Located in the north corner of campus sits a modern and peaceful building. Inside are relaxing reading spots, art exhibits, murals, a bamboo garden and more than 60,000 books.

The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, already a hub for art and creativity, is also taking steps to improve its space and increase its support for the campus and Tucson communities. A renovation of the space will start this summer.

Housed in the Helen S. Schaefer building, the center is a non-circulating library home to around 8 million poems, all of which are free to view and open to the public.

It is a “national park for the imagination,” said Tyler Meier, executive director of the center.

It is also one of the world’s largest freestanding poetry collections, he said.

Its flagship program is the Reading and Lecture Series, which brings nationally recognized poets to the university to feature their work and engage with the local community.

Poetry is important for all students and the way they think about the world, regardless of educational background or goals, Meier said.

“If we want solutions that are different from what our past looks like, then we need new ways to imagine those challenges. Poetry gives us a whole new way and new frame of reference, an exciting new language to think about the possibilities,” he said.

Students and faculty alike use the center.

Center in action

Cameron Carr, a master’s student studying creative writing, uses the center’s resources regularly.

He first found the center while doing research on graduate fine arts programs. Finding a program with an active reading series and engaged community helped him make his decision.

It has also been vital to his thesis research on writing and publishing, he said.

Using the center’s archive of past creative writing theses, he compared authors’ published works to their unpublished theses and interviewed those authors to learn more about their personal revision process.

“I can’t imagine another opportunity to see the true unpublished work that writers went through on their way to creating a published book that has gone onto success,” he said.

This experience has helped him prepare to enter the professional writing world and has taught him different editing techniques from writers and their editors, he said.

Claire McLane, an associate professor of practice, uses the center in her teaching at the W.A. Franke Honors College.

Her class Living Poetry focuses on poets in the center’s Reading and Lecture Series. Students read and discuss the poets’ works, then those poets visit the class, giving students a personal encounter with the poets.

Many students have limited or outdated experiences with poetry, McLane said.

“It’s amazing for the students to interact with living, breathing poets that might look like them as well, which they might not have been used to in what they have read previously,” she said.

She also tries to incorporate field trips to the center into her other classes so students know about the space and their resources.

“I work a lot with students, unschooling what they’ve learned about poetry and making it really accessible,” she said.

Renovations and additions

To bring people together through poetry, the center is implementing the Belonging Initiative.

As part of the project, the center is renovating its building, creating a new green space in the south alleyway behind it.

Called the College of Humanities McCauslin-Smith Gardens, it is designed to welcome visitors and provide new opportunities for the community to gather, Meier said.

The initiative also includes a residency program for poets focused on queer writers and will add works in Spanish and by Indigenous authors to the Reading and Lecture Series.

“Belonging is one of our cultural and societal deficits. We think poetry and poetry experiences can be a tool where we can build the conditions from belonging more broadly,” Meier said.

The Poetry Center will be closed from May 19 to July 7 to complete the upcoming renovation. The residency program and renovated space will open in the upcoming academic year, Meier said.

Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism.