Experiencing poetry can mean reading words on a page, hearing a writer share their art out loud, or even listening to music lyrics. It’s all poetry, and poetry is for everyone, according to the leaders of Friends of Poetry, a local group that’s celebrating its 50th anniversary this month.
The group was launched by the late Martha Moffett, who “wasn’t a poet or a professor — just a poetry lover on a mission,” says FOP board member and past president Elizabeth Kerlikowske. “She’d visited New York and saw poetry on buses and wanted to do that here.”
Two years later, riders could indeed see, read and enjoy poetry inside Kalamazoo buses, on signage above the windows.
“Roughly 30 poems a year went up for about 10 years, until the cost became prohibitive,” says Kerlikowske. The group later funded public murals combining poetry with the art of Kalamazoo painter Conrad Kaufman, three of which can still be seen around town
Kerlikowske, who met Moffett while working on her bachelor’s degree at Western Michigan University in 1978, had started writing poetry as a teenager.
“I was 14 and had a little corner in the basement near the waders and the wringer washer. And I had a really f—ed up life, so I had a lot to write about,” she says, laughing. “It’s the best therapy ever.”
Her first poem — about her great-great-grandfather, “who was a checkers champion in the Union Army” — was published when she was 16.
After earning a master’s degree from the University of Colorado, Kerlikowske returned to Michigan and taught writing for 20 years at Kellogg Community College, completing her Ph.D. during that time. She’s been published in various journals and magazines and online. She teaches writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and as a volunteer at Gateway Academy in Richland, the community’s alternative high school.
Kalamazoo “is such a poetry town, and I think that Martha and this group has had a lot to do with it,” she says.
Current FOP President Scott Bade (BAY-dee) concurs. “You can’t turn a corner and not bump into a poet or writer in this town,” says Bade, who came to Kalamazoo in 1997 to study for a Ph.D. at WMU. Although he didn’t start writing poetry until college, Bade began to appreciate it in high school, thanks to “having a cool teacher.”
“I remember reading Robert Herrick’s poem, the one that says ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ about living for the day, and I remember thinking, ‘I get what this means.’ I was still into sports and girls but realized, ‘Look at what language can do and how it can say these things.’”
At Loyola University, in Chicago, Bade took a poetry class, which convinced him to “not be afraid of it.”
“I got my degree in photography, but I realized I liked language even more. One of my instructors encouraged me to apply to grad school at Western Michigan University. There were several cool poets there — Bill Olson, Nancy Eimers, Herb Scott. I knew that the writing program at WMU was pretty good, and it turned out it was really, really good.”
Bade earned a Master of Fine Arts degree and a Ph.D. in creative writing, specifically focused on poetry. He wrote poetry while working full time as a technical writer, and he currently teaches creative writing and poetry at Kalamazoo College and an ongoing poetry workshop at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. He also taught a poetry workshop this year at the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival office.
In 2012, Bade was drawn into the Friends of Poetry world when he was named a co-winner of the group’s Celery City Chapbook Contest. (A chapbook is a small book of poetry with its roots in European street literature). This year’s winners were Gail Martin, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Joshua Leland Sauvie and Janice Marie Zerfas, who read from their work in March. The 2027 contest is open for submissions through Aug. 15, with categories for Kalamazoo County residents and Michigan residents. Two winners from each category will have chapbooks published next year.
Friends of Poetry also runs a youth poetry contest called Poems That Ate Our Ears, which began in 1987 and is open to Southwest Michigan students ages 4 to 18. FOP publishes a book of the winning poems and will host a reading from the book at the Kalamazoo Public Library’s Van Deusen Room at 1 p.m. Sept. 19. (Submissions have closed for 2026.)
On June 18, Friends of Poetry will host a 50th anniversary celebration at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts as part of the KIA’s free Summer Jams event. FOP will take the stage from 5:30–6 p.m., preceding the KIA’s open mic from 6–8 p.m.
“We will do some readings and have a typewriter for contributing to a community-created poem, and a creation station for kids,” says Bade, adding that food and beverages will be available, along with displays featuring past publications and historical photos.
This fall the group will present its annual reading, Can Poetry Be Funny? — the answer being a resounding yes — when local writers and luminaries read funny poems at the Kalamazoo Public Library.
To those who say they don’t care for poetry, Kerlikowski suggests that “they haven’t read the right poetry.”
Bade, too, says “poetry has room for everybody.”
“It doesn’t care who you are or what you believe,” he adds. “I think in some ways it’s at the core of human existence. There’s a challenge every human faces in trying to express what they feel as honestly and as clearly as possible, and that’s incredibly hard to do. That’s what poetry tries to do — to say what literally can’t be said. All the times when we feel like, ‘Man, I don’t know what to say,’ poetry will. Poetry does.”
