Poetry coming to a sidewalk near you
Bill Knight
Contributor
Say goodbye to lackluster walkways. St. Paul is about to combine the written word and the concrete beneath our feet to spiff up a part of the city that most people probably never even notice. In a recently completed contest called "Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks," up to 20 poems will be chosen to be "published" on the city’s sidewalks.
"The idea is to take a pretty sterile public asset, a city sidewalk, and infuse it with art," said Dave Hunt from St. Paul’s Public Works department.
In this case the art is poetry written and submitted by city residents. Marcus Young, the city’s artist-in-residence who came up with the idea, and Hunt agree that the arts can help people look at the city differently and create a more inviting atmosphere.
Young, who calls his job a great lesson in civics, lived in Lowertown in the early 1990s, working in the performing arts. "But now I say that I am a conceptual and public artist," he said.
This may sound like an unusual project for Pubic Works to undertake, but it’s not that far afield from what already happens in that department. Each year St. Paul replaces approximately one mile of worn-out sidewalks, which is about one-tenth of all the sidewalks in the city, at a cost of about $1 million. Why not add a few poems to the mix?
"When the sidewalk is almost dry, the poem will be stamped into the concrete," Hunt said. "To help bring out the image, we plan to color the stamped words."
Form and beauty
Hunt concedes that an ordinary sidewalk doesn’t do much for a person, aesthetically. "It’s there, it’s functional and it’s necessary," he said. "So you don’t think of a sidewalk when you think of beauty and aesthetics." Young agrees.
"As I walk through the city I see there is so much functional text around us," he said, pointing to street signs and billboard advertising. "There needs to be some text just there for the reading, to make you think, to beautify your thoughts. We are trying to create moments of inspired reading.
"We have plain-Jane sidewalks so we are creating art from the everyday materials that make up our lives," Young said. "It’s art integrated in how Public Works does its business. We’d like people to consider poetry as part of sidewalks and that they go together naturally."
Contest guidelines required poems to be original and short. Writers had to stay under 300 characters, which includes words, spaces and punctuation. Hunt said this part of the contest raised the largest number of inquiries and called the limit "a challenge for us because people do poetry in their own style."
The topic was open to a writer’s imagination, although Hunt said the city asked people to write something for public consumption. Winning poets will each receive a $150 prize, publication of their poems in a printed book and on the project website, and, of course, on the sidewalk.
A new twist on an old idea
Sidewalk poetry is not a new idea, although St. Paul is using a different approach. Young said that Addison Street in Berkeley, Calif., is known for sidewalk poetry written by noted poets. "Installation" of St. Paul’s poems will begin this summer.
"With this kind of a project, we’re sailing into uncharted water," said Hunt. "We don’t know how people will accept this idea." The authors’ names will not appear on the sidewalk and poets cannot request specific locations for their work.
"We’re going to leave that to the sidewalk engineers," Hunt said.
