blueprints

A Place for Poetry | 189
tive poetry signage matched with nature and conservation resources and
related poetry events at libraries, and a poet in residence at each site. 6 The
installations were inaugurated in 2010, and we anticipate that millions of
people will experience poetry in the zoos of New Orleans, Milwaukee,
Little Rock, Jacksonville, and Brookfield, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.
This themed urban synergy among institutions uses poetry as the catalyst—and
the language of poets to articulate the most essential message of
wildlife biologists to the public.
Art can create new kinds of affiliation and understanding in our communities.
The Language of Conservation installations will function as flexible
anthologies throughout the zoos and reinforce a basic assumption that
poetry can help people apprehend any subject with greater pleasure and
understanding. The arts, whatever else they may be, are about how we live
in the world. In my view, this kind of generative, associative work will
become more necessary as we seek to create new modes of engagement,
understanding, and value in our cities and in our towns. 7
This new model comes out of a successful project at the Central Park
Zoo in the late 1990s, when poems were placed throughout the zoo on
benches, rafters, and stairs, 8 creating another set of connections through
which visitors could enter into relationship with the living creatures they
were apprehending. Finally, it is because poetry is an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time that the art form has been so associatively
rich.
At the Central Park Zoo, professional evaluators did interviews with
zoo visitors before and after the poetry signage was installed. When visitors
were asked what they took away about conservation after the poetry installation,
most frequently they would recite a few lines from a poem or
approximate a poem fragment. When asked directly if they liked the poetry,
some of those same people did not know that what they were saying was
poetry. Nonetheless, researchers found that after the poetry was installed,
visitors had a significantly increased awareness of human impacts on ecosystems
and, more important, a deepened sense of themselves as participants in
a larger world.
Scientists and zoo workers who had been suspicious of poetry at the
beginning of the project began to think of it as a “conservation tool.”
Because it works. (Personally, I don’t care if scientists call a Gary Snyder
poem a tool—if they love it and go back to it and make it their own.) By