Spreading the words: Students diffuse poetry throughout city

Graduate student Marcus Wicker’s W203: Poetry Creative Writing class is taking poetry outside the classroom and posting it around Bloomington.

As part of an ongoing class project, Wicker assigned his students the tasks of reading selections from the contemporary poetry anthology “McSweeney’s Poets Picking Poets” and selecting their favorites to share with the community.

“The idea is simple, really – to normalize the idea of poetry, to post it in a nonacademic setting so that passersby might experience a poem in the way one might engage a newspaper article or portrait,” Wicker said.

Students’ only stipulation when choosing their poems was to choose a piece they found engaging enough to stop a passerby for a moment, hopefully demanding their reflection on that piece of poetry.

“I think more people should read and write poetry. Even if it’s terrible, cliche or unintelligible, it has some worth,” sophomore Frances Frame said. “Poetry forces people to look somewhere and see something they might never see otherwise, or feel something they didn’t know they could feel.”

The public installations are simple, either typed or hand-printed copies of the poems displayed in various locations. The poems’ subject matter is designed to relate to the space in which the piece is posted.

One group, for example, posted a piece called “On the Subject of Doctors” to a tree outside of Bloomington Hospital.

“My students have been very creative with their installations, often using a poem as an actual rhetorical device,” Wicker said. 

Frame and her partner took a poem in which a person’s emotions are dissected with a saw, and taped it to a display of formaldehyde-preserved baby alligators in Jordan Hall.
Senior Justin Chandler said he feels the integration of poetry into the environment to find beauty in the mundane is what makes the project so engrossing, both for students and observers.

Chandler and his group chose a poem titled “The Glimpsed Old Woman in the Supermarket,” in which the speaker, in the everyday setting of a grocery store, encounters an old woman and sees her infused with beauty, life and even sexuality.

“Taking such a simple scenario and finding that potential is what makes the poem so strong,” Chandler said. “We need to see the world, even the seemingly mundane aspects of it, as a place of beauty, of meaning, of excitement and of passion.”