I imagine a man stooping to look more closely, a teenager scoffing with friends and pocketing their phone for a second, and a harried mother pausing—each drawn to the curious white squares hung in shop windows along the street.
New Hampshire bustles in the fall with tourists, children heading to school, white-robed students walking to karate class, people going to coffee shops. But during this particular October, passersby are stopped in their tracks by the sight of a word or a phrase. What is that? There in the window? Lingering, pausing, being caught up unexpectedly in the world of a poem—a surprisingly expansive world assembled into a concise, confined space. A poem by a local high school student that describes the first snowfall of winter. Another offers a self-portrait as twilight. Another still compares the seeds of a tomato to bullets on the tongue. A poem about forks written by a former U.S. poet laureate, or one about chronic illness published by a state laureate. One or two of those who’ve stopped may recall lines they wrote in school when young. After going home, they might open a can of soup or pour a drink, sit down, and put words onto a page for the first time.
*
Pure accident. During a family holiday at my Greek grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, as adults conversed around the dining room table topped with the plastic tablecloth and bright flowers, surrounded by oil paintings of couples dancing in formal attire, I pulled my chair back from the table and wandered off in boredom. In the back room that was once the shared childhood bedroom of my mother and my aunt, the one with the contraption bed on which I had slept that folded out from under another bed with a creak, where I could hear the sirens pass and see lights flash across the cracked plaster of the ceiling late at night, there was a single book. My grandparents were not readers, so its origin was a mystery.
I opened it to a page that contained Emily Dickinson’s voice—another someone, a speaker, a poet, a human from another time, who somehow knew something about me that no one else did and put it to language. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone in the ways I thought I was.
*
Accidents make a poem powerful, jar us from our sleep. A slight twist away from expectation here, a juxtaposition of two incongruous moments there. Poetry is an alchemical mingling of language. As though one were to toss words into a large mixing bowl along with a congealing image, then whisk in a metaphor or fold in a phrase. We cook up something with an unknown richness, consume it, and find ourselves changed—not just by the poem, but within the poem, in its structure and the way it moves, the way it snakes down and across the page.
What sparks fly as two metals strike. What harnessed horse strains behind the wheel’s gristing. What liquid poured into another liquid incites an explosion or the most unnatural shade of blue. Gifts of context, strangeness, order. The spark is what fires a poem’s engine, its combustion. The best moments in a poem are in themselves accidents of placement or statement that impact us unexpectedly.
*
What is there in an accident? Each of these papers hung, a moment suspended. Latch onto a passerby. Slow motion. Heads turned. An engagement—but not the externalized engagement or erasure of the screen, of a film, or reel. The self, the voice, the visual, but also the language —reflection—the self met partway.
I didn’t realize that I was laying a minefield of accidents for those passing through. Possible interactions or encounters, just as my encounter had been an opportunity for such an accident, synchronicity, kismet. One accident might be the self quietly saying: I’m here.
Maybe someone is captured by the bright silence evoked by a poem hanging in the window of a coffee shop or a pizza joint, and they enter and hear and see their own voice and experience. A poem makes room. It doesn’t just speak; it listens to your telling. This is the part that is not an accident. The “I” appears like a declaration. Every poem embodies all the selves that enter it. The many selves within are the reason it exists.
*
A poem is about you. Go to it, stumble at its open doorway or stride confidently in wearing a wool scarf and your polished shoes. Its room changes shape as you move through it, and that is your mind changing shape. All of a poem’s moving parts are in proxy, in harmony or chaos, kinship and connection. A poem is the construction site you turn toward as you walk. Everything around you is being built.
*
Poems were visible from alleyways and crosswalks. The city was abuzz with poetry for those few weeks in October, as leaves were changing and days became shorter.
Alongside this posting of poems, a diverse array of poets paraded through an ornate upstairs poetry salon all day as part of a festival celebrating the written word—a packed space with standing room only. The audience heard the words of distinctive poets and were provided the opportunity to meet them and walk home with their poems in hand. Maybe this was the accident, the moment that changed it all for some.
Everyone should be able to see a fork in their hand as a bird’s foot, or a tomato as a weapon threatening to explode. This ability to imagine is what makes us human, and Main Street is where we connect.
*
When we bring a poem to a public space, we are placing it like a net for fish—except the fish are caught not so that they can be eaten but so they can be fed.
What is it about language? To hear quietly—the voice is quiet, inside.
Reading is not speaking. I am setting out the net of the poem, but no one is trapped.
Then, down the street, there are poems in the open air, in a packed room. A line floats in the air, strikes, and then is gone.
And still the fonts on Main Street, titles like little hooks or flags fluttering, grapple out in the stream, fishing line, bait.
We all find ourselves caught up in what we see, though we each experience it differently. But it’s no accident what brings us here: the humanity—the empathy—the feel.