Poetry Pole

I got a letter from my Portland Poetry Partner yesterday. (She's a teacher I used to know in the school where I used to work. We used to send poems to each other regularly.) She told me that as retirement gift, one of our colleagues gave her a Poetry Pole which was installed at the school.

I'm not sure I entirely understand what it is. I want to ask her to send me pictures. She said it's like those boxes you see realtors putting out that you can open and take a sheet of paper out. But that this is homemade and beautiful. I imagine some sort of display case for poems but am unsure of how many and whether people take them, leave them, or both.

I did find a youtube video of a poetry pole in Yakima. It's a nice idea, art in the public realm.

I was thinking about how it would be neat if we had one of these at my school, but people do things very neatly at my school, and I would want to allow this to be sloppier. (That said, I already have a poe-tree in my classroom where I hang a few poems now and then. There is also a bulletin board where the kids hang theirs... it can withstand lots of hands touching it better than my little lemon tree can.)

I would prefer one closer to the home part of my life, I think, but maybe not right now.

I'm almost finishing compiling an anthology of my own work that U. is helping me publish. I'm at the stage now of removing poems I don't want others to see after all.

It's a tricky process. There are some fairly private pieces... some about relationships, for example. Also, I've had some highly emotional periods of my life that include obsession about certain topics and I wrote and wrote and wrote at those times. I'm embarrassed by obsession as it feels so out of control, and yet I don't wish to censor myself. So I select one poem from a series and include it, hoping the art in my work will speak louder than the fact of my speaking it and somehow be okay.

I'm also unsure of how certain friends or family may receive certain poems as they may contain parts of my life that I don't discuss openly.

Yet there they are. And I don't wish to censor myself.

I hide behind my writing, and yet I like an audience to my life. This is a brave experiment.