Tucked away from the clamor of downtown San Francisco, The Poetry Garden opened at 199 Fremont Street with little fanfare in the summer of 2001. A product of the municipal ordinance that requires commercial development to include public space — lest the city become a lifeless concrete maze — the garden is one of many privately owned, public open spaces (POPOS) scattered throughout downtown. This quiet collaboration by conceptual artist Paul Kos and Pulitzer Prize-winning, former U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass is a site-specific meditation on the poetics of time and space.
A poem by Hass, “Daisy Laps,” the title a play on the words ‘days elapse,’ is featured on a long wall leading off of the street. The twenty foot high text is variously carved and set in relief. Its visibility is seasonal: set behind young birch trees, the poetry is easier to read in the winter when the leaves have fallen and harder to read in the summer when the trees are full. One section reads:
“An echo wandered through here what? an echo wandered through hear it? there was morning and later/there was evening days elapse what? a reck oh! wan where are we going this city of stone and/hills and sudden vistas and people rushing to their various appointments what points the way?”
The Poetry Garden in 2001
Time passes, the poem reminds us, and the days begin to run together in their momentum. Each year, the trees provide a living example of the life cycle. In the ten years since the garden opened, their branches have inched up the wall offering unexpected emphasis through the inverse effect of obscuring Hass’s message. Like the sage riddles of an elder, lessons are embedded in the metaphors of the garden. Sight, sound and touch provide the clues.
The Poetry Garden in 2001