Aspiring Evanston poets may soon see their work set in stone.
The City of Evanston’s Public Art Committee and Evanston Public Library have announced a poetry competition open to all Evanston residents. Five winning poems will be chosen in May and set in concrete on the sidewalk outside the library. Contestants must mail poems to the library by May 10.
Officials announced the contest in April in honor of National Poetry Month.
The library plans to replace the brickwork on its front sidewalk with concrete in the coming months, said Joshua Barney, chairman of the Public Art Committee. Library and city officials hope the engraved poetry will enhance the space, he said.
“The poems in general will hopefully inspire, enlighten, humor and raise the awareness of a variety of different thoughts and emotions,” Barney said.
The project will produce works unique to Evanston since only residents of Evanston can submit entries, and a committee of Evanston residents will choose the winners, Barney said. Contest organizers aim to display poetry Evanston residents can relate to, and the sidewalk prints should remain in place for many years, he said.
Contest organizers were inspired by a similar project in St. Paul, Minn., three years ago, Barney said. That project started in connection with St. Paul’s standard sidewalk maintenance program, with the goal of letting the city create art during routine repairs, said Marcus Young, the lead artist behind the St. Paul project.
“This is poetry that comes to you,” Young said. “It comes to your front door.”
Young came up with the idea after noticing the abundance of commercial and regulatory text in public areas and the lack of any text purely for beauty or enjoyment, he said. He was also inspired by the stamps that construction companies put on sidewalks, and he wondered why the rest of the concrete is usually left like blank pages in a book.
In the first two years, 26 poems were chosen and installed at 260 places around St. Paul, Young said. Most people like the idea, and he has received inquiries from cities across the United States, as well as in New Zealand and Nova Scotia, he said.
For Pamela Haas, a social worker whose poem is imprinted in St. Paul, the project provides a way for the public to appreciate poetry in their everyday life.
“It doesn’t cost a lot, and it just adds so much to the city,” Haas said. “I’ve seen people stop and look at them and just spend a little time with some art.”
Poetry has been marginalized over the past 50 years, but it may be making a comeback, said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, a literary organization based in Chicago.
“Anecdotally, I don’t think we’ve seen a decline in the presence of poetry in the American culture.” Barr said. “We see a re-emergence, almost a renaissance of poetry in everyday public life today.”
