2021 Poetry Blast

April is National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. This year we joined the tens of millions of students, teachers, readers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, families, and, of course, poets, in marking poetry’s important place in our lives. Our goal was for everyone in our community to read a poem, write a poem, or listen to a poem in April. Why? As editor and teacher Alice Osborn said, “Poetry is like the Windex on a grubby car window—it bares open the vulnerabilities of human beings so we can all relate to each other a little better.”

With “Poetry Blast” we wanted to saturate the campus and surrounding streets with poetry. Because of pandemic restrictions, we weren’t able to organize in-person events or even assume that people could enter campus buildings, so we focused on virtual and outdoor spaces (see p. 8), as well as outdoor advertising that included the marquee at the Big House (Go Blue!), street pole banners on campus, and advertisements on the outside of the buses that circulate through Washtenaw County. It was a huge success and plans are underway to repeat the event next year, and to include undergraduate students in the planning and execution of our celebration of National Poetry Month.

POETRY BLAST 2021 EVENTS

NOON POEMS Every weekday at noon in April, our YouTube channel featured a U-M faculty poet reading one of their poems. A huge thank you goes to the 22 faculty who broke out their phones and recorded themselves reading one of their poems: Scott Beal, Ruth Behar, Darcy Brandel, Sumita Chakraborty, Hannah Ensor, Lorna Goodison, Laurence Goldstein, Linda Gregerson, Nick Harp, Tung Hui Hu, A. Van Jordan, Laura Kasischke, Petra Kuppers, Khaled Mattawa, Christopher Matthews, Raymond McDaniel, Sarah Messer, Benjamin Paloff, Molly Spencer, Keith Taylor, Cody Walker, and H.R. Webster. PROMPT A POEM!—A DAILY APRIL POETRY CHALLENGE Creative expression through poetry for everyone! Every weekday in April, people from all walks of life united behind a common prompt by writing a poem. Many thanks to Laura Kasischke for creating the prompts. Prompt a Poem was inspired by the 2020 Life/Lines project at the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.

POP-UP POEMS Stroll around campus and read a poem! We teamed up with Michigan Quarterly Review to make poetry part of the campus landscape. Poems were posted all over campus in windows and on the diag. For those wanting to make a night of it, we also created a Central Campus Poetry Blast Walking Tour, a poem-by-poem guide to the pop-up poems on central campus.

Learn more and read the poems at lsa.umich.edu/humanities/programs/ 2021-poetry-blast-.html

–Stephanie Harrell, marketing and communications manager