April is National Poetry Month and in celebration Aurora area writers will be showcasing their work with storefront poems in downtown Aurora throughout the coming weeks.
Last month, Aurora Poet Laureate and Aurora Downtown board member Karen Christensen put out a call to local poets for poetry with the theme “rebirth” and wound up selecting a dozen of the submissions that she said “followed the theme and represented a broad group of writers in the area.”
Beginning Friday, those 12 poems can be found on a dozen different storefront windows for downtown Aurora visitors to enjoy in celebration of both National Poetry Month as well as the local writers who produced the works.
Christensen said this is the fifth year the Aurora Downtown group has sponsored the contest, having picked it up from a group called The Cultural Creative which first rolled it out in 2015.
“The Cultural Creative had this contest in 2015 through 2017, and we took it over in 2018,” she said. “Typically we get about two dozen submissions. This year, numbers were down a little but there are also constraints in terms of the number of places we have to display which is 12. The poems we chose had to follow the theme, which some didn’t, as well as the submission requirements. The point was to encourage people to express themselves.”
Submissions were varied, Christensen said, and appeared to represent a broad demographic. She added that through the past two years, “submissions have been particularly good – particularly because we get submissions from people I have not met or aren’t in our local writers’ group.
“We’re really delighted that we get this kind of interest from people who are not really connected to poets in Aurora. People were not asked to give their age but based on the poems I’ve read I’d say there were people from those in their 20s to their 80s,” she said.
Christensen said despite the “rebirth” theme there was no real concentration of ideas or topics to the poems.
“They (the poems) were all over the place. Just looking at the titles, there were a couple that were extremely personal and there were others that were a little more broad brush,” she said. “Some were spring related and some had a little bit more of a spiritual bent.”
Christensen admitted there are additional benefits to the contest beyond enticing people to visit downtown Aurora.
“There is a literacy and artistic side to this and when this project started several years ago the idea was to highlight the arts,” she said. “If you take a look at what has been going on in Aurora the last 15 or 20 years there is definitely a collaborative and heightened interest in promoting culture and the arts that cuts across many things that have been going on and will continue to go on.”
A self-guided walking tour awaits those wishing to visit the downtown storefronts.
The winning poets and the places where you can find their work downtown are: Terry Slaney at Aurora Fastprint, 54 E. Galena Blvd.; Carly Palmer at Altiro Latin Fusion, 1 S. Stolp Ave.; Marisol Del Valle at Artesan Lofts Gallery, 2 S. Stolp Ave.; Paula Garrett at Paramount School of the Arts, 20 S. Stolp Ave.; Araceli Ascencio at Do or Dye Designs, 24 S. Stolp Ave.; Christopher Kuhl at Pure Skin Solutions, 26 S. Stolp Ave.; Simone Barnes at Wardell Art and Glass Studio, 28 S. Stolp Ave.; Susan Schubert at Christian Science Reading Room, 34 S. Stolp Ave.; Donna Zine at All Spoked Up, 14 W. Downer Place, Suite 10; Carrol Roark at Wyckwood House, 14 W. Downer Place, Suite 16; Brian Olsberg at Tredwell Coffee, 14 W. Downer Place, Suite 18; and Tricia Cimera at the GAR Museum, 23 E. Downer Place.
For more information on the poetry contest, go to www.auroradowntown.org.
