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Love, of Indiana, has been offering monthly poetry workshops at the Lockport branch of the White Oak Library District. These workshops, which continue through September, are part of Lockport's unLOCK project. According to a news release from the Gaylord Building in Lockport, unLOCK is a project featuring the work of10 artists creating new art by utilizing Lockport's unique cultural history and connection to the I&M Canal. This art is then "installed or performed in businesses, historic sites, and cultural institutions throughout downtown Lockport," the news release also said.
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Each month Love presents a different theme at his two-hour workshops for adults. Teens may attend, although they must be accompanied by an adult, Love said. Past workshop themes include poetry as art, history in poetry, and creating poetry using the exquisite corpse method. With this method, Love announced a theme and then passed a piece of paper around the room, with each participant adding a line without reading what the rest had written. "You might think, 'Oh, my God! This is going to be terrible!" Love said. "But we did it and read them and it was amazing, as I knew it would be." For Saturday's "poetry sleuth" workshop, Love will feature seven poems by Homer of Illinois. "There's no biography accompanying these documents," Love said. "I think they were written before the establishment of the heritage corridor. We're going to read them as a group and sleuth out when these were written and who this person was." Love said the Will County Historical Society provided some information the group can use as clues. Other hints include the communities "Homer" mentioned in these poems and the different fonts used in these writings, which leads Love to surmise "Homer" must have written these poems over a stretch of time. "And we found some records from 1940 that might indicate who the person is," Love said. "So this person might feasibly be still living."
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In addition to the poetry workshops (which attract new and returning participants at each meeting), Love is also collecting snippets of original poetry. Interested contributors can also add one or more lines of poetry into the poetry collection box at the Lockport branch. So far, Love has collected about 250 lines of poetry, he said. His goal is to cover all the beams by the time unLOCK ends this fall.
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Love has displayed the results of all these projects beneath the underpass between the Gaylord and Norton buildings – using wheat paste so the words will stand up to both the elements and the passing of time, Love said. "I pay special attention to the edges so they don't peel off," Love said. He chose that area because it's a community space that was attracting a lot of inappropriate graffiti, Love said. And he's all about "community words and reclaiming spaces." "I'm not against graffiti," Love said. "But what people are submitting on the cares and at the workshops is beautiful. People really understand this community and their love for it. Visitors will see the beauty of it, too." Love said he did a similar project in Gary last year, collecting over 1,000 lines of poetry. With a master's degree in history and Love himself being a poet. Love said he wanted to present Gary as something more than "blight, murder and Michael Jackson."
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IF YOU GO WHAT: Poetry Workshops by Sam Love WHEN: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., July 28, Aug. 25 and Sept. 29; and 2 p.m. Aug. 26 and Sept. 23 WHERE: 11 a.m. events: White Oak Library, Lockport Branch 121 E. 8th St. Lockport. 2 p.m. events: Illinois State Museum, Lockport Gallery 201 W. 10th St., Lockport. INFORMATION: Visit gaylordbuilding.org/unlock