Houston Poetry Recovery Project 2026 Event
We had a wonderful time sharing the 2026 Houston Poetry Recovery Project with a live audience in April. Our host, Basket Books & Art, graciously let us in early on a Sunday to set up for the 10 o’clock reading— and Houston showed up!
The Houston Poetry Recovery Project (HPRP) called for poem submissions that took Houston and Gulf Coast historic newspapers as source and inspiration. We were blown away to receive dozens of tailored submissions, and were honored to select an incredible lineup of poems from talented writers, many from Houston or connected to our state in some way.
SJ described that the spark that started this project came from stumbling across some scanned pages of old newspapers (shout out to the Houston Public Library digital archives!). When viewing the old tattered pages, it was fascinating to experience all the plays of opposites: fonts once retro now trendy again, headlines both familiar and fantastic, public language and private reflection, “current” events merging and receding with the currents of time. It was surprisingly emotional, and the idea came pretty quickly that poets would be the best group to mediate this experience, creating from old news a new kind of currency.
And the submissions surprised and overwhelmed us! The selected poets produced found poems from headlines, visual images from blacked-out text, and moving compositions developed from snippets of stray details. Six of the ten HPRP poets were able to join us at Basket to share their poems. Humor, pride, and even hope emerged from the readings.
Ariana Akbari’s poem, “Honest to God,” utilizes vernacular and run-on sentences to achieve a conversational, storytelling effect. Handwritten lines scrawled atop an image of an oil geyser read “they’ve got us drinking oil now until it runs out of our eyes.” Texas audiences will appreciate this industry-induced claustrophobia: “the parking lot is for the new lng plants or the new plastics plants or the new energy plants. you can’t go anywhere.”
Payton Bellman’s poem, “He Who Knows No Failure,” references early newspapers, from the 1880s, amplifying the ambiguity between American optimism and skepticism. The poem begins, “The man went completely broke in a poker game. / He lost $56,000 / for blood and nerves,” only to later recall, “Guess what the man in the striped suit is saying? / The Texans are hopeful.”
Moving to more recent history, Aris Kian’s “The Master Machinist,” remembers a black craftsman who handcarved a gift for President Reagan: the man “Feared nothing but a failing / heart or an unsteady grip. He cemented his name / making chess boards. Bronze rooks, gold kings.” The poem resists the cynical feelings that might in retrospect be applied to the 1980s; instead, the voice of the poem highlights the craftsman’s pride: “whatever he touched / had to reach the highest hands.”
In shorter form, Simone McGowan’s wry haikus deliver news that feels perennial. “Music and measles / Strange time to be a lady,” muse lines from “The Goings on in Paris (Texas).”
Anna Rajagopal’s “Houston: Words not Said” assembles a patchwork of Houston Chronicle headlines from 1925. Through erasure, the poem exposes the callous operations of power present in everyday language. In the Q and A with the audience following the reading, Anna pointed out that, though they achieve the same ends, the headlines of the past were more explicitly derogatory, while it seems that news journalism of the present has come to operate more indirectly and through euphemism.
Bren Ram’s blackout poem crafts a scene of disrepair in the aftermath of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. In the poem, images of structural damage point to social and personal vulnerability: “ISOLATED. / Completely Cut Off From Communication With the Outside.” The violence of the severed and crisscrossing steel telegraph wires is replicated in the blackout poem’s connecting lines.
We loved being able to project poems for audience members to read along—huge thanks to Laura and Edwin at Basket for the technical support. We received positive feedback about having the poems on a screen; we weren’t sure how the audience and poets would like this choice, but we’d absolutely do this again!
The HPRP reading event was just the first stage of the project; the next will be a bound, published collection of the work. Audience members had the opportunity to reserve free copies of the book, and we still have space available! You can reserve your free copy of all ten poets’ work in the Houston Poetry Recovery Project by signing up here.
We plan to offer for pickup at a few locations in Houston, when it is printed. Stay tuned!
Thanks to Jun Su An for the wonderful photographs :)
Finally, many thanks to the Houston Art Alliance for a grant that helped fund this project: we were able to pay poets—which is always a good thing!