Poetry nightstand proof there’s still magic in San Francisco

“Take a poem, leave a poem.”

Turns out, the poetry nightstand is the brainchild of Amanda Barrows, a 30-year-old San Francisco resident currently enrolled in City College of San Francisco’s Poetry for the People class.

Founded by acclaimed Jamaican American poet June Jordan at UC Berkeley in 1991 and borrowed by CCSF interdisciplinary studies professor Lauren Muller, the course — now helmed by Tanea Lunsford — teaches empowerment through the arts and advocates for Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a beloved community for all — one where the gap between universities and communities is bridged.

One of the requirements for CCSF’s version of the class is an end-of-the-semester “field project,” where you’re asked to bring poetry into your community.

“I was having anxiety, I had no idea what I was going to do, then it sort of just came to me,” Barrows told SFGATE. “I was inspired by the little free libraries you see in SF, where you ‘take a book, leave a book,’ and thought, ‘Maybe I could do this with poetry.’”

She got the nightstand from a co-worker’s garage (“When he heard about the project, he was like, ‘I have the perfect thing’”), asked her immediate circle of friends for all of their favorite poems to fill the “take a poem” pile, then stuck them in the nightstand, tossed it in the back of a friend’s truck and drove it straight over to Golden Gate Park’s permanently car-free JFK Promenade.

“I didn’t think I’d get any engagement with this project,” she said. “I have 70 pieces of writing, and it’s only been in parks for a week and a half. It’s like actual poetry and mostly people’s own words — people have written some beautiful stuff.”

She’s published virtually all of the poems on a dedicated Instagram account (@ccsf_p4p), and it really is filled with beautiful stuff:

A note of music
Whistling in the wind
Mindful humans stepping on stones
A boat.
A sail.
Magic in the air.

In just the nightstand’s first 10 days in existence, Barrows has already moved it to Alamo Square — where it took a beating before she could get it to safety, losing its legs in the rainstorm that hammered the city — and Upper Noe Recreation Center. Her goal is to move it around San Francisco’s gloriously robust park system, moving it every four days or so — well past her field project’s due date.

“Every morning when I collect the submissions, it feels like Christmas,” Barrows said. “I’m just going to let it live its life and see what happens. Keep it running indefinitely.”

A Boston transplant, Barrows has lived in San Francisco for the past 11 years and says it’s things like this poetry nightstand that have kept her in the city.

“It’s one of the reasons I’ve lived here so long. I spend so much time accessing outdoor spaces, and I always come across random things that just make you say, ‘wow,’” she said, pointing to the mysterious miniature Victorian house in Golden Gate Park. “There’s magic all over the city.”