April’s nod to National Poetry Month is 30 days filled with recitations, incantations, slam poetry performances and spoken word gatherings that evoke the wonder of the 1950’s Beat Poetry gatherings once perceived as scandalous and impure. The fact that it fades away when May comes is less the calendar’s fault than it is our too short a love affair with poetry.. But as we impatiently wait for our flowers to blossom and for the world to stop hating, beautiful poetry continues to be written, read, spoken and sung.
The richness of Boston’s poetic past reaches back to Edgar Allan Poe, whose life-sized statue has been rushing down Boylston Street at the intersection of Charles Street South since 2014, lording over Edgar Allan Square like a madman on a mission. The imagination runs wild with what would have happened had Poe encountered 19th century Concord poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickenson or 20th century Boston Brahmin Confessional poet Robert Lowell; add the possibilities of the tragic figures Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath; and influencer, UMass Amherst professor 2021 National Book Award-winning poet Martin Espada. His collection Floaters speaks to (and for) the term certain Border Patrol agents use to describe Mexican migrants who drowned trying to cross over. It is both an historical epic and a intimately personal recollection of baseball, racism, and identity.
What is poetry’s future in Boston? Boston’s newly-appointed (February 2022) Youth Poet Laureate Anjalequa Birkett sees her appointment as a way to connect with Boston youth, “…to find issues they want to change…and be the voice that makes it happen in my own way. Nine finalists were also cited from Greater Boston area schools as young people willing and able to make a poetic difference in their lives, the lives of their contemporaries, and a future infused with poetic promise.
The strength of our poetic youth and their potential for change is only as strong as the foundation under their feet. 826 Boston, celebrating 15 years in the city, is a leading nonprofit writing, tutoring, and publishing organization dedicated to helping students in K-12 (and beyond) share their stories, amplify their voices, and tap into their leadership potential. As the local branch of an organization founded 20 years ago at 826 Valencia in San Francisco by author Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari, 826 Boston understands that the poetic voice of its youth has expanded from the traditional definition of the form.
826 Boston is not alone in its mission to provide a voice to poets and writers from all spectrums of life. Grub Street Boston works to remove barriers (social, cultural, and institutional) and allow all voices to thrive and tell their own stories in their own ways. Founded in 1997 by Eve Bridburg, Grub Street has been a leading voice over the past quarter century in affording a voice to the marginalized. This is more important now than ever, especially in a national cultural climate where outlets for poetic performances, in recognizably poetic forms or spoken word storytelling, can still be divided by race, ethnicity, and class.
Serina Gousby, Senior Program Coordinator of Grub Street’s Boston Writers of Color and (BWoC) group, noted in an April 2021 interview with Boston Compass newspaper that the quest for equity in finding (and keeping) a platform continues:
“Though we have worked for many years to push equity forward, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic disproportionately affecting health and safety of Black and AAPI communities, our organization felt a greater urgency to tackle racial injustice and inequity in everything we do.”
What was once established as textbook “poetry” in academia as represented by Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge (to name but a few) has effectively morphed into a different definition of poetry, the role of the poet, and the form it can take. Bob Dylan’s long overdue 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature conclusively proved to any naysayer that the ancient oral tradition of storytelling really has no beginning or end. The traditional poet who pontificates in stentorian tones has suited our purposes for centuries, but the format and intention has always been flexible. It’s just taken a long time to understand how to absorb poetry. As one of Dylan’s own contemporaries (Paul Simon) put it in his 1965 song “Sound of Silence,”
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/and tenement halls/and whisper in the sounds of silence.”
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
