Year-round, Kansas Citians’ love for the place they call home seems to literally spill out as they dress top to bottom in Royals blue, Current red and teal, and Sporting blue, or paint their hair and faces to rally for their Super Bowl-champion football team.

This year, the Young Friends of the Kansas City Public Library has given that love a new outlet in the Dear KC poetry contest. The Young Friends 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 will be displayed at the KC Streetcar's Library stop at Ninth and Main streets starting Wednesday, May 17.

Barbara Varanka, a Young Friends board member, says she organized a similar contest 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 it 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 to writing poetry.
 
“I think one of the big things was people's really intense love for Kansas City,” Varanka says. “It just seemed like an overarching theme was, 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. … 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 acted as a judge along with writer Andrew Johnson. Abernathy says they saw a lot of poems about Union Hill Cemetery, Loose Park, Midtown, the riverfront, and the West Bottoms.

Varanka numbered the poems before passing them to the judges, so neither judge knew anything about the poets other than what was represented in the work. Abernathy had a lot to consider as she tried to make her top picks.
 

The main thing she looked for was a balance of personal specificity about the city with what the city is known for – like jazz, fountains, and barbecue. Abernathy acknowledges that those features are worth celebrating, but they’re so widely known it was hard to feel excited about them.

And, for the most part, she says that the poets were able to uniquely elaborate on the virtues of the food scene, the fascinating weather, the twists and turns of professional sports, and their favorite neighborhoods. Those who did it with the most personal flair came out ahead.

When installed at the streetcar stop, posters of the top three poems will measure 28.5 by 44 inches. Five designers at Crux spent about 16 hours creating each image 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,” explains Miranda Read, Crux art director.

Read is also a member of Friends of the Library support organization, but, she says, the Young Friends have “claimed” her. Both groups are open to adults of any age, but the Young Friends is more activity- and 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 all ended up being digital, but most of the art was still hand-drawn, just on tablets rather than paper or canvas. Read says the designers enjoyed the artistic opportunity to use the style that they felt would best represent the poem.

“We have one that is very watercolory, 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.

The posters and winners will be revealed on Wednedsay May 17, 2023, at a reception at Bliss Books & Wine. (As of May 15, the event is at capacity.) Varanka anticipates that the Young Friends will run the contest again in March 2024.