Tunnel Poetry

Local poet Beth Seetch recently had one of her poems painted onto a wall in the tunnel between the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and the Easton Cemetery. She explained to me how it came to be, and began with a recitation of her poem:

"'Turn me into water
Pour me
from a great
​height
Into a bent-corner
Cedar box
May I overflow.'

The last few years, I've been writing a poem a day in April, and one April we were vacationing in Portland, Oregon, waterfalls everywhere, Native American art--bent-corner boxes, which are not caskets; they're meant to hold water. I was taking notes and firing on all this stuff and this is one of the few poems I've written with very little change in just one or two sittings. And then I really like the Cemetery. I write about the Cemetery sometimes, too. And cutting to the chase, last summer when the Friends of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and Jim (Toia, of the Lafayette College Arts Program) said 'Let's have a little competition to generate more art to go on the trail.' I had sent the poem to Jim earlier and he said, 'Let's make sure we try that as a wall poem.' So, because he had the means to make that happen, the means of production and the labor, we did it. We finally got it done. So now we're hoping it's going to be the first of several more wall poems in Easton. I was the Guinea pig." (Laughs)

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