POEMS IN THE WILD
Snippets of verse can be found all over Houston. Find one, snap a photo and hashtag it #Chronpoetry.
Poetry is underfoot and overhead. It sprawls across walls, hangs from lampposts and lurks in the corners of artwork. In Houston, it’s possible to stumble across a poem on a walk, on the way to work or at the neighborhood bar.
April is National Poetry Month, so we decided to showcase some of our favorite poetry in Houston’s public places.
Have you seen one of these poems or spotted poetry in your own neighborhood? Snap a photo and show us. Or share some public poetry we didn’t include in this list. Find an arty angle or include yourself, your kids or your pets. Post your photos to Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #chronpoetry. We’ll publish our favorites at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, look inside to find out where these snippets of verse can be found.
UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-DOWNTOWN, 200 Girard
This is just one of several murals in a “traveling visual poetry exhibition,” a joint project of Writers in the Schools and the University of Houston-Downtown’s Graphic Design Research Initiative. Graphic design artists turned WITS kids’ poems into wall-size works of art. The murals debuted last year in the tunnels under City Hall. Now they’re in the hallways of the Girard Street Building at the University of HoustonDowntown.
MONGOOSE VERSUS COBRA, 1011 McGowen
This line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” is stamped into a concrete step at the entrance of this Midtown bar. UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON MAIN CAMPUS This sculpture, by artist Jim Sanborn, sits just outside the M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston. Sanborn has carved lines of poetry and prose — in several languages — in its curving panels, made mostly of copper and bronze. CORNER OF FANNIN AND COMMERCE On the north side of downtown, a boat-shaped sculpture overlooks the bayou near Allen’s Landing. The poem begins with a line of wisdom from the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, then continues with more images of water. Below it, water flows lazily as the bayou curves into downtown Houston.
UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON’S M.D. ANDERSON LIBRARY
This wall-size charcoal drawing hangs just outside the university’s Honors College. Houston artist Randy Twaddle created the work, which twists around a series of familiar phrases. The work reads: “Shine and rise, gentleman and ladies! Smell the coffee and wake up! Forget and forgive circumstance and pomp. Learn and living nothing but the truth and the whole truth, for all and once, over and over … ever and forever.” DOWNTOWN SIDEWALKS A number of pavestones that feature prose and poetry are embedded in downtown sidewalks. These scattered stones are what remains of a project called “Texts in Context,” which installed 100 of them more than a decade ago. Today, some stones can be found near the Houston Public Library and City Hall. “Summer Surprised Us” is in the 800 block of San Jacinto, between Rusk and Walker. 2101 POLK Just around the corner from the 8th Wonder Brewery, this mural — by artist Sylvia Narvaez Blanco for Blanco Art — uses words written by Andrew White, the city’s former youth poet laureate. CORNER OF DALLAS AND CAROLINE This banner is one of many that hang from downtown lampposts along several blocks of Dallas, not far from Discovery Green and the Toyota Center. The Downtown District put up 575 of them last year; they were taken down around the time of the Super Bowl, but a number have reappeared since then. The banners feature lines from Houstonians past and present, a group ranging from local children to Beyoncé. This one was written by Miah Arnold.