As part of my duties as Murfreesboro’s inaugural Poet Laureate, I wrote a series of 5 poems inspired by the city entitled “because no place is perfect.” I recorded these poems on my back porch on a summer night, so you’ll hear some crickets and katydids and maybe some traffic and a train in the distance. Each poem is about a minute in length.
Click to listen:
- Say you want to love it here
- Say you feel like an outsider
- Say you go away for a while
- Say you can say this much
- Say you’re trying to understand
About the work
In writing this series of poems, I wanted to consider the shifting role of the “outsider”—from how a resident new to the area might view our city, and our Southernness, to how someone born here might feel increasingly alienated by growth and change. Of course, even someone born here may feel alienated by their otherness due to the color of their skin, their religion, or other aspects of their identity, and I hope the poems resonate with those points of view as well.
From the beginning of my vision for this series, I also wanted to pay tribute to the strength and heart of our residents. As it happened, the Murfreesboro Loves movement grew out of response to a white nationalist march during the Laureates’ term. I saw this tremendous response as a pivotal moment in our city’s history and therefore fitting for the culmination of the series.
The colored subtext throughout the series offers the viewer an alternative way of parsing the poems and the ideas they present.
About the exhibit
The Other Side: Contrasts in Our Community reflects a shared awareness of all three Laureates for the challenges of life in a fast-growing, increasingly diverse city in the South. “The other side” echoes the well-known poem “The Bridge Builder” by Murfreesboro native Will Allen Dromgoole (1860–1934), suggesting that the past and the future are bridged best with intention. While Dromgoole’s poem imagines the bridge builder as an old man thinking of a “fair-haired youth,” the artists expand the concept of connection between past and present to particularly interrogate the idea of “the other,” whether that’s a young person of color in Nelson’s “race”, the pliable “you” addressed in Wells’ series of poems “because no place is perfect,” or the Civil War soldiers almost hidden in the mist of construction rubble in Togrye’s “Bridge Builder.”
View the Cultural Arts Laureates exhibit from June 26 – August 3 at the Murfreesboro City Hall Rotunda. In addition to my poems, there are photographs by Jessica Nelson and paintings by Ginny Togrye.
