DC remains an exceptional city for so many reasons – let me know when you come visit – and it ranks as the best for closing out National Poetry Month. I walked over to the Library of Congress a few days ago on a calm evening fragrant with spring flowers to attend a free (!!) celebration of the end of U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's term.

Poetry events are fun and support important community connections, but I remain a stalwart advocate for more poetry in public spaces, where poetry arrives as a gentle surprise. A line written in wet concrete or incorporated into a nature trail. Better still when the words exist in a form that blends with the surrounding scene.

In short, I want more poetry in unexpected public spaces.

I'd also applaud more poetry with unexpected origins. Archives offer their own treasures of verse hidden among the papers, and librarians are now copying poems to help Ukraine preserve the less-stable forms of digital records. Harjo pointed to "ancestor poems" in her talk, the sparks that illuminate and converse with contemporary work. The preservation of poetry itself isn't exactly what I'm talking about though.

Archival material can and should serve as the cornerstone for new creations.

After the event, which included Harjo playing music on multiple instruments, I walked out across the Capitol plaza with the dome white against the turquoise western twilight. I biked past the dome the next morning, the swooping curve gleaming in the early sun, and I thought of Harjo once more:

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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.