Tucson has always been a place that comes alive after dark, after work, after school, after the heat index dips below “broil.”
Even now, in the middle of a Sonoran summer, there is a nighttime buzz downtown that has nothing to do with the neon lights above Congress Street.
The summer schedule at the Rialto Theater includes Dwight Yoakum, Marc Maron and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Some might prefer Three Dog Night, who will be at the Fox next weekend. Rodney Carrington visits the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall Aug. 4.
Oh, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center will offer another “Summer Social” July 20 at the recently renovated Century Room at Hotel Congress.
Outsiders and purists alike might agree that poetry seems out of place when in proximity to the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Mark Maron, but Poetry Center director Tyler Meier disagrees.
“Modern poetry has something for everyone,” he said, “and it’s a lot more approachable than some people think.”
The July 20 program will introduce the Tucson Tome Gnome, tucsontomegnome.com, who hides free books at various spots around town each month to promote the joys of reading and kindness.
The Poetry Center has offered summer programs downtown since 2013. The series moved from the Tucson Museum of Art to Hotel Congress the following year.
In addition to filling a gap in the center’s calendar, Meier said, planners hope to reach a new audience in a fresh new way.
That group, specifically, is the generation of young professionals who don’t go home for the summer but go to work every day in Tucson, just as they do all year long.
“There is a core group here in the summer who are hungry for arts and culture opportunities that sort of go away when the students and snowbirds do,” Meier said. “We try to offer topics they will be interested in … downtown, where many of them come all the time.”
Think of it as a happy hour for smart people.
Do not think of it as a happy hour that includes long readings of complex poetry. It’s not that at all.
These summer sessions are completely informal, laid-back and interactive, with attendees sitting at cocktail tables and mingling freely before the program.
Doors open at 5 p.m., admission and snacks are free, and the Century Room bar is open. Programs begin at 6 p.m. and run no later than 7 p.m.
Meier is delighted with the new old Century Room.
“We did our summer programs there before the renovation, and now … wow,” Meier said. “The new space is beautiful. And the fact it’s become a jazz club really works for what we’re trying to do. We think of music as a branch of poetry, and this helps us connect the two.”
The Poetry Center’s offering July 20 will feature the three young professionals who together launched the Tucson Tome Gnome project last year: Mary Ellen Flynn, Jody Hardy and Emily Walsh.
Each month, they select a theme and purchase 30 copies of a book that speaks to that theme. They then gift-wrap each book and “hide” them at theme-centric locations.
In May, for example, the theme was Memoirs and Murals — “The gnome loves alliteration,” Walsh said — and copies of “Sigh, Gone” by Phuc Tran were left at various murals around Tucson.
In April, National Poet Laureate Month, copies of Joy Harjo collections were dropped at locations that included the Poetry Center and the Poetry Drop Box in the Broadmoor-Broadway Neighborhood.
Clues to the hiding places can be found on the Gnome’s Instagram page (instagram.com/tucsontomegnome) and website. Books can be found almost anywhere.
“Part of the reason we started was to give ourselves a fun, new thing to do after all the dreariness we all felt in 2020 and ’21,” Walsh said. “But the thing that made it special was knowing we were creating joyful moments for the people who found the books, too.”
The Gnome found inspiration in Harjo, who appeared at the Poetry Center in 2016 and the Tucson Festival of Books in 2010. In her poem “Calling the Spirit Back,” Harjo encouraged the reader to help the next person find their way through the dark.
“It was dark for a lot of people during the pandemic,” Walsh said. “This is our way of creating some light for the people who find our books. It already has for us.”
As for identifying this month’s selection? Or telling us when the next search might begin? Here’s the thing about gnomes. Their lips are sealed.
Footnotes
Flynn, Hardy and Walsh started the Tucson Tome Gnome project with their own money, buying the books themselves. They are reluctant fundraisers, but if you would like to help them, financially, a GoFundMe page can be reached through the Tome Gnome website, tucsontomegnome. com.
For additional information about upcoming programs at the Poetry Center, visit poetry.arizona.edu/calendar.
The Poetry Center’s last “Summer Social” will be Aug. 10, again at Hotel Congress. Poets will ponder the promise and potential peril of future space travel in a program entitled “Beyond Earth’s Edge.”
Petula Clark popularized the pop single “Downtown” in 1964. It spent weeks atop Billboard’s Top 100 list. If you still remember the words, they will still ring true in downtown Tucson.
