Young Friends of the Kansas City Public Library Help KC Show Its Love.

Kansas Citians show love for the place they call home in many ways: by wearing their favorite teams’ colors, arguing over which barbecue restaurant is best, and taking wedding and prom photos at beautiful venues like Union Station or Kansas City’s Central Library.

The Young Friends of the Kansas City Public Library has given that love another outlet. In March and April, the organization hosted the Dear KC poetry contest and asked people to open their hearts, focus on what they love about their town, and put it in verse. “Dear KC…”

Fifty-seven people did just that, and the top three poems have been turned into art by marketing “un-agency” Crux KC – the posters it created are on display at the KC Streetcar’s library stop at Ninth and Main streets for part of the summer.

The winning poems were: “Take the Bus Home to 18th & Vine” by Marcia Hurlow; “Hubcap Kansas City: Midtown Artist” by Polly Alice McCann; and “June 2012, Kansas City” by Diana Platt. Annie Klier Newcomer and Kiernan Walshire earned honorable mentions.

Varanka, a Young Friends board member, says she organized a similar contest for the organization in 2019, inspired by a New York City subway poetry project that a friend mentioned to her.

A published poet herself, Varanka suggests that many people only experience poetry in school, which leaves a stale academic taste and seems to serve as a deterrent to reading or writing it for fun.

“I just love the idea of bringing poetry to people and making it less intimidating and more accessible, making it more part of the community,” she says.

She hopes the visually embellished poems at the streetcar stop will help accomplish that, but it also seems that the contest’s theme offered a good point of entry.

“Even if they weren’t originally from here, or maybe they’ve lived here for five years, or they’ve lived here their whole life and moved away,” Varanka says, “everyone was really drawn to this theme of ‘yes, I want to write about how much I love Kansas City.’”

Pembroke Hill School English teacher and poet Piper Abernathy was one of two judges. She saw a lot of poems about Union Hill Cemetery, Loose Park, Midtown, the riverfront, and the West Bottoms.

Abernathy says narrowing down the list was a challenge.

She observed that people wanted to write about what Kansas City is most known for – like jazz, fountains, and barbecue. But, while Abernathy acknowledges that those features are worth celebrating, they’re so widely known it was hard for her to feel excited about them. She wanted specificity, and she thinks the five they chose reflect that.

“One of our honorable mentions wrote about the Union Hill Cemetery,” Abernathy says. “The speaker in the poem is eating lunch in the cemetery with the dead. People really chose very specific places to write about, and you really feel the vibrancy of that when you read the poems.”

When installed at the streetcar stop, posters of the top three poems will measure 28.5 by 44 inches. Five designers at Crux spent a total of 83 hours creating the art for the broadsides as part of the company’s community volunteerism.

“We believe that when we invest in our local businesses and community, we’re making our community better,” says Miranda Read, Crux’s art director.

Read is also a member of the Friends of the Library support organization, but, she says, the Young Friends has “claimed” her. Both groups are open to adults of any age, but the Young Friends is more activityand networking-oriented.

When Read heard about Dear KC, she knew she could help. She acted as a project manager once Crux team members Bailey Mitchell, Zoe Abner, Cody Carnes, Shaun Friesen, Sydney Baird, and Taylor Dietterich chose the poems they wanted to work on.

“We had a little bit of a poetry analysis meeting, where we kind of dove into the deeper layers of meaning within the poems and did some group brainstorming,” Read says. “And then from there, they developed sketches and concepts.”

The finished projects were all digital, but most of the art was still handdrawn, just on tablets rather than paper or canvas. Read says the designers enjoyed the artistic opportunity to use the style they felt would best represent the poem.

Mean Mule Pomegranate Gin Fizz

Makes 1 cocktail

2 oz Mean Mule Agave Gin

1 ½ oz POM 100% pomegranate juice

½ oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice

¾ oz simple syrup

1 egg white

1 oz soda water

Garnish with rosemary sprig

Instructions: botanicals in about 100 combinations before they found a recipe.

Combine gin, pomegranate juice, lemon juice, simple syrup, and an egg white in a cocktail shaker and shake like you mean it for 15 sec onds (no ice). Then add ice and shake like you really, really mean it for 30 seconds until cold. Strain the drink into a glass and gently top with soda water as the egg white rises to the top. Then add the rosemary sprig garnish.

What they landed on does include juniper – for legal pur poses – but also white peppercorn, cardamom, lemon zest, coriander, and, mostly strikingly, persimmon.

“We have one that is very watercolor-y, and we have one that is a little more painterly in a printmaker style,” she says. Each one offers an apt visual accompaniment playing up a pivotal aspect of the poem. Varanka anticipates that the Young Friends will run the contest again in March 2024.

“We had an enormous persimmon tree on our property,” Meg says about her childhood home near Hermann, Missouri. She says they wanted to bring in elements from their farm and heritage and even experimented with cornhusks and other things that grew all around them.

“Persimmon just really came out with something that we loved and have good memories around. Grandma used to the United States, which sounds not only like great bragging rights for Mean Mule, but for Kansas City.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Kniggendorf is a staff writer/editor at the Kansas City Public Library. She's the author

Anne Kniggendorf is a staff writer/editor at the Kansas City Public Library. She's the author of Secret Kansas City and Kansas City Scavenger, and a freelance writer for various local and national publications. Visit her website: annekniggendorf.com.

ROOTS FIRMLY PLANTED IN THE FUTURE

Radical innovation characterizes the all-new GranTurismo, but the principle behind that evolution has remained constant since day one. Because icons aren’t born overnight.

Maserati of Kansas City 9400 W 65th Street, Merriam, KS 913.677.3300 | maseratiofkansascity.com