By Daniel Rigney
I’m reporting to you from the streets of Berkeley, California, a university city that has more than its share of street performers. I wish some of them would come to my own city of Houston as cultural missionaries.
My favorite Berkeley street art so far has been performed daily -- not by living buskers, but by dead poets whose society of poems, cast in iron with words lettered in porcelain enamel, are laid into the concrete in front of a theater just off Shattuck Avenue near UC’s campus. (My pledge to you: No “concrete poetry” puns will be inflicted in the making of the post, starting now.)
Here’s just a tiny sampler of lines from the 120 or so dead writers whose words rest here, whose feet walked these very sidewalks, and whose ghosts can still be heard whispering free verse to those who have ears to hear them.
"There's another Act coming after this. I reckon you can guess what that's about." -- Thornton Wilder
"You write the happy ending to the play! There must, there, must, there's got to be a way!" -- Bertold (or Bertolt) Brecht
"I saw a young deer standing among the languid ferns. Suddenly he ran -- and his going was absolute, like the shattering of icicles in the wind." -- Hildegarde Flanner
Finally, this engraved lyric from an indigenous Ohlone song:
“See I am dancing! On the rim of the world I am dancing!”
For more on this remarkable installation of civic sidewalk art at the foot of the Berkeley hills, look here and here.
I have a new favorite American city. As a former governor of California once said, "I'll be back."
Danagram
I’m reporting to you from the streets of Berkeley, California, a university city that has more than its share of street performers. I wish some of them would come to my own city of Houston as cultural missionaries.
My favorite Berkeley street art so far has been performed daily -- not by living buskers, but by dead poets whose society of poems, cast in iron with words lettered in porcelain enamel, are laid into the concrete in front of a theater just off Shattuck Avenue near UC’s campus. (My pledge to you: No “concrete poetry” puns will be inflicted in the making of the post, starting now.)
Here’s just a tiny sampler of lines from the 120 or so dead writers whose words rest here, whose feet walked these very sidewalks, and whose ghosts can still be heard whispering free verse to those who have ears to hear them.
"There's another Act coming after this. I reckon you can guess what that's about." -- Thornton Wilder
"You write the happy ending to the play! There must, there, must, there's got to be a way!" -- Bertold (or Bertolt) Brecht "I saw a young deer standing among the languid ferns. Suddenly he ran -- and his going was absolute, like the shattering of icicles in the wind." -- Hildegarde Flanner
Finally, this engraved lyric from an indigenous Ohlone song:
“See I am dancing! On the rim of the world I am dancing!”
For more on this remarkable installation of civic sidewalk art at the foot of the Berkeley hills, look here and here.
I have a new favorite American city. As a former governor of California once said, "I'll be back."
Danagram
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