Academy of American Poets Selects National Poetry Landmarks

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 Academy’s website, http://www.poets.org, during August 2004, as part of the Academy’s 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 Academy’s website, http://www.poets.org, beginning August 2004, as part of the Academy’s year-long National Poetry Almanac project.

“We received hundreds of poetry landmark nominations, and we heard from people in all fifty states,” says the Academy’s executive director Tree Swenson. “We are excited to recognize points on our country’s 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 poet’s 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 Academy’s award-winning website, http://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 http://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 Stevens’s home-office route, Hartford, CT

5.    Key West, FL: homes of Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Tennessee Williams, & Shel Silverstein

6.    Sidney Lanier’s home, Macon, GA

7.    Carl Sandberg’s birthplace, Galesburg, IL

8.    Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, Chicago, IL

9.    Langston Hughes’s hometown, Lawrence, KS

10.    Robert Penn Warren’s birthplace, Guthrie, KY

11.    Emily Dickinson’s 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 Millay’s home, Camden, ME

18.    Theodore Roethke’s home, Saginaw, MI

19.    Robert Hayden’s 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 Williams’s home and office, Rutherford, NJ

24.    George Moses Horton’s 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 Wright’s hometown, Martins Ferry, OH

30.    Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia PA

31.    William Stafford’s signs along the North Cascades National Scenic Highway, WA

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