformation,” and you can explore the whole show online at his Web site. *from Jayne Cortez’s book of that title)

also from The San Francisco Chronicle:
“Words take wing in North Beach artwork,” by Sam Whiting
“At first glance, the new public art project unveiled Sunday in San Francisco’s North Beach appears to be a flock of birds taking off from a traffic island at Columbus Avenue and Broadway.... A closer look reveals that the ‘birds’ are actually 23 illuminated white polycarbonate books suspended in midair with their pages opened as if startled into flight.... ‘Language of the Birds’ is a permanent installation by San Francisco artists Brian Goggin and Dorka Keehn. Etched into the concrete below the books, strung among two stoplight poles and one streetlight stanchion, are words that appear to have fallen from their pages.”

(You can read about and see photographs of this piece at Brian Goggin’s Web site.)

Previous notes on poetry in public places:
Poetry Made Public and Permanent, or Perhaps Not So Permanent
“Archipoetry 101,” Gary Mex Glazner explores community building & Poet’s Plaza becomes a reality
“Poets’ Way,” Boulder blazes a poetic trail, by Michael Evans Smith
“Herman Berlandt’s International Poetry Museum,” by Marj Hahne

Poetry has played a prominent role throughout the course of the two-year campaign leading up to this year’s U.S. Presidential election (see our previous postings on the topic listed below), and since the election, many poets have been moved to write new poems, capturing the feel of this historic moment. Derek Walcott, the West Indies poet who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment,” and whose Collected Poems was photographed in Barack Obama’s hand just a few days after he was elected President, has already written a poem for Obama that appeared in The London Times the day after the election: “Forty Acres.” Anny Ballardini’s Poets’ Corner at fieralingue has posted an ever-growing anthology of poems responding to the election: “While the He/art Pants,” curated by Nigerian poet, artist and English professor Obododimma Oha. And one of the stalwarts of our own About Poetry Forum, Guy Kettelhack, has written a delicately powerful evocation of the moment-to-moment waiting that is the actual experience of election day itself: “Selecting Precedents.”

Our previous posts about poetry in the 2008 election campaign:
The Intersection of Politics and Autobiography in Poetry, Obama’s poetry (March 2007)
Harold Bloom comments on Barack Obama’s poems (June 2007)
Poetry vs. Prose in the Presidential Campaign? (February 2008) — This one has a poll asking “Would you vote for a poet for President?” Stop in and see how our readers voted.
Barack Obama’s Poem Now a Video (July 2008)
Found Poetry on the Campaign Trail, Sarah Palin’s statements made into poetry by Hart Seely (October 2008)

Edgar Allan Poe is among the most treasured of American writers, and his homes and haunts are celebrated as tourist attractions in many of the cities where he lived. He was an American Romantic, a journalist and a writer in the populist genres, the inventor of the modern detective story, and a poet whose melodic narrative ballads remain perennial favorites 150 years after his death. When we played Survivor Poet in 2001, Poe made it to the final twosome and was the very last poet voted off the island before Emily Dickinson was declared the winner by our readers.

The 200th anniversary of his birth is approaching — it’s January 16, 2009 — and celebrations and conferences and performances for the bicentennial are happening all over the place. Here’s a sampling:

• The Poe Bicentennial Celebration at the Poe House Museum in Baltimore
• Bicentennial events at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, the house he lived in in Philadelphia
• Nevermore 2009, the City of Baltimore’s year-long celebration
• Boston College’s 2-day bicentennial celebration in the city of his birth (where Boston College Poe scholars are lobbying for greater recognition of Poe — see “The pendulum swings: Boston urged to reclaim Poe” by Peter Schworm in The Boston Globe)
• Poe Revealed 1809 - 2009, commemorative events in historic sites all over Virginia
• Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial sponsored by Penn State in Philadelphia in October 2009
• A new Edgar Allan Poe postage stamp to be released on his birthday, January 16

More on Edgar Allan Poe:
Our biographical profile of E.A. Poe, American Romantic
Library: Poems by E.A. Poe
A new wrinkle in the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death
The Mysterious Poe Toaster Revealed?
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe! The Empty House Tour, by Tom Devaney
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (2006)

Barack Obama is a poet himself, an inspiring and eloquent public speaker, and poetry is sure to be a part of his Presidential inauguration ceremony. Robert Frost recited a poem at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Maya Angelou read for Bill Clinton’s, and folks are already speculating on who will be Obama’s poet:

from The Telegraph (UK):
“Barack Obama still has time for a little poetry,” by Catherine Ellsworth
“Three days after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama was spotted in Chicago carrying a book of poems by Derek Walcott, the West Indies Nobel laureate.”

from Associated Press:
“Angelou writing a poem about Obama,” by Allen G. Breed
“Upon his election in 1992, Bill Clinton — affectionately referred to as the nation’s first black president — asked Maya Angelou to compose a poem and read it at his inauguration. Angelou feels a new poem welling up inside her following Barack Obama’s election, but she does not expect another command performance.”

