Every year, The Contributor presents a showcase of our vendor’s poetry from the year before. We go through each issue from the last year and pull poems that are meaningful and full of imagery and then have an illustrator display them in image form.
This year, because of a new partnership with a longtime Contributor collaborator, our Poetry Issue includes something new. Artist Joe Nolan’s Pikes Project Poetry Billboard series this year includes a collaborative poem he wrote alongside our paper’s vendors. The poem, which is depicted as an illustration of this paper’s cover, is set to go live on the iconic Nashville Sign this April during National Poetry Month. Nolan ran a workshop with the vendors and supplied the poets with brand new writing journals and encouraged them to share their works in progress while they reflected on everything from popular culture to images of the natural world to recent legislation that makes camping on state property a felony crime.
“The Contributor poets include some of the more experienced writers in the series, and the recent legislation brings an urgency to their message that this public display can help to amplify,” says Nolan.
Pikes Project Poetry Billboard III is funded by a Nashville Metro Arts THRIVE Award. Nolan’s billboard series grew out of his multimedia Pikes Project, which has deployed photographs, essays, poetry broadcasts on public radio, gallery exhibitions, and an ongoing Instagram campaign to highlight the sometimes overlooked beauty along Nashville’s “Pike” roadways.
Nolan’s first Pikes Project Poetry Billboard was created with middle school students in Madison and displayed on Gallatin Pike in April, 2020. The second project was created with immigrant construction workers from Workers’ Dignity and launched at the corner of Nolensville Pike and Thompson Lane in April 2021.