A suburb of LA and a bridge is nice. But in other countries poets have towns and parks and statues dedicated to them galore. Their faces appear on coins and paper money. When you pay for gas in Lisbon, for example, you hand the clerk a 20 with the image of Fernando Pessoa… There are four or five different poets on Uruguayan denominations. Etc.

Kent
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San Francisco has a number of streets named after writers, including Jack Kerouac Alley.
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But no Dickinson or Whitman or Poe (named after the poet, that is)?

In Latin America, poets get neighborhoods and towns and rivers and things named after them all the time…

Kent
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Thanks so much for introducing us to Kerns work. Looking into the world of contemporary photography is like looking into the world of contemporary poetry. There are, like poets, just so many excellent photographers out there. One has to clear away the visual noise, the ersatz imagery that we’re forced to stare at all day just to see what really talented people can do. Poetry probably suffers similarly, drowned out by the constant stream hackneyed media-speak and jargons of all kinds. (Ashbery, in his later career has become a master at restoring the linguistic trash of contemporary culture to poetry, a great articulator of cultural clutter).

Kerns work is very interesting. Here’s how he does it:

“The photographs in this essay were shot at night and in total darkness aside from moonlight and, in some cases, artistic effect lighting. The only exceptions to this are “Eliasville” and “For Sale,” which were partially illuminated by sodium vapor lamps on nearby private property.

The luminescence and color saturation in these images are a result of the lengthy exposure times, ranging from one to ten minutes, and belie how dark the scenes really were.

For the effect lighting in several pictures, I used hand-held strobes with colored gel filters, and an arsenal of flashlights varying in intensity from a Mini-Maglite up to a 2,000,000 candlepower spotlight. All pictures were taken with a Nikon D80 digital SLR camera.”

This is from an essay he wrote Texasescapes.com….very worthwhile. Here’s the link:

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasPhotography/Texas-Ghost-Towns-by-Night-Nocturnal-Photography-Noel-Kerns.htm
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In Rome (likewise-built-on-seven-hills), Georgia, the citizens hail their fellows as Romans. We never found the Forum. The arrows continued pointing right. And a sculpture of Remus and Romulus. Given by Il Duce to the Romans of Georgia. Stored in a root cellar during the war.

It follows that in Athens, Georgia, the citizens hail their fellows as Athenians.

West of Rome is Poetry. Poetry, Georgia. Wonder who lives there.

[Excerpt from http://jacketmagazine.com/15/cdwright-poem.html
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Maston Ussery gave Poetry–located on the old Shreveport-Dallas Road–its name “because the area in springtime reminded him of a poem.” There’s more here in The Handbook of Texas Online: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/PP/hrp47.html.
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Geist Magazine does some fabulous thematic maps:
http://www.geist.com/
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