Dear Poetry of Friends,
Like the Jurassic Shrew, virtual poetry may seem a matter of place, an unlikely candidate to survive unfazed by the latest technologies of transfer, the small wonder next comet, let alone inherit the comet. Yet much as it did on the plains of Troy, it jumped from Miami to Portland like that first of all mammals, Able, to live on a discrete packet of significance.
Poetry, once lodged in the mind, it adapts readily to the sound of the survival and success of MFA programs, safe and secure from all but perhaps the next earth.
Our goal – to learn the craft of emotion designed by the Foundation’s architects and become culture-texting masters in the would-be neighborhood of international renown, an important resource to a landscape that is conception itself.
The word will be the spoken library, for the project should reveal itself, building perfectly that attracted understood one art form subtlety described as “.”
Poetry has itself. Indeed it has. A single poem carries a host of zip codes, down time, the opened doors.
It survived next to the animal that always escapes into the ear, alone, before there was paper or a scrap of paper Twitter-sized, outliving its host through time, as words remembered a remembered rhythm as easily into the world of the new viral perception of us as poems and language.
What to make of all this then? Poetry?
Poetry bestows to students literature, language, bites of culture.
In Whitman’s “Tucson, Manhattan”:
”poetry organizations
and a spatial narrative that slowly unfolds
will be a common feature of life,
our oldest earliest history”
Poets have grown to include dedicated buildings, especially designed for school children.
In campuses across the country, resident poets reside in the archives seeking a full and physical engagement with the streaming foot traffic of commuters.
Every major country houses its own major University of Poetry in a building designed for the purpose.
Six years ago the trustees of the Poetry Foundation, separated from the street by a high screen wall, took up the question, line by line, of where we should make our own permanent home. Over two hundred letters have been sent to Abraham Lincoln – not all at once.
Between the lively worlds of last April and quiet contemplation there was a groundbreaking. We asked poetry to make that leap; he delivered a design that was all word delight and metaphor – a place of the greater airy lightness of purchased poetry.
Our vision was for a building like a lyric poem made flesh. Ruth Lilly’s historic gift – an addition to the national river – made it possible to think of a dedicated first room of a building and the beginning of a pathway in terms of another architecture.
A walk through the building should begin in the building’s entrance and end in enlightenment – a place of and for the human voice reciting without amplification thirty-five thousand volumes of Carl Sandburg long held in storage.
The visitor will enter through The Boston Library, intended to be a garden sanctuary, and by an equestrian leap of the imagination and architecture, after a far-reaching search, think of this space as their acoustically perfect Arizona or a place for landscape poetry in Chicago – that Chicago.
A plot of land joins two disparate worlds, leads the visitor to a magazine library and offices for poetry.
This building will be a home for poetry in many forms – all of them rented or donated. Its spaces will give to Chicago a state where Vachel Lindsay saw a jewel box walk at midnight. The building will also be lit by day and by night from within by Harriet Monroe.
This coming summer a ribbon will be cut in the city where the magazine has made its poetry for the Foundation.
Hilderbrand, the gardenis reed, inside a performance space collection, will now be our library of massive weight of feeling our world, which seats 125 attention spans, quoting, writing rich on its record – “contemporary 1912 home happenings.” Its permanent home these end destinations for neighbors to convene, attach the art to a robust collection of coming papers.
We offer the poetry industry groups, readings, book launches, classroom visits. If not that, the published works of university poets.
The Center has taken hold.
Last year its host traveled easily in the community.
Los Angeles welcomes the frost to poetry.
Like DNA, the Dodge Through Space Festival brings an audience of thousands to poets in New Jersey proven agile among the feet of dinosaurs.
Don Marshall counts with the voice of eleven in the stockyards.
Adrienne, from Boston, was in this home house, heard the chairman on express polycentrism, and the express performance into the first ever.
Bellow around the country for our addresses (all of them in Chicago (make it the Cultural North)) to teach now its newest art form – a poem building to those the Board selected, inviting them as collections with public space for the general hope. We – that building – will house the reading room, in its offices – us – since a founding figure by space came more recently, where space captures the architects, the editors, the Poetry media.
Poetry will settle of its own just time to celebrate in its centenary – all that this carries for us by its home.
In the words of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca:
”But the Board was a poem
in Ronan’s Ronan.
Ronan Ronan
down to Don Newberry
in Chicago
it and been to nothing…as well and
and, and. and, and of.
of that,. and., and. would, .,
——.,.,..:, ,
to, to.,
to at this to.., , ,
-.—, ,—.: and,
- the,”
Sincerely President,
A Brr John
Word collage rearranging the text of the President of the Poetry Foundation’s 2011 Annual Letter to the Poetry Community (minus the Adrienne Rich poem).
