The Visible Cities: Looking at Place & Identity through Poetry

The Visible Cities: Looking at Place & Identity through Poetry is community-wide poetry project happening during the fall 2009, featuring a residency by poet & Quad City-native Ryan Collins October 19-22.

Theme/Description

The great American poet Elizabeth Bishop in her poem "Questions of Travel" once asked, "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" While this is an important question of any journey taken, it begs us to ask others, such as:

-How well do I know the place I call "home"? -How does this place help define who I am? -How do I look at this place differently after I traveled or lived other places? -How have other places I've traveled or lived help to shape who I am and how I see the world?

The Visible Cities will be an exploration of questions such as these. It encourages everyone to examine the place where we are, places we have been and how place informs who we are, how we behave and how we live. It has been said that it's not the destination, but the journey that matters; but without destinations there are no journeys, and while it is great to be mindful when we move from place to place, it is equally, if not more, important to be mindful how we move within or around a place, and how that place and its contents move around us. Edgar Lee Masters once said, "…places do have an essence, everything has a noumena back of its appearance." The Visible Cities will encourage area residents to engage that "essence" in new ways.

By examining this place we call "home" (the Quad Cities & surrounding areas), its topography, history, structures and people, we not only come to know more about this place, but also about ourselves: what impact we have on this place and what impact it has on us. From a better understanding of place comes a greater appreciation of where, and who, we are, and the potential that comes out of our shared history.

Through poetry, Ryan Collins will engage the Quad Cities in a variety of events that will inspire people to more deeply consider the places around them, what those places mean to them and what they mean to those places. Through his own work and work by well-known poets and writers, he will help people to re-discover the place we call "home" in a new light, inform participants about these places we share and help people to express all the things home can mean to us all.