The city is poetry for Marco Melfi
Marco Melfi said urban images — the kind you see from a bus window — lend themselves to poetry.
“I’ve always been drawn to cities, urban areas. I’m also a commuter, bus rider, train rider, so I’ve just always liked being in an urban setting, and exploring in those settings,” Melfi told Taproot.
His first book of poetry, Routine Maintenance, will officially launch at an event on June 14 hosted by Alice Major at Audreys Books. It’s already topped the Edmonton bestseller list.
Melfi said he carries a notebook when moving through the city to capture the images that will turn into poems. His day job, as a planner at the City of Edmonton, involves him observing people and things in urban spaces, too. “There’s definitely a link, because my interest in that urban life and cities drew me to urban planning,” Melfi said. “You just spend so much time walking around, talking about spaces, talking about places, always observing and documenting it, that ‘field study’ nature of it — they kind of started to merge.”
Melfi’s work departs from what might be commonly thought of as typically poetic subjects, like beauty or romantic love. Many of his poems are about the gritty, urban places and objects that can be found in Edmonton, like a faulty porch light, a parking stall puddle, or a strip mall sign.
“I flash on for pizza delivered next door. / I flash on as the avenue’s deadbolts tuck in,” Melfi writes in the voice of a porch light in The Faulty Porch Light. “Not trusting / I’m enough, my owner has tacked / a ‘No Trespassing’ sign to the front window.”
Another poem, Drive-Thru, is written from a fast-food worker’s perspective: “I heave the window open / for a brief breeze. Wafts of pollen / and exhaust greet the burnt beef / as cars queue for burgers and fries.”
Melfi is currently part of the City of Edmonton team revamping the heritage places strategy. There’s a parallel between his job, where he helps shape what should be preserved, and his poems, where he notices and preserves little pieces of Edmonton in words.
“I have a poem about an apartment building in my neighborhood. I just liked walking by that apartment building, and I had to think, ‘Well, why do I like to do that?’ And it just offered a lot of sense of place,” he said. “I think my poems hopefully offer a sense of place, and my role as a planner is to foster or create or improve a sense of place.”
Observant Edmontonians will recognize references in Melfi’s work. “I know I’m no Spitfire podiumed / outside a warplane museum / or a welcome billboard at the city’s limits. / Neither am I a novelty — like the big baseball / bat that swings near Alberta Avenue,” Melfi writes in the voice of a sign in Plaza Sign Down.
“I appreciate the artifacts in our urban environments,” he said. “I think recognizing those artifacts and recognizing what they mean to our city connects to the work that I’m doing about our buildings or our places that matter to us and that we would try to keep or, you know, sometimes we lose them and want to honour them.”
Routine Maintenance, which also includes poems about soccer and yard work, is published by Gaspereau Press.
