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Monday, April 19, 2010

Monday Morning in Greenpoint: "Poles on Poles" on Manhattan Avenue


We took the B48 bus from Dumbo Books HQ this morning

to Lorimer and Bedford and then walked up Manhattan Avenue to make our first stop at one of the two Rite-Aid stores a block apart (the one that used to be The Meserole Theatre, where you can still discern the location of the old balcony and stage)

when we spotted the first sign of "Poles on Poles," a series of Polish poems put up along the shopping district.

As we made our way, we saw more:

They are a project of [v]vital[ny] (in Polish, witalny means "vital"), which
looks to the ephemeral to challenge positions of privilege and encourage interactions between groups that occupy the same space. Keeping with the idea of the city as transitional, our installations are temporary and non-colonizing of space.


Poets up include Edward Hirsch, above (ten wiersz w języku angielskim), C.K. Williams, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jack Gilbert, and Robert Haas, although we couldn't find them all and suspect that some may have been taken as souvenirs.

In unrelated (or maybe not) Polish cultural news, we see the Polish Film Festival is coming soon.

We were heading up to C Town and then to the India Street entrance to the G train to get our drugstore supplies and groceries home, but we'd like to express our gratitude to [v]vital[ny] for brightening our walk up Manhattan Avenue with poetry.

Dziękuję!

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