On an exterior wall of the old Sunflower grocery building, you can see a painted gang of animals: a cat, three dogs, and one more that might be a coyote. They’re racing bicycles and scooters against a blue sky that fades to green at the horizon. The cat on her two-wheeled scooter leads the pack. She casts a placid smile toward her canine companions, who speed along after her, honking bike horns and throwing back their heads to laugh. One dog salivates over a bicycle basket full of fruit from the market. Another dog rides with no-hands, raising his paws to the sun, which in this world looks like rings within rings of lime green, yellow, orange, and pink. The whole animal pack is spiral-eyed and crazed with excitement, baring their teeth and letting their tongues loll like ribbons, like the undulating road as it rises and falls under their bike tires.
Around almost every corner of our small town in southern Mississippi, you’ll find concrete bridges, utility boxes, or brick walls transformed into canvases for public art. Some of these locations were once drab examples of urban blight, but now they sport hummingbirds, fish, flowers, portraits of blues musicians, and bold-lettered affirmations. With sixty-seven murals completed to date, the city feels like an outdoor museum, where art has overflowed from the galleries and spilled onto the street.
When I became the City of Hattiesburg’s first poet laureate, I wanted to create a public poetry project that would build on our town’s enthusiasm for public visual art. The program I developed, which has been generously funded by the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation, involves two parts: firstly, I’m sponsoring the creation of a new mural to celebrate Mississippi’s poetic heritage; secondly, I’m holding a series of poetry workshops in local elementary schools where students can write creative responses to the existing mural artwork in our town. Planning this program has given me a chance to think more deeply about the role of public art in a community and about the relationship between the visual and literary arts.
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In the face of serious community challenges—from economic inequalities to decaying downtowns—mural art may seem like a frivolous investment. After all, it’s just a thin layer of paint that “pretties up” a city surface. And poetry too, when it’s crammed into the corners of our busy lives or stitched onto the edge of an already-full K–12 curriculum, can feel like an ornamental add-on. But art isn’t a decorative surface layer; it’s a means of peeling back a layer, exposing hidden realities. Art tears a hole, however small, in the here and now and offers a glimpse into that other world, the one which, to paraphrase the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, exists inside this one.
Gregory Orr writes, “All we have is words // to reveal the rose / that the rose obscures.” I think he means that poetic language penetrates layer by layer into existence, finding the worlds of dreaming and imagination. Through the aperture of art, we can see how energies arc between seemingly unconnected concepts: metaphors gleam like strands of a spider web catching the light. In the stroke of a paintbrush, the line of a poem, we can view an unseen universe where our dreams, fears, and delights operate with great force. This world of imagination is papered over by timesheets, shopping lists, quizzes, and report cards. But it’s always there, waiting for an artist to break through and show us.
I test this idea while watching a muralist work on a wall downtown. As he rolls on the base layer of bright blue, I imagine he isn’t adding to but erasing the wall that obstructs our view. He spray-paints in the detail as though pulling back a curtain, inch by inch, on the dream world. Now that the building is brushed aside, I can see where the Crescent rail line runs through an avenue of magnolia blossoms, each flower taller than I am. It’s true. In late April, their scent can feel that large.
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When it came time to select a subject for the new mural celebrating Mississippi poetry, I immediately thought of Etheridge Knight. A towering figure in American poetry, Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1931. C. T. Salazar notes that, although Knight spent much of his life outside this state, his poetry has deep ties to the language and literary heritage of Mississippi. Knight served in the Korean War, where he sustained physical and psychological traumas that led to drug use. He began writing while incarcerated, and his work embodies the power of the artist to free himself from the confines of physical existence. Knight’s poetry confronts the feelings of anger, listlessness, and desperation that come from living under an oppressive system; then, in flashes of lyric beauty, he tears hole after hole in the constructs that enable those systems. His famous poem “Cell Song” finds the poet pacing his cell at night and straining to alter reality through language—to “twist the space with speech.” Then the poem moves its speaker outside the prison walls to contend with a higher ceiling of reality: “Take your words,” he challenges himself, “and scrape the sky.”
In these lines, the poet rakes the dome of stars with his words and finds a weak spot to tear through. The liberation Knight creates for himself feels cosmic.
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Some liberations are much smaller.
I first loved the bicycle gang mural, titled “Let’s Go” by artist Spence Townsend, because it made me smile. The crazy-eyed, speed-greedy dogs are funny. Most of us encounter this mural while driving on Hardy Street. I’m on a schedule. I’m inside a climate-controlled bubble of glass and steel, my music drowning out exterior sounds. Then this painting opens to me, and I feel something primal, even animal. I remember traveling on wheels and the almost giddy pleasure of propelling myself forward. I remember the French blue sky and neon sun, and cruising downhill with the breeze in my face.
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Dozens of times this year, I’ve stood in front of a class of elementary school students and clicked through slides of local murals: a woman’s face in profile is a mosaic of colored glass; a bee opens its giant wings over blackberries and honeysuckle; wild ducks fly against a hot pink sky. Over the energetic hum of conversation, I explain that the beige paint on their classroom walls protects the cinderblock to make it last longer, preventing mold and dust. We talk about how language, like paint, can fulfill a utilitarian purpose or can do something else. Words can march in a line, or they can dance—a “regimented riot” as Etheridge Knight might say.
We talk about the power of the poetic image and how you only have to speak the name of a thing to conjure it and bring it right into the room. To demonstrate, we play a game where the students close their eyes, I say a word, and they give me a thumbs up when they can picture what I said. We start with something simple: the color red. I ask the class if they can picture red or feel red energy. Thumbs go up all around the room. Next, we try something more involved: a gray cat with black stripes and green eyes. I see eyelids flutter and smiles spread across faces when I tell them that’s my cat, June. I brought her here, with words, so you could meet her.
Then we turn to our papers, and I ask them what they would like to paint with words. In those moments, the hallway noises grow distant, and the cafeteria smells fade. Students summon words and write a hundred tiny liberations: a brown horse gallops in a green field; a family holding hands around a dinner table; a race car zooms to a finish line. And tiny, against the black of outer space, a rainbowed Earth sings and spins. It’s true. Sometimes the world is that bright, that exposed.