A banner day for city
Instead of promotional slogans, new banners feature snippets from variety of local writers
Signs feature snippets from local writers, and Houston is the theme.
I helped create the most unusual list in Houston this year. My husband all but jumped up and down when he saw the whole thing: the hundreds of lines like the ones above (by Farnoosh Moshiri, Tria Wood and Nicole Zaza). “That ought to be a book!” he said.
That was apropos. These lines, excerpts from writings set in or inspired by Houston, were collected to fill the pages of a sort of book — one whose brightly colored pages were designed to billow atop street poles and lampposts in downtown Houston, each one carrying no more than a 12-word phrase, each phrase adding to a story it took hundreds of people to tell:
A University of Houston undergraduate, a High School for the Visual and Performing Arts student, a rapper, an artist, a professor and a schoolgirl. Collins Adams, Catherine Angerson, Fat Pat, Mong-Lan, Steve Wolfe and Sofie. Their words appear on some of the 575 artful banners lining downtown’s thoroughfares, and they exist among a magnitude of more words from poets and professors, entrepreneurs and anarchists, children and historical figures, cynics and dreamers.
The project is the brainwork of Alan Krathaus and Fiona McGettigan of Core Design Studio. The Houston Downtown Management District wanted to create something bold and inspiring with the new banners it was going to hang and asked Core for ideas. Its answer —“Figurative Poetics” — was adventurous from the get-go: Whereas most downtowns have banners with simple promotional slogans, McGettigan and Krathaus wondered: What it would be like if Houston’s banners could reveal the city like the complex and unlikely character that it is?
What if walking down the street could be like having a conversation? What if each new path through the city created a new narrative, and each story was as dynamic as the city itself? What if Houston could sing its innumerable voices?
The duo imagined banners carrying these lines set atop colorfully intriguing, pop-art-inspired renditions of photographs of Houston. The images would bolster, challenge or intuitively interact with the words they’re paired with. The designers also graphically set apart one word in each banner with a box; these words would serve as a backbone, a secondary narrative of one-word poems.
I joined the project as literary detective, tasked to help find the quotes Core would need to make the project ignite. We scrambled in the time we had. Inprint, Writers in the Schools and Travis Elementary students sent poems. We scoured David Theis’ wide-ranging anthology, “Literary Houston,” and a newer anthology of Houston poems, “Untameable City.”
To broaden the scope of writing, I sought contributions from the classes I taught at UH, my own Grackle & Grackle writing studio and HSPVA. I asked my fellow alumni of the UH Creative Writing Program and pored over blues and rap lyrics. Then I sought out Houston writers I had never heard of the new/oldfashioned way: on the Web.
We knew all along about Houston’s huge writing com- munity, but to see the list come together — incomplete as it is — was eye-opening. We became obsessed. There was always a stone left unturned. We kept begging everyone we met for new names we’d never heard of and voices we didn’t yet know. As the words began to pour in, they filled us like the electricity in Frankenstein’s monster, and we felt Houston stirring.
Bayous, heat, flowers, trees, buildings, food, birds, traffic, concrete and languages: Certain themes kept popping up. It became clear Houston is a city comfortable with porous borders, or, as student Magdalena Hill puts it, we have no problem “walking between the water and the sidewalk, balancing the two.” But we are also a city of steel that feels any moment it might be swallowed up by an earth “sensing the swamp” we really are, borrowing an image from the poet Martha Serpas.
The oldest of the lines on the banners seems both like a premonition and an echo: “Gaxiame’tet upat.” It is from the Karankawa and means: “Long time ago I spoke (the language).” Houston poet John Pluecker found the line in an 1884 glossary A.S. Gatschet made with an indigenous Tonkawa man named Old Simon, who translated it to English. The words remind us of the numerous cultures that have ebbed and flowed along the Gulf Coast, and of the resilience of language to travel across centuries, to live longer than any single human can — to revive, even for a brief moment, the past.
Taken all together, the poetry does not reveal the city so much as it revels in its elusiveness. A “masked” city, a city “half-imagined (yet wholly real),” a city “like the secret pockets in blue jeans.” A city “superbly dark.” Our joys are not always easy. We are a city “gut-wrenchingly beautiful.” A city with a “sweaty power.” It should come as no surprise that “concrete” is among the most common words used. But, oh, for poets like Carolyn Tourney Florek, the concrete is “splitting for a single seed,” and the city is “springing ever further into green.”
Strong roots, bursting the earth open, showing gigantic talons. Yes my dumpling, my cuddlemonkey, my jar of lightning. A glimpse of one lithe heron momentarily lowers my jaw. Through the bus window, I learn the true meaning of abstract. It is never too cold in the heart of a nutria swimming in the bayous. And I’mma slide slide slippidy slide … Houston skyline, jagged line of my heart. Mud strangled pearl! The moonscape is coming home …