Volume 11:4, Winter 2010
MAPPING THE CITY:
DC Places, Part II
This issue is the second in a series that features
poems about specific places in the greater Washington, DC region. All
the poems mention real places by name: streets, neighborhoods, parks,
monuments, businesses. They reveal how the city continues to be a source
of inspiration.
This issue is presented in conjunction with Beltway
Poetry Quarterly's tenth anniversary and
the release of the new anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About
Washngton, DC, edited by Kim Roberts and published by Plan B Press.
That volume, limited to one hundred poems, filled too quickly. This
issue fills in some of the gaps, and includes poems I was unable to
include in the book.
While the print anthology focused on contemporary poems,
written from 1950 to the present, in this special issue, I decided to
include some older poems as well, to show how the city was viewed by
residents from earlier periods. These older authors include
Joel Barlow, who lived in DC during the Federalist period,
Anne Lynch Botta, who lived in DC prior to the Civil
War, and Carrie Williams Clifford, a lesser-known Harlem
Renaissance-era author. While writing styles and literary tastes have
changed, these poems still have considerable charm and historical interest.
My deep thanks to Emery Pajer, who
designed the beautiful interactive map for this issue. Users will note
that 52 poems from the first DC Places Issue
(Volume 7:3, published Summer 2006, co-edited with Andrea Carter
Brown) are marked with red pushpins on the map. Poems from
this current issue were added to the first, and are marked with blue
pushpins.
Table of Contents
I. The Mall and Environs
Mark Fitzgerald,
"Potomac at Last Light First"
Carrie Williams Clifford,
"Lincoln"
Phyllis Armstrong, "At
Watergate"
Charlie Rossiter, "Fishing
in the Tidal Basin"
Anne Lynch Botta, "Webster"
Joel Barlow, Three excerpts
from The Columbiad
Gretchen Primack, "The
Albert Einstein Memorial, Washington, DC"
Mary-Sherman Willis, "Miracle"
David Keplinger, "Visiting the National Gallery
While the Country is at War"
II. Georgetown, Downtown, Shaw
Jody Bolz,
"Moonrise Over Washington"
Wendy Babiak, "The
Time I Saw Rip Taylor While Walking from Work Outside the Four Seasons
Hotel
....... in Washington,
DC"
John A. Joyce, "Decoration
Day Poem"
Jamie Brown, "Fall
in the City"
Adelaide E. Cardozo, "New
Jersey Avenue"
Dehejia Maat, "All
the Secrets of the Universe"
Grisella M. Martinez,
"Easter Lily"
Danielle Evennou, "See
It, Say It"
III. Dupont Circle, U Street,
Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan
Martha Sanchez-Lowery,
"The Statue at Dupont Circle"
J. Scales, "old school
u street song"
Zein El-Amine, "The
Ellington"
Simone Jacobson, "Night
Crawling"
Yael Flusberg, "Optical
Illusions"
Heather Davis,
"The House on Hobart Street"
Brother Yao, "what we
were looking for in the night"
L. Lee Alexander, "Bird
House, National Zoo, Washington DC"
Mike Maggio, "The
Snake"
IV. NE and SE
Peter Montgomery,
"Wake Up Call"
Mary Beth Hatem,
"Learning Birds"
Joy Jones,
"I'm From DC"
Fareedah Allah, "The Corner
Store"
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, "Wandering
Jew in Little Rome"
Shirley Cochrane, "The
Fall of the Mourning Dove"
Truth Thomas, "New
York Avenue"
V. Heading Out
Michael
Blumenthal, "Abandoning Your Car in a Snowstorm:
Rosslyn, Virginia"
Simki
Ghebremichael, "Great Falls"
Stacy
Johnson Tuthill, "At the Trolley Museum"
Jade Foster, "jessup/
a poem to prison"
Tom
Lachman, "The Indoor Pond"