Pittsburgh Youth
Pittsburgh Youth Poetry Competition
Across the city of Pittsburgh, I propose that a competition be run in all of the high schools for students to write the poetry that will be put on the public stairs. The poetry for this competition will need to meet several guidelines:
Guidelines
1) The poetry will be upbeat. Since this will be poetry that will be read every day by many people, it is important to convey messages that bring levity and empower each person who uses the public stairs.
2) The poems will follow length guidelines so that they will fit on the stairs. Depending on the specific font used and the spacing of the letters, a maximum of only about thirty characters will fit onto each stair riser. Poems should be written so that they can be broken into short segments, they should have a maximum length of one hundred and fifty words, and ideally they should not be longer than one hundred words.
3) The poems will have some relationship to the staircase that they are intended for. If a staircase is located near a school, the poem should have an educational theme. If a staircase is important to a community, the message of that poem should tell the merits of that community. Of course, any poem that contains a message of travel, or that uses stairs as a metaphor, would be particularly good for this project.
Winners!
Winners of this poetry competition will have their work immortalized in the concrete stair risers placed on the stairs, and they will be recorded on this web site. There may also be other promotional work done to bring attention to the winners of the competition, attention to the specific staircases that their poetry ornaments, and attention to the communities that these staircases serve.