Takoma Park, Maryland th April is National Poetry Month, a time when communities across the United States popularize poetry. In New York, restaurants place poems inside diners' menus. All over, transit systems are "advertising" poems on buses and in subway trains. Here, in a suburb of Washington, poems have sprung up as steel street signs.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Takoma Park, Maryland – April is National Poetry Month, a time when communities across the United States popularize poetry. In New York, restaurants place poems inside diners’ menus. All over, transit systems are “advertising” poems on buses and in subway trains. Here, in a suburb of Washington, poems have sprung up as steel street signs.
The idea was borrowed from a “poetry walk” along trails in Hardwick, Vermont, where poems are lashed to trees ( and where members of the Friends of Takoma Park Library recently hiked ).
The Takoma Park signs, designed by local students, feature several works by important African-American poets.
A good place to start on this urban poetry walk is the bus stop at Maple and Grant avenues, where the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son” is posted. Written in the early 1920s, this plea to a disheartened son was inspired by Hughes’ landlady, who encouraged him as he struggled to find work after dropping out of Columbia University, according to E. Ethelbert Miller, a poet and director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University in Washington. ( Read the poem. )
Hughes was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that began in the legendary New York neighborhood in 1915 and lasted more than a decade. Entrepreneurs and publishers helped black music – jazz and blues – and other arts flourish.
Migration from the South was rampant. Hughes “had a good ear and listened to new migrants,” Miller said.
Working in laundries and restaurants, Hughes held jobs that connected him to the common man. Takoma Park poet Brian Gilmore recalls a time when Hughes lived in Washington, working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. One evening, Hughes spotted poet Vachel Lindsay among the diners and left some of his own verse beside Lindsay’s plate. Lindsay later read poems by his new discovery -- the “busboy poet” -- to reporters.
At another bus stop is “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. “I identify with this poem; it reminds me so much of my own father,” Miller said. “A silent figure, but also one who provides, is up, working, even before daybreak.” Miller said today’s immigrants also can relate to that theme. ( Read the poem. )
Gilmore said he might have chosen a Hayden poem that explored race.
“But race wasn’t the end all” to Hayden, according to Miller. Hayden practiced the Baha’i faith, believed in universal brotherhood and “looked at us as an extraterrestrial would look, from outside the planet.”
Hayden’s career ascended in the 1950s, but he was compromised by the rise of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, which derided formal style and favored Black Power themes. Nikki Giovanni, a prominent poet of that movement who teaches at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ( Virginia Tech ), said she was writing emotional, but true, poems in language that “makes you pay attention. People complained about our language, but we were complaining about our lives.”
Lucille Clifton, who has served as a Maryland poet laureate, has two signs – “Good Times” and “Miss Rosie.” It is the depiction of a homeless woman in Miss Rosie that Miller admires most. “[Clifton] is a spiritual person,” Miller said. “She is able to see herself in others and speak for those who cannot speak.” ( Read “Good Times” and “Miss Rosie.” )
Toi Derricotte’s “Black Boys Play the Classics” stands in Old Town, outside the Middle Eastern Market. This rhythmic poem is about adults watching black kids play Brahms. It is about stereotypes, “about recognizing ourselves and about being recognized,” Miller said. ( Read the poem. )
At the entrance to a community center, visitors are greeted by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Rita Dove’s “Fox Trot Fridays.” Dove was poet laureate of the Library of Congress in the 1990s; staffers recall her as a “dynamo” who reached out to reporters, appeared on TV’s Sesame Street and gave countless readings at schools. ( Read the poem. )
“Fox Trot Fridays” celebrates the end of the work week, a time to get dressed up and dance. Music and dance are themes in much of Dove’s poetry. Miller said he sees the poet herself – “she is into dancing and wearing miniskirts” – in the poem.
Giovanni said music and poetry are intertwined for black poets, a relationship traceable to the poetic cadences of Negro spirituals. “Sermons captured the cadence of the spirituals. That gives way to blues, then to jazz, then to rhythm and blues, and now to hip-hop,” she said. “The face of [American] poetry should be a black face.”
“Housekeeping,” a poem by the 2007 Pulitzer winner, Natasha Trethewey, is posted at the historical association. The poem hearkens back to a childhood in Gulfport, Mississippi. “I can remember seeing my mother iron. She did sort of revel in a mundane task like that,” Trethewey said. Trethewey would shell peas. “Those communal things,” she said, “are mundane, but are a time to sit down and talk. It’s familiar to a lot of people, as well as the longing for something.” ( Read the poem. )
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a prominent poet in his own right, said African-Americans are unique among minority groups. They hold memories of African language and music in their culture, but are native speakers.
Because poetry is becoming “auditory,” Gioia would argue the poetry walk might add appearances by poets performing rap, hip-hop or poetry slams -- competitive contests involving prize money and extemporaneous rhyming. “African-American poetry is tailored for performance,” Gioia said.
Experts suggested other black poets who should be included in the next poetry walk – Dudley Randall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Nelson, Patricia Smith. But after dashing in the rain to make a last stop at the Hughes sign, Gilmore read over the familiar poem and said, “This seems like something my mother would say to me.” And that is the point.
The poems cited above are copyrighted materials. Permission has been granted for reproduction on this site for educational and informational purposes; all other rights are reserved.
For more information about Giovanni and her uplifting convocation address in the wake of the tragedy at her university, see “After Shootings at Virginia Tech, Many Find Solace in Poetry.”
For more stories on the influence of poets and other artists in society, see The Arts.
( USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov ) By Elizabeth Kelleher USINFO Staff Writer
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