Related Articles • The Dream of the World of Poetry • Poets' Way: Boulder Blazes a Poetic Trail

Elsewhere on the Web • Campaign for an International Poetry Museum • “The time is right for a poetry museum,” in The San Francisco Chronicle

You are sitting in a small café, sipping a cappuccino and noshing on a sticky bun. You are furiously penning a sonnet, your first since high school, and you will post its 14 rough-hewn lines at the virtual café for feedback from fellow cybards. You have just witnessed, in the theater’s intimate dark, a kinetic poetic marvel: the Medicine Wheel Dance Company whirling, shuffling, glissading to a voiceover of Anne Waldman’s “Make Up on Empty Space.” You have yet to visit the library, where you will research the life and bilingual translations of Mexican poet Juan Jose Arreola, his recent death your introduction. On the way there, you will pass the permanent collection of word paintings by William Blake and Kenneth Patchen, complemented by the current revolving exhibit, “Artist as Poet, Poet as Artist,” featuring work by Max Ernst, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Apollinaire. You remind yourself to visit the museum shop before it closes. You know you want that T-shirt bearing the Wallace Stevens quote: “Poetry is the priest of the invisible.” And Joy Harjo intoning from your CD player during your morning meditation. And a postcard photo of a young e.e. cummings, unshaven, bereted. You are in Poetopia. You are spending the afternoon at the International Poetry Museum in San Francisco.

Museum: a shrine to the muses. Enshrine whom? Latin American poets? Sí. Sacred poets? Hallelujah! Gay poets? You go, girl. Erotic poets? Yes…yes…yes! Cowboy poets? Yeehaw! French poets? Oui, absolument. Women poets? We want the IPM. When do we want it? NOW!

Enter Herman Berlandt. Editor and publisher of Mother Earth International Journal, a decade-old quarterly forum for the poet’s perspective on global political and ecological issues, among other journals, newsletters, and anthologies. Producer of six National Poetry Week Festivals, 17 poetry-film festivals, one poetry-rock festival, five Labor Day Poetry Reading Marathons, four Young Filmmakers Festivals, among other poetry events. Author of 15 poetry collections. Filmmaker. Teacher. Director of and Dreamer-Guy behind the proposed International Poetry Museum.

I met the multifarious Mr. Berlandt this past September at his rustic Bolinas, California digs. Wise, affable, committed. But can he get enough individual members of the global poetry community to back his vision? Well, to date, he’s received written endorsements from American po-notables Adrienne Rich, Robert Creeley, Alice Walker, Gary Snyder, Nellie Wong, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maya Angelou, Philip Levine, Wanda Coleman, Robert Pinsky, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Andrei Codrescu, Chana Bloch, Robert Bly, Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, and Caroline Kizer. Also X.J. Kennedy, Maxine Hong Kingston, and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Not too shabby a start. And why wouldn’t folks want to support an idea “whose time has come” -- the first of its kind in the world -- in a city celebrated for its rich literary history, its multicultural artscape, its top ranking as a national and international travel destination? Why wouldn’t folks -- poets and not-yet-poets alike -- want all-sensory access to this most ancient and universal expression?

But hey, the bottom line is the bottom line. Who’s gonna pay the grantwriter? Who’s gonna pay the urban per-square-foot rent? Who’s gonna pay for the stamps? We, if we want larger audiences for poetry. We, if we want the lay public to appreciate our art form. We, if we want our poetry communities vibrating with authenticity and abundance. In his poem “Monuments Still Not Built,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko says:

Monuments of the coming future,
you advance on us by yourselves.
I hear the cast-iron tread.
I hear the voice of bronze.
There can be no rebuilding
without rebuilding memory,
and without rebuilding monuments
to those who built us.
Now is your time, monuments,
the time of honest marble.

So help a fellow poet realize an honest dream: Send what you can and any suggestions to Uniting the World Press, P.O. Box 886, Bolinas, CA, 94924. And contact Herman at the Campaign for an International Poetry Museum Web site to see what else he needs to build this monument to the timeless muse of poetry.

...The museum will be closing soon. You walk the long corridor walled with portraits of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks. On your way out, you drop by the information desk to submit your registration form for the upcoming ciné-poem workshop, sign up for the semiannual poetry marathon, and grab next month’s calendar of events. A lecture series on “Poetry Under the Influence”? A “Poetry as Medicine” symposium? A live simulcast of Lou Reed climaxing The People’s Poetry Gathering in New York City? Thank the Muse all this information is posted on the Web site so you can tell all your pals about the unbelievable, mulitpleasable, po-peaceable International Poetry Museum.

Marj Hahne

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Marj Hahne is an educator and a poet, who recently relocated to New York City from Philadelphia, where she served as our Philadelphia/South Jersey/Delaware Museletter correspondent. She endeavors to create a blissfully seamless life of poetry, teaching, and travel. She has written two feature columns for About Poetry before this one:

• “Reviews That Should Have Been Written: Poetry, The Press, and Public Space”
• “Painted Bride Quarterly Tossed Across Earthside Cyberstoops”

Two of her recent poems appear in our Poems After the Attack anthology.

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