Shin Yu Pai's Poetry in Place Campaign Brings Poetry to Seattle's Streets

by Jas Keimig

In the lush greenery of the Central District, a lavender poster on the home-turned-art-gallery Wa Na Wari's front porch is visible from the sidewalk.

Upon closer inspection, it asks in a giant font, "How you doing?" then beckons, "Come take a seat." At the bottom of the poster is the poem from which those two lines came — "The Visit" by storyteller and playwright Kathya Alexander.

The piece centers around a Black elder named Miss Grosvenor as the speaker comes to visit her at her Central District home, expounding on how gentrification has shaped the neighborhood. "The flowers in her yard are blooming. / Red and pink fluffy rhododendrons.," the poem reads. "Miz Grosvenor's nearly 100 years old. / She's lived in this house since she was born on some land her daddy bought. / Now she's the only Black family left on her block." This poem's placement is fitting on Wa Na Wari, a fifth-generation Black-owned home that has served as a gathering place and site of connection since its inception in 2019.

"The Visit" is one part of Seattle Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai's Poetry in Place, a public poetry campaign that takes poems from five emerging poets — Alexander, Bryna Antonia ( Thanh) Cortes, Cindy Luong, Joe Nasta, and Bryan Wilson — and plasters them onto different locations in Belltown, the Central District, downtown, South Park, Little Saigon, and Greenwood. Each poem speaks to its chosen location, rooting each poet's words to a sense of place for the duration of National Poetry Month.

"I felt like it would be a really beautiful thing to platform and give an opportunity to a number of poets from our community to represent and interpret their work in a visual way that could make it very site-specific and place-based," said Pai in a recent interview. "And give these poets an opportunity to have their work experienced in a way which they maybe hadn't imagined before, as well as giving the public that opportunity to engage with poetry in a different way."

Initially, Pai put out a call for poems around sustainability. Many of the over four dozen submissions she received were mostly just generic Pacific Northwestern vibes — rain, trees, birds, shorelines. But the five that rose to the top were specific, taking the reader to various spots around Seattle. Like in "Seattle's Little S i Gn," Cortes captures the hustle and bustle in Little Saigon ("Jackson and 12th street trails, / swing doors gift savory winds"), or in Luong's "The Seattle Public Libraries," the poet reflects on the importance of the Central and South Park Branches:"Through setbacks and steps forward / The libraries are / Here / For me / For you / For us."

"I wanted to take these poems and see what could be done with them visually because they had really interesting images and language that were fresh and could lend themselves to something very imaginative," Pai said.

Thus, Pai enlisted the help of Jayme Yen, a Taiwanese American designer and co-founder of the Seattle Art Book Fair to create the visual manifestations of each poem. In the case of Cortes' poem, which is in both Vietnamese and English (translated by the poet's grandfather), Yen found a stylized typeface by a Vietnamese designer to make the letters really pop. And for Bryan Wilson's meditation on atmospheric rivers, aptly titled "Atmospheric River," Yen designed the large font that reads "Fictions & Fishes" so that it pools on and cascades down the cool blue page, reflecting its watery subject.

The poems' subjects lent themselves very easily to placement around the city. Pai organized a group of community partners, including Wa Na Wari, Friends of Little Saigon, Slide Gallery in Belltown, Seattle Municipal Tower, The Seattle Public Library branches downtown and in South Park, and The Bureau of Fearless Ideas in Greenwood, to host a corresponding poem poster. In the spirit of democratized public art, everyone is invited to download the poems in both poster and postcard form to keep with them or post up in any way they see fit. Namely, Pai is interested in encouraging connections between poetry, Seattle, and ourselves.

"Whether it's poetry, language, or public art, there is this experience of slowing down, which is something we just don't get enough of in our present-day culture," Pai reflected. "These particular poems, which speak to experiences of place and belonging, I would like to believe that if someone slows down long enough to read poems, they will feel a sense of connection not just to the poet and the place, but to have something resonate in themselves. The thing we often forget as people living in a city is that we, as part of the city, also contribute to place-making by how we are in a place. The sense of belonging that we create and shape also belongs to a collective. They mutually inform one another."

Shin Yu Pai's Poetry In Place public poetry campaign will be on view at various locations through April 30. For more information and downloadable posters, head over to the Office of Arts & Culture website.

Featured Image: Kathya Alexander's "The Visit" is on view outside Wa Na Wari as part of Seattle Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai's Poetry in Place campaign for National Poetry Month. (Photo: Jas Keimig)