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.