More Public Poetry Installations: St. Paul and San Francisco
Monday November 24, 2008
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.)
Are there poems permanently ensconced somewhere public in
your town? Tell us about them in Comments (below), please!
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
Poets Writing History — Immediate Responses to the 2008 American Election
Thursday November 20, 2008
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)
Celebrating Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th Birthday
Wednesday November 19, 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:
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)
Who should be the inaugural poet for President-elect Obama?
Thursday November 13, 2008
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!
