Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

The city of Saint Paul’s Public Artist in Residence, Marcus Young, is working in tandem with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program to install poetry where sidewalks are replaced. The project is called Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk and in its first year has the goal of one hundred stampings of twenty poems written by Saint Paul residents. Young says:

Sidewalks are the blank pages of our city as a book. If you look closely, however, you see traces of text, such as Knutson Construction or Standard Sidewalk, stamped discreetly into some of the panels. I wondered if we could borrow this simple stamping idea, enlarge the stamp to a prominent size, and give our poets this everyday public space for writing.

We held a poetry contest open to all residents of Saint Paul and received more than 2000 original poems. The outpouring of verse was unexpected and heartwarming. Poems about spring and winter, mothers and fathers, love, and many other things imaginable reassured us that in Saint Paul we lead poetic lives. Through an anonymous judging process, our thoughtful panel chose twenty winners and fourteen honorable mentions. We made large stamps of the winning poems and teamed up with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program with the goal of one-hundred stampings this construction season.

First seen here. The website for the project is here and includes pictures of the plates they made, the poems, like the one below, and more.