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.

words with a view

We’ve posted a number of times about typewriter poetry. Here’s an addition to that collection.

Plateau Point is located on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s a six-mile hike one way on Bright Angel Trail, but the views are stunning. “During three days of unseasonably warm weather” near the end of 2017, National Park Service ranger Elyssa Shalla carried a table, a chair, and a typewriter to Plateau Point and left it there for three days “with an invitation for visitors to reflect on their experience and type a note on the analog machine.” Seventy-six people did.

For her efforts, Shalla was honored with the 2018 National Freeman Tilden Award, which goes to the top interpreter in the National Park Service.

See some samples and additional photos of this engaging project on Towers & Type.

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photo Elyssa Shalla

park poems

As you may be aware, 2016 marks the centennial of the National Park Service. To mark the occasion, the Academy of American Poets has commissioned fifty poets to write poems about a park in each of the fifty states. Every Thursday, throughout the fall season, you can find a new selection of five poems posted on Poets.org along with an Info link that includes a statement by the poet.

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NPS map

poetry walking

In our ongoing pursuit of all-things-poetry-walk comes this ambitious project by poet/performance artist Moheb Soliman. Soliman’s project, H.O.M.E.S. (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior), explores “the place of nature in modernity, identity, and belonging.” He has tracked, on land, the entire coastline of the Great Lakes and has formed partnerships with local stakeholders in the region. One outcome of his meandering is a series of “nature poems masquerading as official park signs” on trails at Pictured Rocks, Apostle Islands, and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshores, and Isle Royale National Park.

You can learn more about the artist, his art, poetry, residencies and the HOMES project on Moheb Soliman’s website. There’s more about the Great Lakes installation on the National Parks Service site and still more in a brief story in The Detroit News.

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NPS photo