Last April, we traveled down Library Way to get to Grand Central Station, where Poetry in Motion was staging an event called The Poet Is In. New York City's finest poets, including Ricardo Maldonado, Timothy Donnelly, and Dorothea Lasky sat behind typewriters in Vanderbilt Hall, awaiting their muses: the public.

We waited in line with other poetry fans to receive an original poem generated by one of the poets. To our delight, we were paired up with the poet Sally Wen Mao, a Cullman Fellow at The New York Public Library. Sally asked us some questions to get her creative juices flowing, and Catherine shared some memories that her grandfather had shared with her, about his lunch dates with Catherine’s grandma in the terminal. Sally used those memories to create an original poem, which she typed up on an electric typewriter.
 

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the poetry collection Mad Honey Symposium, available in The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman’s General Research Collection. Her work has appeared in publications including The Best American Poetry, A Public Space, Poetry, Guernica, Harvard Review Online, The Missouri Review, and Washington Square. During her year at the Cullman Center, she will work on her second collection of poems, Oculus.

Extras

• Check out How to Research Poetry from the New York Public Library's Research Guides, and Poetry in our Articles and Databases.
•  What is Library Way, you say?
• Speaking of poetry in motion, here's one of our unique finds from the database Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture. In the publication National Police Gazette's 1901 Saturday edition, you'll find an article entitled "The Poetry of Motion” about young women who do gymnastic exercise to music.

This post was co-created with Miriam Gianni, General Research Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building