Seattle's own Shin Yu Pai, the city's Civic Poet, is gearing up to bid adieu to her two-year tenure with a splash of creativity come this April. Kicking off a poetic frenzy for National Poetry Month, Pai is orchestrating a public poetry project that's more than your garden-variety open mic night. According to Art Beat Seattle, her interactive art campaign will speckle the city with the lyrical prowess of local poets, where sustainability is the word and Seattle is the muse.
Following last year's public plea for themes, Shin Yu Pai sifted through 51 character-oozing entries to pinpoint five poets whose words struck the right chord on Seattle places singing sustainability, the selected poets include Kathya Alexander, Bryna Antonia (Á Thanh) Cortes, Cindy Luong, Joe Nasta and Bryan Wilson they're not your typical Bard Club; they're civic wordsmiths with a message. Their poems are bound to pop up city-wide from the Seattle Public Library, both downtown and in South Park, to cultural hotspots like Wa Na Wari and the Friends of Little Saigon, not to exclude the bureaucratic hive of Seattle Municipal Tower, the artsy realms of Slide Gallery and Bureau of Fearless Ideas.
Architect of the visual feast, graphic designer and teacher Jayme Yen, has cooked up an eclectic mix of aesthetics for this project - think postcards, posters, and window clings dancing with vinyl banners, and a cut-paper installation that can all be mapped out for the poetic pilgrimage. Poetry enthusiasts will soon navigate the streets, tracing the verse-voyage across Seattle's urban tapestry.
We're not just talking about slapping words on a page and calling it art; this campaign is stitching poetry into the fabric of the city, it’s about visual storytelling in dialogue with public space, Pai is threading the needle between words and landmarks, knowing full well that the impact of verse on the concrete jungle can often be as indelible as any monument.
