Pittsburgh teens infuse neighborhood sidewalks with cryptid-inspired haiku

By Karen Price

Springtime brings the emergence of new life, but the creatures that sprung from within the walls of the YMCA in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood this year weren’t like any this world has ever seen.

One was like a bird, but friendly as a dog with six legs on each side for walking. Another was a “humanoid type” character with multicolored fur-covered skin, three eyes, six legs and rounded ears. Then there was a round purple-and-pink monster with long, curly fur, two long legs, one singular eye and floppy ears.

Cryptids exist in folklore and legends across cultures worldwide, and this spring the teenagers at the YMCA Lighthouse program created their own cryptids – creatures such as Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil, that are rumored but never proven to exist – to “roam” the streets of Homewood. They furthered their exploration and creation of the creatures and their role in the community by writing haiku poetry about them in partnership with PA Humanities and the Rain Poetry project. 

“I liked the idea of taking the art form and using it to talk about something both mystical and something related to the community,” YMCA Lighthouse director Ahmed “K” Bey said. “We’d planned on doing the cryptid project but we hadn’t planned on doing poetry (before the partnership with PA Humanities).”

The YMCA Lighthouse program serves teenagers and offers after-school clubs focusing on audio and visual arts. They’d done world-building projects in recent years, including super heroes and magic systems, Bey said. This year, the creatures themselves were the center of the project. 

The students were experienced in writing haiku poetry, having incorporated it into projects in previous years. But Bey welcomed the opportunity to invite Rain Poetry teaching artist Karen Howard into the space and have the teens take a deeper dive into more advanced elements of poetry and language, such as metaphor and writing from a different perspective.

As part of the cryptid design, the students drew what their creatures looked like, animated them, created and recorded what they sounded like, and wrote about their origins, powers and temperaments before delving into poetry based on the hidden spaces and secrets of Homewood.

“It was this combination of world-building and process of thinking or and creating character to adapt to problems or situations,” Bey said.

Azadiel Watts, a teaching artist at YMCA Lighthouse who assisted with Rain Poetry but also built the unit on cryptids, said that rooting the students’ cryptids in Homewood strengthened community ties.

“These stories infuse everyday neighborhood experiences with a sense of mystery, addressing local issues and empowering youth to envision and advocate for change,” they said.

Howard expanded on the theme of hidden spaces and secrets of Homewood by leading students in a discussion of places in Homewood’s rich history that no longer exist. 

They talked about the National Negro Opera Company house – a well-known safe place for Black athletes and performers such as Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Joe Louis who were passing through Pittsburgh to gather and rest – as well as Silver Lake, a once picturesque lake that was filled in and paved over during the Great Depression. She then prompted students to think about how their cryptids might interact or experience visiting these places, and you can see these considerations reflected in their poetry.

“What are your cryptids seeing in these safe spaces?” she asked the students during the workshop. “What happened to make them fill in Silver Lake? Think figuratively, not literally.”

Bey was also part of the Rain Poetry project at Northview Heights, assisting Howard with one of two workshops at that location. He enjoyed witnessing her approach to teaching the project, he said, and she introduced him to some new processes that he plans to integrate into activities they do at YMCA Lighthouse. 

“And personally, I really enjoy co-teaching,” he said. “Without getting too philosophical, I have a strong resistance to what I call authority teaching, where the teacher is the sole authority and everyone else is below them. One of the ways to mitigate that is having more than one teacher. You bounce ideas off each other and it’s less of this supreme power and more of a collective conversation. One thing I really liked about (the Rain Poetry project) was this aspect of teachers who wouldn’t normally work together and bringing them together.” 

After the workshop was complete, artists Max Gonzales and Shane Pilster installed the poems on the sidewalks surrounding the entrance to the YMCA. The big reveal was part of YMCA Lighthouse’s “Future Roots” end-of-year showcase of all their talented teens, including performances by musicians, rappers and spoken word artists. 

“(The reaction to the installation) has been huge,” Bey said. “Everyone who stops by asks me about them. And especially if I happen to be outside and someone asks, ‘What are these,’ I explain it and everyone loves the idea. And Shane and Max even took the time to talk to the students during the installation process and explained what they were doing. They weren’t just installers; they were part of the educational process.”

Since it wasn’t the students’ first time writing haiku poetry, Bey said, he enjoyed seeing the self-assurance they demonstrated in their ability to create.

“They were confident in their ability to write so much that they were kind of flexing and showing off,” he said. “I took pride in the fact that they felt so confident that they thought they were going to show off a little bit. That was kind of cool.”

In the Pittsburgh region? The YMCA Homewood/Brushton branch is located at 7140 Bennett Street, but the installation is on the sidewalk along the back of the building. Park in the lot along Kelly Street and look for the rain drops to indicate the location of hidden poems!

Rain Poetry is made possible with the generous support of the Heinz Endowments, the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the Grable Foundation.