poetry quarterly

10th anniversary

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"