and meanwhile, in Cambridge…

If your holiday travels take you to Massachusetts, take a stroll around Harvard Square to view the poems on the third annual Harvard Square Poetry Stroll. The National Park Service (NPS) in partnership with Mass Poetry and the Harvard Square Business Association present 18 short works by local poets, on view now through January 1, 2023. If you can’t make it to Cambridge, you can read the poems at the NPS link above.

walk with Emily

Perhaps next year the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk will be live and in person once again, but for now, those of us not in Massachusetts can easily join in the annual event. “Called Back”: A Virtual Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk will happen on Saturday, May 15, 2021, at 8:30am Pacific (11:30am Eastern). Registration is required, and free, with donations gratefully accepted.

(in)visible poetry

Picture this: your rainy-day poem stenciled on the sidewalk…invisible…until it rains! Rainworks, a Seattle-based company (where else?), has come up with a non-toxic, environmentally safe, biodegradable product that does exactly that. It can be stenciled or painted on and once it’s dry it remains unseen until it gets wet. It lasts, on average, two to four months, the contrast fading as time goes on.

Now, Mass Poetry, in partnership with The City of Boston, is using a similar product to create “Raining Poetry” — four poems stenciled on sidewalks near downtown. Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Georges hopes to expand the program into the city’s neighborhoods.

Important note from the Rainworks website: “Please note that Rainworks Invisible Spray will not make you invisible.”

Darn.

More Rainworks on Facebook.
. . . . .
Rainworks photo

poetry on trolleys

We’ve talked about poetry on buses and here’s another entry for the poetry-in-transit file: Poetry on the T. This Mass Poetry program puts poetry posters on Boston’s trolleys and “enables more than one million people who ride the T every day — to get to work, school, home, to go to restaurants, bars, parks — to read poetry during their commute, in place of advertisements.”

The program is funded in monthly segments — no funding, no posters — and posters bear the sponsor’s name or logo and feature poems chosen jointly by the sponsor and Mass Poetry. Read the poems, including a larger version of Joyce Peseroff’s “Your Ad Here”, see additional photos in a Metro article and learn more about the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority art collection.