Zeena Fuleihan ’18
In the summers of 2015 and 2016, I interned at the Poetry Center of Chicago, a not-for-profit organization that curates public readings and sends poets to teach poetry in schools that may not otherwise be able to offer poetry education. While I was there, I took on an independent project to create a digital archive of the poets and writers who have read at the Poetry Center since its founding in 1974. After two summers of intense work and a lot of quality checking, the archive went live this past October.
Just out of my first year of college, I was so lucky to find my first internship experience in the wonderful home of the Poetry Center. Their incredible Executive Director Elizabeth Metzger Sampson entrusted this unique project to 19-year-old me, beginning with the task of learning how to build a website off of a web host. After many days of researching, watching YouTube tutorials, and building test options, I proposed my sample archive layouts and began building the final site.
Thankfully, the Poetry Center uses WordPress to build their site layout, which is easily customizable with plugins. I set out doing more research on various plugins in order to make a searchable, cross-referenced platform to build the archive. Once I finished the basic set-up for the archive, I moved on to the task of creating profile pages for each of the over 300 poets and writers who have read at the Poetry Center. Combining various spreadsheets of reading dates and venues with recorded audio that other Poetry Center interns digitized, I managed to patch together a stable history of the public readings and decided on a standard layout for the profile pages.
The rest of the work was any English major’s dream—I got to research each poet, read their poems, listen to interviews, and use my judgment to select the best excerpts and multimedia to feature on each page, with the addition of the recorded audio and Poetry Center broadsides and CD compilations. While almost every poet was a joy to research, some of the most exciting names I came across were Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Li-Young Lee, Erika L. Sánchez, William Burroughs, Naomi Shihab Nye, Allen Ginsberg, Agha Shahid Ali, Sonia Sanchez, Fatima Asghar, Jamila Woods, and the list goes on! Those two summers of immersion in poetry and related media taught me so much more about poetry and literature than I could have imagined from an internship, and even inspired me to write at least one poem a day for the summer of 2015, two of which are featured in The Words from December of 2015.
Now that the archive is live, I encourage all lovers of poetry and aspiring readers alike to peruse its many pages. It can be used as a classroom resource for research or creative writing inspiration, as a lengthy list of reading recommendations, or simply as a way to expose yourself to various forms of poetry. As it is organized both alphabetically and by decade, it’s also an interesting way to see how poetry, especially in Chicago, shapes itself as time passes. It still feels surreal to see this project I worked so hard on finally published, and I hope it inspires many others to delve into the incredible world of poetry and to support their local literary not-for-profit organizations as they do so much work to keep the literary community alive and prosperous.