Worcester poetry contest, mapping project celebrates local poets, places
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The next time you're out and about in Worcester, you may well be following in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop or Frank O'Hara.
A new project aims to capture the places poets have trodden, and take residents and visitors alike with them, with self-guided walking and driving tours of locations important in the lives of poets who have left their mark.
The project also includes a poetry competition, seeking poems about places in the city, both past and present, and a series of tours highlighting locations in the lives of poets who were born in or spent significant time in the city.
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The contest, dubbed Poets in and out of Places, invites Worcester County residents to write poems inspired by public places in Worcester.
The deadline is June 1. Winners will receive $75 and will be photographed in the spaces that inspired them. There are also plans to put recordings of the winning poems on YouTube, and display of the poems at the site that inspired the poem, or at Worcester Historical Museum.
Additional poems will be posted online, with more contest details at the page of the Worcester County Poetry Association's website.
The contest welcomes poems about places such as monuments, bus stops, murals, houses of worship, libraries, bridges, street corners, parking lots, factories, playgrounds, rivers, parks, coffee shops or the city's memorial squares. This includes landmarks that are no longer present or are undergoing significant change.
Worcester Poet Laureate Oliver de la Paz, a professor at College of the Holy Cross, serves as judge for the contest.
"I’m looking for poems that speak to the vibrancy of Worcester," said de la Paz. "I’m always looking for work that evokes sensory detail but in particular, with these poems about the city and the surrounding environment, I’m excited about work that can also imbue a sense of legacy and history."
Tracing poetic steps
Mapping Worcester in Poetry is creating a series of self-guided tours, in which participants can meander along places in the city where poets lived or spent time, or which inspired poems.
Poets represented in the mapping project are:
Worcester natives Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, Mary Fell, now an English professor at the University of Indiana East
Frank O'Hara, who grew up in Grafton and attended school in Worcester
Etheridge Knight, who spent part of his life and career in Worcester
"They represent a diverse group in terms of ethnicity, gender, ethnicity, race and class, and are all nationally known and historically significant," said Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, distinguished professor of arts and humanities, English professor at College of the Holy Cross and director of Mapping Worcester in Poetry.
'A fascinating process'
There are already two tours completed: one for Elizabeth Bishop, and the first of two slated to represent Stanley Kunitz.
Kunitz, who was born in Worcester in 1905 and died in 2006, was twice named poet laureate of the United States. According to the Worcester County Poetry Association, Kunitz once said, “Worcester provoked me into poetry.”
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Bishop, who was born in Worcester in 1911, spent much of her life there and in Nova Scotia, as well as in Key West, Florida. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956, but gained in her literary reputation after her death in 1979. The Poetry Foundation notes that Larry Rohter in The New York Times referred to her as “one of the most important American poets” of the 20th century.
For the project, Sweeney received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, which was extended to a fourth year, due to preemptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. "This project has two ends. The basic idea is to encourage people to realize that poems are connected to places and connected to Worcester itself."
Work on the website will continue in the upcoming academic year. "It's been a fascinating process. I would drive around with a student, who would write down directions," Sweeney said. The first tour dedicated to Kunitz starts with a mural of Kunitz outside Polar Park and works its way along Green Street and Union Hill by Providence Street.
The project began with a poetry-reading event held April 22, 2022, at TidePool Books.
The project grant is administered by Scholarship in Action at Holy Cross and student research in partnership with a community organization. The Worcester County Poetry Association is the grant's main community partner, with partners including of Main IDEA, POW!WOW!Worcester, Preservation Worcester, Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home, Worcester Historical Museum and The Worcester Review.
'Something for everyone'
The aim of the contest is to encourage people to write poems about places in the city, which can strike a personal chord. "I had a student whose mother worked at the Denholm Building," said Sweeney. "Her mother didn't speak English, so she did a lot of translating, and my student couldn't believe that someone had written a poem about the place where her mother worked. This amazed her. She couldn't get over it."
The poem is "City Song" by Mary Fell, which describes City Hall and mentions the Denholm Building.
Poems can be in a language other than English but should include an English translation, Sweeney said.
The contest has so far attracted about 40 entries, including 12 from Worcester students.
Sweeney said, "Partly, what I want to do is have everyone, especially people who think poetry is only for people who are well educated, or who only speak English. I want people to think of poetry as something for everyone, and connected to the actual world."
To learn more, visit the Mapping Worcester in Poetry and Poems in and out of Places pages at worcestercountypoetry.org.
This article originally appeared on Worcester Magazine: Contest, self-guided tours part of Worcester poetry project
