Project Description

Listening Out Loud: A Hundred Days in Parkville was a project conducted by Real Art Ways with their Poet-in-Residence, Verandah Porche. The project culminated in a published collection of poems called Listening Out Loud, created from interviews Porche held with a local community members. The goal was to create a living history of Parkville, and the year-long project was celebrated with the distribution of the book to the community and a public reading.

Real Art Ways (RAW) is a multidisciplinary public space founded in Parkville, CT, in 1975. Parkville, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Hartford, is a middle-class neighborhood with significant Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Vietnamese, and African American populations. The events generally hosted by RAW include artist discussions, independent movie screenings, concerts, performances, spoken word nights, educational activities, and public art initiatives.

In 2002, she joined RAW as their Poet-in-Residence to launch a community-based poetry project. Porche conducted interviews with a wide range of Parkville community members, including life-long residents, store owners, senior citizens, landlords, literacy volunteers, business owners, students, bar hounds, and shop keepers. Then she turned the interviews into a style of poetry she calls “told poems.” At the end of the project, the interviews were amassed into over 200 pages of text which were spoken by 60 people, ages three to 98, who hail from five continents and speak a slew of different languages. The poems were published in a book called Listening Out Loud, where they were accompanied by portraits of the interviewees taken by documentary photographer Bill Hackwell. To launch the book, RAW hosted an afternoon celebration that included a welcome address by Executive Director Will K. Wilkins, a poetry reading by Porche, and a dialogue that allowed the audience to share their thoughts and reflections.

Verandah Porche’s work as a poet, performer, and writing partner generally explores relationships between individuals in communities. She has been based in rural Vermont since 1968, publishing two books of poems, The Body’s Symmetry (Harper and Row) and Glancing Off (Through Books). For Porche, her experience as Poet-in-Residence was reciprocally beneficial. As this was her first urban project, she admitted that it was different than any one she’d ever done before: it brought together her craft of writing poems, with her love of listening to people talk. The practice she developed, called “told poetry,” enabled RAW—who need a writing partner for their project—to create, preserve, and share personal literature. Porche continues to pursue alternative literary careers by creating collaborative writing projects in nontraditional settings: in literacy and crisis centers, hospitals, factories, nursing homes, senior centers, a 200-year-old Vermont tavern, and an urban working-class neighborhood. Recent residencies include the Police Poetry Project, where she worked with teenagers and local police in Bennington, VT; and Music of Our Spheres, where she worked with a 90-member women’s chorus in Brattleboro, VT.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities

The poems in Listening Out Loud describe Parkville’s “eclectic mixture of culture and language,” as described by Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. “Parkville,” he believes, “is a sort of a secret in the Hartford area.” During the interviews, community members were asked about a wide range of issues, including the themes that face every community: homelessness, crime, remembering the past, and the constant transformation of the neighborhood. These issues were also addressed by community members at the readings.

The website that RAW launched in conjunction with Porche’s book release includes information about Verandah Porche’s Poet-in-Residence project, and information on their art exhibitions and summer outreach programs. They have a database of shows, which archive their most innovative and controversial exhibitions and is continually growing, as they add more shows, concerts, and public art photos. Under the direction of Pheeroan Aklaff, an internationally recognized percussionist, as well as RAW’s Program Manager and faculty, children are invited to participate in a seven-week workshop series called ParkArt. The workshops take place in Parkville’s only park, Day Playground, directly across the RAW building. Previous topics include environmental arts, nature and technology, dance, literary arts and poetry, and live music.