Because, in modern times, poetry has largely appeared within the pages of a book or journal, its presence can surprise us by turning up "off the page" in totally unexpected places. I have found poetry painted onto paper dolls and sold as "cheap art" (Bread & Puppet); transferred to sculpted stone books displayed in museums (Bentivoglio); mounted on placards in subways and buses (Poetry in Motion); projected onto bridges and buildings (Holzer); and co-mingled both symbolically and playfully with food in kitchens (Mones, Esrig). Tragically, poetry has even been found in the pocket of a corpse, as happened with the Hungarian poet Radnoti, a Jew murdered in the Holocaust, a poet who needed to write even when he was barely alive and even when it was forbidden. This essay invites readers to engage with these examples of "poetry in unexpected places" and to think about their responses to such discoveries.
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