This summer, I took part in a program called Teacher-Ranger-Teacher, which connects classroom educators to National Park sites. Different park sites ask their educators to do different things, and I was asked to create some resources for using the Springfield Armory site for poetry, so that the rangers there could work with schools and students. This connects to Ada Limon’s Poetry In The Parks project, where the US Poet Laureate is unveiling poems carved on picnic tables in different National Park sites.
I’ve done plenty of work in the past with the Springfield Armory and the National Parks through the Write Out project, so I was game to dive into poetry and think about how to use the site for writing. The slideshow presentation is one of two projects I developed (the other, also poetry, will be used for a national Writing Marathon with the National Writing Project next month as Write Out 2024 kicks off — more to come).
I explored a poem already at the Armory, women at the Armory during WW2, Double V Day, the immigrant/worker experience and more. I also was able to spend a few hours in the archives, looking through the Armory’s old newsletter collection, finding poems written by workers over the years and featured them in the presentation itself — giving voice to those whose lives centered on the Armory.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin