Poetry Organizations from Across the United States Join Together to Offer Programs on the Theme “What Is It, Then, Between Us?: Poetry & Democracy”

The question “What is it, then, between us?” is an excerpt from the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman, a poet whose work forged a new kind of American poetry that both expresses democratic ideals and contains painful truths about our country’s origin. Throughout 2019, many libraries, museums, schools, and cultural organizations will be marking the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth, which took place on May 31, 1819.

 

In taking up the theme of Poetry & Democracy, Poetry Coalition members aim to demonstrate how poetry can positively provoke questions in their communities about timely and pressing issues, spark increased empathy and understanding, encourage civic and grassroots engagement, and contribute to public debate and dialogue. 

 

All organizations and others interested are invited to program on this theme in March and share their efforts using the hashtags #PoetryandDemocracy and #PoetryCoalition. 

 

Here’s a look at some of the programs that will take place across the country in March: 

 

The Academy of American Poets in New York City will dedicate five Saturdays in March in its Poem-a-Day series to poems by contemporary poets that will explore the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, specifically the freedoms of religion, speech, and the press, and the rights to peaceably assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Poem-a-Day is distributed to more than 450,000 readers each morning via email, social media, and syndication. Poets featured will also curate collections of poems by other poets that speak to the theme. The Academy will enlist the support of organizations outside of literature to help share the poems and educational resources. 

 

The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ current class of National Student Poets will be joined by alumni of the National Student Poets Program to present workshops at schools across the United States on the theme of Poetry & Democracy. Additionally, in conjunction with the AWP Conference & Bookfair in Portland, Oregon, 2019 National Student Poets Ariana Smith, Daniel Blokh, and Darius Atefat-Peckham will lead workshops on the theme of Poetry & Democracy for teens in local public schools and LGBTQ+ youth organizations. The class will also bring high school participants to the conference to hear from poets, speakers, and attendees about literary organizations, writing camps, and opportunities to study writing and literature.

 

The Asian American Writers’s Workshop will host a free reading in New York City to promote discussion in the Vietnamese literary community on March 23 in collaboration with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. The reading will feature Amy Quan Barry, Matty Huynh, Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vu Tran, Monique Truong, Thanhha Lai, and Ocean Vuong, and will be moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Mimi Khúc, and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud.

 

Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, California, will partner with Safe Place for Youth, a nonprofit dedicated to providing support to unhoused youth, to offer a three-week poetry workshop at SPY’s Venice resource center. The workshop, which aims to amplify the voices and experiences of Los Angeles’ unhoused population, will culminate in a reading by participants and local poets at Beyond Baroque. This reading will take place in conjunction with a spring garden festival celebrating the Beyond Baroque/SPY community garden, which provides homeless youth with internship and job-training opportunities. Participants’ poetry will then be made publicly visible via a poetry wall located at Beyond Baroque on the grounds of Venice’s former city hall.

 

CantoMundo in New York City will offer “From Frontlines to Borderlines,” an ongoing series of poetry, paper-making, and printmaking workshops for veterans, Latinx poets, and Dreamers, in partnership with Frontline Arts and Mobile Print Power. Participants will aim to share unique and resonant experiences with democracy as a result of forces such as migration, class aspiration, struggles for citizenship, various forms of violence, and stresses from complex trauma. In March, a public, participatory art-making session will also be held over the course of three days in East Harlem, where participants will make screen prints using paper and poetry created in earlier workshops and create broadsides that reflect a communal response to Whitman’s question, “What is it, then, between us?”

 

Cave Canem in Brooklyn, New York, and Lambda Literary in Los Angeles, California, will co-host “Party for the People!” at Amarachi in Brooklyn, New York, on March 14, featuring pop-up readings on themes of democracy by Danez Smith, Omotara James, Victoria Newton Ford, and more, and music by DJ RIVERA. 

 

Kundiman in New York City will be sharing a Poetry & Democracy action calendar for the month of March, which will focus on one topic each week: immigration, documentation, Asian American activism, and solidarity. The calendar will include an introduction, a folio of poems, a writing prompt, and direct actions. Kundiman will also engage regional groups and invite them to hold in-person gatherings to take action together and will organize a poetry postcard exchange based on the writing prompts. 

 

Letras Latinas at University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies in Notre Dame, Indiana, has commissioned award-winning poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico to compose poems that engage with the theme of Poetry & Democracy. On March 21, Scenters-Zapico will visit South Valley Academy, whose entire 9th grade will have read her book, The Verging Cities. Scenters-Zapico’s new work will be unveiled at a public event at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on March 22. In addition, Albuquerque Poet Laureate Michelle Otero and New Mexico Centennial Poet Levi Romero will co-host a late afternoon poetry walk through Albuquerque’s Río Grande Bosque on March 22, as well. Along the walk, the poets will read and invite attendees to reflect on Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and Scenters-Zapico’s “When the Desert Made Us Visible.” Otero and Romero, and others, will also present work on the theme of Poetry & Democracy on March 22. This event will be presented in partnership with NHCC’s History and Literary Arts Program, headed by former Sante Fe Poet Laureate Valerie Martínez, as well as Duende District Bookstore, now based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 