So which poet would you like to hear from on Inauguration Day? Do tell!

David Alpaugh, who has both run and won a poetry book contest himself, offers his astute analysis of the business of selecting poetry books for publication by holding a competition. Fraud and cronyism, hidden connections between judges and winners... these are not the real problems. Alpaugh locates the reasons for the boom in poetry book contests, investigates what that boom is doing to the art and the poetry market, and gives you plenty of things to think about before you package up your manuscript and write a check for that contest entry fee.

More required reading before you submit to any contests:
How to put together a poetry manuscript for publication
Is Poetry Contest Publication Worth It?
“A Word To the Wise: On entering your poems in competition,” by Kurt Heintz
“You Do It Because You Love It,” by S.A. Griffin

Related resources:
More contest links

Last week we received the announcement of September winners (chosen by Tony Barnstone) in the InterBoard Poetry Competition:

• In first place, “St. Louis Jim,” by Henry Shifrin
• In second place, “Saturday” by S. Thomas Summers
• A tie for third place, “Sheer” by Tom Watters and “sinkholes and illusions” by Dorothy D. Mienko
• Honorable mentions to Laurie Byro and Beverleigh Gail Annegarn

• In first place, “Ache,” by Michael Creighton
• In second place, “Convalescence” by Antonia Clark
• In third place, “Debris” by Ashura
• And five (!) honorable mentions.

We’re still sending poems each month chosen from the many, many pieces posted on our Poetry Forum — but this month we had only two entries:

• “An Endangered Species” by Melissa Resch (BostonArtist)
• “Mindfulness” by Brian K. Lynch (BebopPoet)

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, poem links and book-buying links for current IBPC judges Hélène Cardona and John FitzGerald

That briefest of poems, the haiku form migrated from Asia, took deep root in English, and now sprouts up in the strangest places. Just this week, I’ve found two new varieties: biker haiku and dinosaur haiku!

from Bob Strauss, About.com’s Guide to Dinosaurs:
Dinosaur Haiku
A page of examples with an invitation to contribute your own “dinoku.”

from The Boston Globe:
“The Rhythms of the Road,” by Emma Brown
An article about the Highway Poets Motorcycle Club, which has just published an anthology of biker poetry called Rubber Side Down. The first poem quoted in the article is a “baiku” by the anthology’s editor, Jose Gouveia.

More about Haiku:
Haiku defined, in our Glossary of Poetic Forms
Haiku, Senryu, Tanka links

It’s been 400 years since John Milton was born, and as part of the year-long anniversary celebrations at Cambridge University, they hosted a marathon reading of the entirety of Paradise Lost, soon to be available online as a series of podcasts. Better yet is the online project written by students of Milton at Cambridge, Darkness Visible, a vast and varied resource collection on Paradise Lost.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27 and somehow she always enters my thoughts around this time of year.... Last year what would have been her 75th birthday was marked with an academic symposium at Oxford; on her birthday this year, I came across her natal astrological chart online, purporting to explain the trends of her life and her ultimate end in suicide by the positions of the planets at her birth. It turns out Plath is a common choice of online astrologers posting charts of famous people — there is even a long discussion among astrologers about the interactions between Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ charts, at Astrodatabank. (I’m no expert, not even much of a believer in astrology — to learn more about it, visit Molly Hall’s About.com Astrology guidesite.)

More on Sylvia Plath:
Thinking about Sylvia Plath as the winter darkness comes on
Our biographical profile of Plath, with links to buy her books
“On the Decline of Oracles,” audio recording of her reading

Our anthology of fall poems began with classics by Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Clare, Browning, Rossetti, Stevenson, Hopkins, Sandburg and Frost... but now we’ve selected the best from among the many poems we received in the last couple of months from contemporary poets around the world:

• Patricia Boutilier, “Floridian Mabon”
• Dorothea Grossman, “In the Library”
• Judith A. Lawrence, “Autumn Offering”
• Joseph Pacheco, “November Snow”
• Jack Peachum, “Our Pierrot in Autumn”
• Lisa Shields, “Sweater Weather”

We welcome your submissions for this autumn anthology and for our winter collection — you are invited to submit your own poems or suggest your favorite classics. (Please take note of one caution: the text box on our submission page doesn’t convey your format accurately when you type a poem into it — so we ask you to use slashes (“/”) to indicate line breaks and double slashes (“//”) to indicate stanzas.)