The Poetry Society of America (PSA) has a long history of placing poems in public spaces—some New York City commuters have been reading poems on posters in the subway system since 1992 when the organization partnered with the MTA to create Poetry in Motion. In recent years, PSA’s public poetry initiatives have grown to include placements in public parks, botanical gardens, urban plazas, street corners, and other natural gathering places. The latest iteration of this work is the Poem District, which seeks to transform neighborhoods around PSA’s Brooklyn storefront with dozens of poems on the walls of buildings in the coming years. Sites will include bookstores, public schools, community gardens, cafés and restaurants, offices of local civic and cultural organizations, and public housing developments. The project comprises a mix of hand-painted and vinyl installations and will continue to feature poets from a diverse range of backgrounds. The poems are selected in collaboration with each site. “The Poetry Society puts together a selection of poems by nationally and internationally acclaimed poets that we think the general public will find compelling and that resonate in some way with the site,” says executive director Matt Brogan.
“We then consult with the site on the final selection. A playful poem installed at Books Are Magic [above] was positioned near the entrance to the store’s children’s section, while a bilingual French and English poem was selected for a neighborhood bakery. At Emma’s Torch, a nonprofit serving immigrants and refugees, the PSA installed Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus.’ Similarly the PSA worked with the Arab-American Family Support Center to install a bilingual poem in Arabic and English by a Palestinian poet, reflecting the cultural and linguistic diversity of the neighborhood.” Though the PSA is focused on spreading the project throughout Brooklyn, the initiative raises a compelling question: What other neighborhoods across the country (and beyond) could be transformed into similar open-air poetry anthologies? How might encountering a poem unexpectedly, right in the middle of our daily routine, alter the way we move through the world?
