Poems in the Park
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
It looks like your standard-issue National Park sign, a chocolate brown square with white type affixed to a wooden post. Upon closer inspection one discovers that this isn’t your Uncle Sam’s signage. This summer, nature poems masquerading as official park signs can be found in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the four other Great Lakes national parks at trails, vistas and beaches as part of the National Park Service centennial celebration.
The Great Lakes Parks Centennial Poetry project is a site-specific public art installation with poetry and the Great Lakes at heart. Iconic brown and white park signs complete with official symbols offer poetic takes on Great Lakes nature, culture, modernity and identity, in contrast to the normal regulatory information. Texts are by Minneapolis poet Moheb Soliman, 36, who composed 25 poems for the project. Soliman said the poems speak to special natural or cultural places and experiences such as beaches, hiking, borders or technology. The poet is especially interested in how we “live with nature in modern times,” and how that experience is “mediated by technology.” His poems ask visitors to consider the “beautiful vistas” that come at the end of a trail hike, and how that view of the world “uploads before your eyes.”
At the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, visitors will be able to encounter the poetry in Leland and Good Harbor Bay, on South and North Manitou Islands, and on the Bay View Trail. Soliman was at the park June 22-25 to assist with the installation of poem signs. The project includes signs installed at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and Isle Royale National Park.
Soliman’s project pivots on an interesting switcheroo. Park visitors expect signs to contain information that is straightforward, scientific, ecological, and/or historical, he said. Substituting poetry for that didactic information “inverts” the experience, Soliman said. “I love the play on the format by changing the signs’ content.” Visitors expect science and history when they encounter a sign. What they get is a Midwestern poet’s thoughts about the natural world and how modern humans engage in it.
Nature poetry has a rich heritage in the United States and is always being redefined for contemporary audiences and contexts, Soliman said. National parks have long partnered with artists — through residencies, exhibitions, and public programs — as a way of visually describing the natural and historic worlds preserved in these places for the broader public. According to Soliman, the National Park centennial is an especially fitting moment to expand both of these traditions.
This project is part of Soliman’s ongoing interdisciplinary project “HOMES,” an acronym for the Great Lakes that describes the border waters and lands that are homes to millions. Under the auspices of a 2015 Joyce Foundation fellowship, Soliman traveled the entire Great Lakes coastline by land for four months, gathering raw material for new poems, and developing partnerships with arts, environmental, native, and other organizations with a stake in the region. In addition to his vigorous poetry practice, Soliman is program director for Mizna, a Twin Cities nonprofit organization that provides a platform for Arab-American artists through its literary journal, performances and other art projects.
