Comments on: Found on Flickr: Poetry, Texas

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:36:54 +0000

The School of Quietude rules the County Boards, apparently!

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

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:49:28 +0000

Yes! And designed by the father of the great Boston poet John “Wheels” Wheelwright. Thank you!

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:39:15 +0000

oh, and there’s the Longfellow Bridge in Boston/Cambridge is named after Henry Wadsworth. Don, shame on you for not thinking of that one.

By: John Oliver Simon

John Oliver Simon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:04:58 +0000

There is a Chaucer Street in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, my home town. It’s one block long.

San Francisco has a number of streets named after writers, including Jack Kerouac Alley.

By: Cathy Halley

Cathy Halley — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:54:53 +0000

I can recite “Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat” from memory. Ask me sometime!

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:52:37 +0000

This doesn’t count, I know, but there are at least two Eugene Field Parks in the Chicago area (aka Chicagoland). Field was the guy who wrote such poems as “Little Boy Blue,” “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the “Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.”

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:33:43 +0000

Greeley, CO is named after Horace Greeley, NY Tribune editor, who published Rufus Griswold’s libelous obituary of Poe. Does that count?

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:17:41 +0000

well, Kent, not sure if you consider him a good poet or not, but Whittier (John Greenleaf) has a large suburb of LA named after him; home of such illustrious Californian leaders as Pio Pico and Richard Nixon (though it wasn’t really “Whittier” in Pico’s time.) Even more interesting is that JGW was still alive when the town was named and he even provided a dedicatory poem.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:20:46 +0000

Is there a town in the U.S. named after a U.S. *poet*? Or any poet from anywhere? There must be a Homer, [State].

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

By: Catherine Halley

Catherine Halley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:48:43 +0000

Martin-
Thanks for that link. It’s nice to remember there’s method to the magic. And thanks, too, Katie, for the CD Wright whom I think is coming up on the next Poetry Off the Shelf podcast.