I’m eating chicken salad sandwiches with the poet, storyteller and educator Shaun Perkins on Main Street in Locust Grove, Oklahoma, looking at old photographs of really, really happy people in what looks like a barn. Teenagers, senior citizens, kids.
End of a day at Silver Dollar City? Nah. They’ve been writing poems. After about ten minutes at R.O.M.P., it’s not hard to find yourself thinking it might be something you could do, too.
Through three locations and a decade of adventures, the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry has been on a mission to celebrate what Perkins calls “the poetry of the people.” A Locust Grove native, she returned to the area after 25 years away teaching literature and running workshops. She’s often taken an unconventional approach to sharing poetry—the idea for the museum came to her in a dream—but for her, it’s all about making the experience accessible, hands-on and fun. R.O.M.P. opens its newest home later this month, with a lending library, a gift shop, ample outdoor and kitchen space and plans for book clubs, podcasts, school group events and much more.
Inspired by that dream and by a trip to the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Kansas, R.O.M.P. is part roadside attraction, part creative playhouse, part guerilla literacy center. It’s got “poetry machines” where you put in a coin and get a poem prompt or a fortune in verse. (R.O.M.P.’s first home was in Perkins’ dad’s machine shop.) A collection of 1920s autograph books, the yearbooks of the time, filled with homemade poems handwritten in silvery ink. Photos from a Big Read led by Joy Harjo in the streets of Locust Grove, a couple of weeks before she was named Poet Laureate. A hallway lined with poetry and prompts focused around the women’s suffrage movement, complete with a gorgeous illustration of Sojourner Truth made by an artist who’d come down for Rocklahoma.
And R.O.M.P.’s upcoming 2021 exhibit, Firewheel Folk: Oklahoma Wildflowers in Poetry, features an entire room lined with gorgeous floral photographs, herbal lore hung beside a vintage medicine cabinet, a tribute to Emily Dickinson and a spooky black-lit doll collection—all surrounded by poems and ideas for writing your own, inspired by whatever catches your eye.
“It is very busy in here,” the soft-spoken Perkins said with a laugh. “And that's purposeful. Because there's so much to see and to contemplate and to consider, there might be one thing in all of that that gets you thinking about things in different ways. Teenagers just love it because, you know, you're letting them do what they want to do in the space. You're letting them write on the walls. You're letting them take pictures and do funny things.” The combination of different learning inputs and outputs (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) plus a ton of freedom is a strategy that, Perkins has noticed, helps people open up.
“If you're open enough to poetry, it does help you become more observant,” she continued. “And you see the layers of things, that there's always something behind what you're seeing. Knowing that is so vital to having a life of any value. If you're just living on the surface, you're missing so much. I think it was Aristotle who said the person who is master of himself is the master of metaphor. You understand those levels: that there's a physical reality, but it doesn't always match your emotional reality, and then we have this great thing called a mythic reality, which is a story we make up about everything we see. Just through helping you think in those terms, poetry helps you to understand people better, to be more humble—maybe more open to learning that so much of what we see is not the full story.”
Locust Grove (pop. 1400) is home to a number of artists and writers who support each other’s work through a diffuse but effective system of mutual aid. Its Wonder City coffee shop won the 2019 Governor’s Arts Award for business in the arts because of its support for local creatives. The Willard Stone Museum is a few blocks away. R.O.M.P. itself is funded largely by the community buying items at its associated rummage store down the street. It’s a small town with a big personality, a fantastic stop on the way home from Crystal Bridges—or a quick day trip of its own, about 45 minutes east of Tulsa. (Don’t miss the spectacular Rabbit-in-Hat Magic Shop.)
Before April 3, you can try your own literary hand with an entry to R.O.M.P.’s annual Oklahoma Poem Contest, open to all Oklahoma residents, with cash prizes and medals for winners awarded at the Wonder City Wordfest later that month. And stop in anytime once the new location opens on March 20 (a grand opening party is scheduled for this summer.)
You’ll notice Perkins has a tattoo of Woody Guthrie’s “This Machine Kills Fascists” guitar on her left forearm. That pretty much says it all, as far as I’m concerned. This poetry museum was made for you and me.
