Believe in the Poetry

A project born of community asset mapping, storytelling, and youth arts education and engagement.

do you believe in the poetry?

A project born of community asset mapping, storytelling, and youth arts education and engagement, “Believe in the Poetry” aims to get first-generation, English-language-learning, South Bronx students’ words out of the classroom and into community.

Since February 2020, I have worked with high schoolers across the Bronx to introduce them to poetry and the value of storytelling, and help them craft poems under the themes of identity, liberation, and home. The above are images of the students’ poems that have been printed on posters and posted up around the neighborhood they know and love, so that they may feel incredibly affirmed in the importance of their stories. By having their poems take up physical space in the streets they walk daily, the project intends to give them a sense of permanence in a quickly-gentrifying neighborhood.

Mapping is defined as “recording in detail the spatial distribution of (something); associating each element of (a set) with an element of another set.”

Thus, in posting up the students’ poems throughout the Bronx, we are (re)mapping — re- and/or newly associating different and very personal stories with parts of their hood that mean something to them, something different than the typically negative portrayals of our borough in the media.

Sample Writing Prompts on the notions of home, belonging, love, and abundance and liberation

  • What does liberation look/taste/smell/feel/look like for your and your community?

  • What does home mean to you? Where do you feel most safe, nurtured, and loved? Is that a place, space, or person? It is not yet somewhere real but more imagined?

  • What "ordinary" parts of you (yourself, your identity, your home and neighborhood, your family; for instance, the scooter you rode down your block when you were 5, the flan you can't get off of your tastebuds from when you were younger, your wide nose, your brown eyes, etc.) do you want to celebrate?

We engage with poetry not only for its expressive capacity, but also for the room it provides to radically imagine and put words to our wildest dreams and ideas for what the future can look and be like. Poetry gives us permission to engage with flowery language, symbolism, metaphor, analogy, rhythm, rhyme, and so much more, in our efforts to express and connect with others.

This site activation and public art project urges you to reflect on the idea of home and how you shape it each day. How can we expand feelings of home and of belonging for more of our neighbors and community? What would that take? What tangible steps can we take to get to a more inclusive and care-centered future?

A proposed first step is to turn to the hyper-local (to your community fridge, your local soup kitchen, the arts organization in your neighborhood, your local garden) and pour your energy and love there.
This project was born through connection with YUCA Arts in the South Bronx, and informed by anti-displacement efforts of Mott Haven Families.

The Artist: Ayling Zulema Dominguez

I am a first-generation Chicana-Dominicana from Bronx, NY. I am a poet, teaching artist, community artist, and mixed media creative.
My art is based in radical love and community nurturing and growing; it draws energy and inspiration from James Baldwin's teaching, "If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you do not see."
Each community-based artwork, installation, and workshop I lead is done in hopes of connecting with others; in hopes of spreading and inviting in new, empathetic and caring ways of viewing the world and of practicing community-based love and tenderness. What use is art if it is not accessible to and in direct conversation with community? Art, to me, lends hope towards connecting with others from different walks of life and paving a path towards a newer, better future, together. How do we do that if not by brainstorming together in public and being in dialogue about our imaginings?
If you'd like to follow and stay up-to-date with my public arts engagements and writings, my socials and email are linked below.
Thank you.

Made possible in part by the NYFA City Artist Corps Grant. October 2021.