Freshkills Park

The Daily Plant : Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Parks Announces Freshkills Haiku Contest Winners

Freshkills Park celebrated National Poetry Month this April with its third annual Haiku Contest and asked to hear impressions, experiences, thoughts and ideas of what Freshkills Park is and will be — in haiku form. A haiku is a type of poem written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables for a total of 17 syllables. Winning entries were split the entries into two categories, Adult and Student, and our judges selected three Adult winners and one Student winner.

Adult winners:

Somewhere underneath
The bike paths I will ride on
My old love letters
-Stevie D’Arbanville

Oasis appears
Decay now gives way to growth
Nature rejoices
-Louis J. Lombardo
To think that our trash
Molded in lovely moundings
Now draws birds, bugs, us!
-Sarah Dolinar

Student winner:

Kites flying up high
And birds hovering above
And hiking below
-Christopher Pagano, Age 12


This year’s judges included Ava Chin, who writes the Urban Forager column for the NY Times; Patrick Morrissey, the author of Transparency (Cannibal Books, 2009), whose poems have appeared in New American Writing, Harp & Altar, Colorado Review, and other journals. Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the chair for the advisory board of Kundiman.org and a board member of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

The 2,200-acre site has begun the transition from closed landfill to world-class park. Freshkills Park will have five main areas: the Confluence, North Park, South Park, East Park and West Park. Each area will have a distinct character and programming approach, developed in response to site opportunities and constraints, public meeting and stakeholder input, agency input, operation and maintenance concerns, and feasibility of implementation. The plan seeks to ensure that Freshkills Park will support richly diverse habitats for wildlife, birds and plant communities, as well as provide extraordinary natural settings for recreation--sports and programs that are unusual in the city, including horseback riding, mountain biking, nature trails and large-scale public art and cultural programming.

To learn more about Freshkills Park and to stay up to date on the latest news, visit the Freshkills Park Blog at www.freshkillspark.wordpress.com.

QUOTATION FOR THE DAY

“Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.”

William Shakespeare
(1564 - 1616)