ED Futures Newsletter

Dear ED Futures Reader:

Over the past week I have been exploring American cities through both image and verse. It has been a rewarding journey yielding some very special feelings and thoughts about our wonderful cities. The experience has given me a new appreciation of cities and our experience of them as personally meaningful places.

Downtown skylines are among the most photographed aspects of urban life, and for good reason since they capture in many ways the "heart of the city." While there is certainly more to any city than its downtown area, the downtown has become a powerful "archetype" in people's imagination of urban places. It is one of the first things people associate with a city. I have posted a series of illustrative photos of various cities, including Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Tucson and Minneapolis. All are, to the best of my knowledge, in the public domain.

Many poems have been written about cities. I have included several that I was able to find, including two of my own about Tucson. Click on the author links to learn more about his or her poetic work. Poetry is very much a "feeling language," and in this sense poems about cities capture their feel. Not always is the poem entirely about the city, rather the poem reflects some specific experiences the poet has had with the city, its natural environment, events and its people. The collection you will find posted here is quite varied. Poets are notorious for using "graphic language." After all, poetry is the art of the painted word.

I hope you enjoy this series. I plan to continue for a while. Please feel free to send me any images or poems about your favorite city. With your permission, I may want to include them in the series.

Best wishes for the summer!

Don Iannone
ED Futures Publisher
Email: dtia@don-iannone.com
Phone: 440.449.0753

Poetic Tucson

Tucson Brush Strokes
By Don Iannone

Nothing hides the searing hot sun
at noon in June in Tucson,
where the maize-colored desert sand
befriends the olive-green sagebrush,
and the gangly octopus-armed saguaro
stretch lazily in powder blue sky,
and where ragged dull gray-green mountains
cradle you in their powerful arms,
while the old pueblo sleeping inside you
slowly melts back into its original abode.

An Arizona Rainbow
By Don Iannone

Milky gray clouds give way
to blurred streaking pastel colors,
arched in celebration
across the darkened Arizona sky.
Hard lines dissolve
in the sky and in my heart
into misty half circles,
dipping down deeply
like magical paintbrushes,
dripping luminous watercolors
across the early evening sky.

Poetic Pittsburgh

Searching For Pittsburgh
By Jack Gilbert

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Glimpses of Pittsburgh

Poetic Chicago

Chicago
By Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Glimpses of Tucson, Arizona

Poetic Minneapolis

The Minneapolis Poem
By James Wright

to John Logan

1
I wonder how many old men last winter
Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled
The Mississippi shore
Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming
Of suicide in the river.
The police remove their cadavers by daybreak
And turn them in somewhere.
Where?
How does the city keep lists of its fathers
Who have no names?
By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water
So beautifully slow.
And I wish my brothers good luck
And a warm grave.

2
The Chippewa young men
Stab one another shrieking
Jesus Christ.
Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.
High school backfields search under benches
Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich
Raw bacon without eyes.
The Walker Art Center crowd stare
At the Guthrie Theater.

3
Tall Negro girls from Chicago
Listen to light songs.
They know when the supposed patron
Is a plainclothesman.
A cop’s palm
Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs
Of a light bulb.
The soul of a cop’s eyes
Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs
Of Juárez, Mexico.

4
The legless beggars are gone, carried away
By white birds.
The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted
And sown with lime.
The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses
Huddle together dreaming in a desolation
Of dry groins.
I think of poor men astonished to waken
Exposed in broad daylight by the blade
Of a strange plough.

5
All over the walls of comb cells
Automobiles perfumed and blindered
Consent with a mutter of high good humor
To take their two naps a day.
Without sound windows glide back
Into dusk.
The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier
Tower not quite toppling.
There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn
To sell me my death.

6
But I could not bear
To allow my poor brother my body to die
In Minneapolis.
The old man Walt Whitman our countryman
Is now in America our country
Dead.
But he was not buried in Minneapolis
At least.
And no more may I be Please God.

7
I want to be lifted up
By some great white bird unknown to the police,
And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden
Modest and golden as one last corn grain,
Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives
Of the unnamed poor.

Glimpses of Minneapolis

Poetic San Francisco

Night: San Francisco
By Deborah Ager

Rain drenches the patio stones.
All night was spent waiting
for an earthquake, and instead

water stains sand with its pink foam.
Yesterday's steps fill in with gray crabs.
Baritone of a fog horn. A misty light

warns tankers, which block the green
after-sunset flash. My lover's voice calls
to others in his restless sleep.

The venetian blinds slice streetlights,
light coils around my waist and my lover's neck,
dividing him into hundredths.

Would these fractions make me happier?
My hands twist into a crocodile.
My index finger the tooth that bites

Gauguin's Tahiti. My thumb is the head feather
of a California quail crying chi-ca-go.
Night barely continues. Is this the building

staying still? Is this hand the scorpion
that will do us in? A few of Irving Street's
sycamores will blue the air come morning.

Glimpses of Birmingham, Alabama

Creating Affluence: A Metaphysical Approach for Economic Development

A stands for all possibilities, absolute, authority, affluence, and abundance. The true nature of our ground state and that of the universe is that it is a field of all possibilities. In our most primordial form, we are a field of all possibilities.

From this level it is possible to create anything. This field is our own essential nature. It is our inner self.

It is also called the absolute, and it is the ultimate authority. It is intrinsically affluent because it gives rise to the infinite diversity and abundance of the universe.

Deepak Chopra
Creating Affluence: The A-Z Steps to a Richer Life
New World Library, 1998

Wisdom Versus Knowledge

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life. “

- Sandra Carey

Poetic Birmingham, UK

Birmingham, Poem City
By Judy Tweddle

Birmingham, Poem City
flying in brave new
words like girders
a poem with cranes
editing herself
with diggers
she's a poem with trees
and images of cool canals
she's a brick
a mixed metaphor
a balti pie
a poem with a
warm heartland
a central theme
but we have to
Dig Beth
digbeneath,
for a poem is more than girders
more than bricks
it's the music the rhythms
the spirit within it
we are the poem
we can't rest
on her laureates
we are the poem
with diggers and cranes
constantly rewriting
ourselves ourselves
ourselves

Glimpses of Charlotte, North Carolina

ED Futures Newsletter

Dear ED Futures Reader,

Welcome to the ED Futures Newsletter.

If you've been to the website this week, you will have noticed that I have begun a series of photographs and poems about cities.

Why the series? I decided that economic development needs a more creative way to experience the essence of place. Too often we get hung up on the economics of place and we forget there is more to economic development than the economic issues we typically concern ourselves with.

Let me know what you think. Initially, I will be relying on web-based images that are non-proprietary in nature. If you have some you would like for me to post here on the ED Futures website, please email them to me. Full credit will of course be given to the source. I am also looking for poems about cities.

By the way, I am interested in smaller communities as well.

Let me know.

Thank you.

Don Iannone
ED Futures Publisher
Email: dtia@don-iannone.com
Phone: 440.449.0753

Poetic Seattle

Seattle
By James Kobielus

In the essential
Seattle users

photosynthesize
caffeine directly

from whatever drops
of liquid sunshine

are vouchsafed their way
or, failing that, fix

off the glints of glare
that glance in off the

gray and grace their green
eye-stained monitors.

Glimpses of Seattle