The Academy of American Poets announced that it has designated 31 sites as National Poetry Landmarks. Road Trip! Poetry Landmarks across the U.S.A." will be showcased on the Academys website, www.poets.org, during August 2004, as part of the Academys year-long National Poetry Almanac project.
New York (PRWEB) August 9, 2004 -- The Academy of American Poets announced that it has designated 31 sites as National Poetry Landmarks. Road Trip! Poetry Landmarks across the U.S.A." will be showcased on the Academys website, www.poets.org, beginning August 2004, as part of the Academys year-long National Poetry Almanac project.
We received hundreds of poetry landmark nominations, and we heard from people in all fifty states," says the Academys executive director Tree Swenson. We are excited to recognize points on our countrys physical landscape—from Maine to Georgia to Montana—that are important to the cultural landscape."
Sites chosen as landmarks include poets birthplaces (e.g., Carl Sandburg, Galesburg, IL), poetry museums and libraries (e.g., the Marianne Moore Collection at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA), places of poetic inspiration (e.g., Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn, NY), and sites that commemorate poetry (e.g., Berkeley Poetry Walk, Berkeley, CA). We tried to identify places where people can literally walk in a poets footsteps," says Swenson. The nomination process was open to the public. A list of the sites selected as National Poetry Landmarks is attached.
The Academy began rolling out the National Poetry Almanac on April 1, 2004, to coincide with the first day of National Poetry Month, a program started by the Academy in 1996. The Almanac will ultimately provide 365 days worth of poetry highlights, activities, ideas, and history for individual exploration and classroom use. The Almanac complements the National Poetry Map, another online project created by the Academy in 2003. Both the Almanac and Map are available exclusively at the Academys award-winning website, www.poets.org.
The Academy of American Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1934 to foster appreciation for contemporary poetry and to support American poets at all stages of their careers. For more information on the Academy and its programs, visit www.poets.org.
National Poetry Landmarks from the National Poetry Almanac, a project of
the Academy of American Poets
1. Berkley Poetry Walk, Berkeley, CA
2. City Lights Book Shop, San Francisco, CA
3. Robinson Jeffers Tor House, Carmel, CA
4. Wallace Stevenss home-office route, Hartford, CT
5. Key West, FL: homes of Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Tennessee Williams, & Shel Silverstein
6. Sidney Laniers home, Macon, GA
7. Carl Sandbergs birthplace, Galesburg, IL
8. Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, Chicago, IL
9. Langston Hughess hometown, Lawrence, KS
10. Robert Penn Warrens birthplace, Guthrie, KY
11. Emily Dickinsons home, Amherst, MA
12. Anne Bradstreet, Salem, MA
13. Grolier Bookshop, Cambridge, MA
14. Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
15. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA
16. McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA
17. Edna St. Vincent Millays home, Camden, ME
18. Theodore Roethkes home, Saginaw, MI
19. Robert Haydens bus route, Ann Arbor, MI
20. Dixon Bar, Dixon, MT
21. Robert Frost Place, Franconia, NH
22. Walt Whitman House, Camden, NJ
23. William Carlos Williamss home and office, Rutherford, NJ
24. George Moses Hortons home, Chatham County, NC
25. Poets Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York, NY
26. Brooklyn Bridge, New York, NY
27. White Horse Tavern, New York, NY
28. Paul Laurence Dunbar House, Dayton, OH
29. James Wrights hometown, Martins Ferry, OH
30. Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia PA
31. William Staffords signs along the North Cascades National Scenic Highway, WA
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