Washington, DC, is not typically seen as a prominent poetry scene the way many folks think of New York City and San Francisco. However, the nation’s capital has been home to many great poets – such as Walt Whitman and Sterling Brown – and continues to be a hotbed of contemporary poetry.
Not only has Washington, DC, served as home to many poets, but it has also served as the inspiration for many poems. In the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington, DC, editor Kim Roberts has collected one hundred poems inspired by the area.
In her introduction, Roberts – who also serves as editor of the online journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly – states:
Decisions about what—and who—to include were influenced by a desire to portray the city at different time periods in its modern history and to cover the city’s full geography. A few poems stray into the surrounding suburbs, but most stay firmly inside the diamond of the city’s boundaries. I was also influenced by another consideration: a limit of one hundred poems. This book could easily have been twice that size—and I regret the large number of wonderful poems I had to exclude in order to maintain my page count.
The diversity of the poets represented in this anthology is matched by the diversity of the subject matter. Myra Sklarew’s poem reflects on the history of and changes to a neighborhood:
Years later I bring my mother to 4th Street to see
the home of her childhood. But it’s gone, raw
earth where a house once stood. Nearby,
the missing cantor’s house, echo of his son
named Al Jolson and his brother Harry who sang
for coins on the street corners to buy tickets
to the National Theater, substituting jazz
for their father’s prayers.
--from "4th Street, S.W., Washington, D.C."
The role of the nation’s capital as both the seat of the federal government and as a pivotal location in African American history are both spotlighted in E. Ethelbert Miller’s poem:
tall man lincoln looking out the windows
of this white house. i wonder what he’s
thinking. the war not far from here. men
dying. death trying to get indoors. i rise
before his wife asks for anything. all the
dresses i make, everything i touch is black.
sometimes i can’t tell the difference between
war and slavery…
--from "Elizabeth Keckley: 30 Years a Slave and
4 Years in the White House"
From its ethnic districts (Chinatown in “The Fortune Cookie,” by Gregg Shapiro) to its history steeped in jazz (A.B. Spellman’s poem “On Hearing Gonzalo Rubalcaba at Blues Alley”), its monuments (“Shadows Fall on Washington,” by Robert L. Giron) to those who simply call the city home (“I Saw Her Rise,” by Ramola D), every corner of the city, and a few of its close suburbs, is commemorated in this collection.
Full Moon on K Street stands as an example of why Washington, DC, should not be known only as a hub of politics. Thanks to Kim Roberts – and the anthology's publisher, Plan B Press – perhaps more people will come to know of the city’s great literary heritage.
147 pages
