San Francisco Park ranger Amanda Barrows, who registered in City College of San Francisco (CCSF)’s Poetry for the People class, began to place a nightstand (床头柜) in Golden Gate Park with a note “take a poem, leave a poem” in December 2022. Since then, over 100 handwritten poems have been placed in the nightstand. “It’s completely unexpected,” said Barrows. “I’m really taken aback by the outpouring of support.”
Park ranger by day and poet by night, Barrows said she began writing and attending poetry workshops in 2020. The poetry course she attended was founded by Leslie Simon in 1975. The class advocates for a focus on the neighborhood, and the cultivation (培养) and public presentation of new poems. For Barrows, the idea that she could combine her job and her hobby by bringing poetry into parks was an inspiration. Barrows asked her friends to contribute their favorite poems to the nightstand as poems that could be taken.
Armed with an old nightstand, Barrows filled the stand with pens and paper. An added drawer at the bottom holds the poems that people “donate”. The concept reminded her of Little Free Libraries, which are fixtures across the city. “I was having anxiety. I had no idea what I was going to do; then it sort of just came to me,” said Barrows. “I was inspired by the little free libraries you see in SF, where you ‘take a book, leave a book’, and thought, ‘Maybe I could do this with poetry.’”
One of the teachers at the CCSF poetry course, Lauren Muller, told The Washington Post that “people need poetry now”, which she suggested as the reason for the success of Barrows’s project.
Past student projects included writing poetry on sidewalks in chalk and placing poems on the windshields (挡风玻璃) of cars. “It’s exciting to see the work that students are doing,” Muller continued. “My hope is that this will happen across city parks… elsewhere.”
【小题1】What did Amanda Barrows do for her project?| A．She invited her friends to donate poems. |
| B．She gave a special poetry course by herself. |
| C．She read a lot of poems for people. |
| D．She equipped parks with many nightstands. |
| A．They made her interested in poetry. |
| B．They let her quit her job for her interest. |
| C．They gave her inspiration for her project. |
| D．They encouraged her to write more poems. |
| A．The benefits of writing poetry. |
| B．The public demand for poetry. |
| C．The help from her neighbors. |
| D．The large number of parks in SF. |
| A．The Impacts of a Park Ranger’s Poem-writing |
| B．San Francisco’s Unique Poems on a Nightstand |
| C．The Spread of Poetry Throughout the Libraries |
| D．A Park Ranger’s Powerful Poetry Project |