Mass Poetry in Boston, Massachusetts, will enlist students, teachers, and members of its community to create erasures, or blackout poetry, of political documents such as the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Continuing in the rich, experimental tradition dating back to the 1960s, Mass Poetry will ask poets to create altered documents of the originals by blacking out text while exploring their newfound meaning. The erasure poems will be shared on its site and on social media, as well as in large-scale formats in public locales, such as libraries, city halls, and on buses and subway cars. In order to encourage dialogue and exchange among different regions of the country, Mass Poetry will also invite student poets to exchange their work on postcards with students from other Poetry Coalition groups across the country.

The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University in California will present poet Brandon Shimoda and Berlin-based Japanese artist Aisuke Kondo for a reading and conversation about their work on the internment of Japanese-American citizens and Japanese nationals living on the West Coast of the US in federally administered concentration camps, where both their grandfathers were among those imprisoned. Before the program, there will also be an informal gathering in the Ruth Asawa Garden of Remembrance, which is dedicated to the 19 San Francisco State University students who were imprisoned in the camps during World War II.

 

The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, will host a reading and conversation on Poetry & Democracy with Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forché, and Javier Zamora on March 7. It will also present several other programs in March, including Martín Espada’s featured talk at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in Portland, Oregon, called “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump,” and a short video by Zinc Films titled “Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet,” featuring Espada, Robert Hass, and U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. 

The Poetry Project in New York City will offer several open workshops in March in partnership with local community college libraries, each inspired by a reading from The Poetry Project’s 50+ year archive, available for the first time since the completion of a digitization process in 2018. Readings by Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Tim Dlugos, Maggie Estep, Audre Lorde, Nicanor Parra, and others will inspire facilitated writing exercises on the power of poetry to shape and effect change within democracy. Participants in the workshops will also have the opportunity to share their work in a culminating public reading.

 

The Poetry Society of America in New York City will invite over a dozen poets, including Chase Berggrun, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Marilyn Chin, Meg Day, Tarfia Faizullah, Lynn Melnick, Carl Phillips, and Raquel Salas Rivera, to respond with new poems or essays for a special website feature dedicated to exploring the theme of Poetry & Democracy.

Poets House in New York City, together with the June Jordan Estate, will host poet-educators Kay Ulanday Barrett, Taiyo Na, Sofia Snow, and Bill Zavatsky on March 2 for a discussion responding to June Jordan‘s urgent and nuanced essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” Presenters’ prepared statements will be published in Housekeeping, the new Poets House blog, to commemorate the Whitman bicentennial. 

 

The University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson will present Patrick Rosal and Evie Shockley as part of an Art for Justice Reading on March 21. Throughout the month of March, and beyond, it will also feature Broken Threads, Lives Unraveled: Fuentes Rojas and the Migrant Quilt Project, an exhibit showcasing textile arts that memorialize victims of drug war-related violence and honor migrants who have died.

 

Urban Word/National Youth Poet Laureate Program in New York City will feature original poems on the theme of Poetry & Democracy by regional winners from the National Youth Poet Laureate network. These poems will be shared on social media platforms from Urban Word and with partner cities. Urban Word will also partner with the Amplifier Foundation to enable the creation of original artworks by each regional winner and national finalist, which will feature lines from  their Poetry & Democracy-themed poems. On April 4, the five finalists for the position of National Youth Poet Laureate will perform their work in a free event at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

 

The Wick Poetry Center of Kent State University in Ohio will continue its support of the Poets for Science project in collaboration with Jane Hirshfield, which began with the 2017 March for Science in Washington, D.C., with special attention to advocacy in its interactive exhibit at the AWP Bookfair & Conference in Portland, Oregon. This exhibit will encourage participants to contact their elected representatives in support of our scientific and creative communities. Simultaneously, it will continue its River Stanzas project, which remembers the burning of the Cuyahoga River 50 years ago, with workshops throughout Northeastern Ohio, and its Writing Across Borders exhibit at the Lakewood Public Library, which celebrates the voices of immigrants and refugees.

 

Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will host bruise bullet flower, an exhibition of new photography by poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who will also give a reading at the Center on March 16. At the reading, the Center will celebrate the debut of a chapbook focused on bruise bullet flower. In addition, throughout the month, Woodland Pattern will curate accompanying youth programming in the Milwaukee Public School system, share throughout the city lines of poetry and the #PoetryandDemocracy hashtag on tear-away flyers, and facilitate the writing of a collaborative community poem on the theme that will be showcased at the center throughout the month.  

 

 

The Poetry Coalition is a national alliance of organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. The Academy of American Poets serves as the coordinator for the Poetry Coalition. The University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University assist with this work. The full membership list can be found here: www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/poetry-coalition. To learn more about the history of the Poetry Coalition: www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/history-poetry-coalition. For more information about future events and initiatives, email [email protected].