April may be the cruelest month, but it is also National Poetry Month and the Grand Center for Arts and Culture partnered with New Ulm High School creative writing students to decorate downtown Minnesota Street with original poems.

Called a Downtown Poetry Path, a total of 36 poems written by 18 New Ulm High School students are hanging in the display windows of 12 downtown businesses. Each participating business has three poems each.

The Grand Programming Director Tamara Furth said this was the third year the art center had collaborated on a poetry month project.

“Last year we did an online version of it,” Furth said “but this year we wanted to do something physical and actually place poems downtown.”

Bookshelves & Coffeecups was one of 12 downtown businesses participating in the Downtown Poetry Walk. Three poems written by local students are hung in the display window. Pam Chamberlain of Bookshelves & Coffeecups said they were more then willing to display the poems. Chamberlain said she especially likes the lyrical poem titled: “Musicians are dead” by Jayda Goold.

The question became where to find original poems for the poetry path?

The Grand’s student intern, Katelynn Hermel had the solution. She was currently enrolled in a creative writing class with teacher Tricia Fairbairn. As luck would have it, Fairbairn was starting a unit on poetry.

Hermel said the assignment for the class was for the students to compose a collection of 12 original poems that fit each genre.

The poetic genres were haiku, cinquain, elegy, ode, lyrical, blackout, freestyle, concrete, limerick, rhymed, narrative and pastoral.

“This gave a wide style of poems to choose from,” Hermel said.

Lyrical poems, "Musicians are Dead" by Jayda Gold hangs in the window of Bookshelves & Coffeecups.

Fairbairn said by exploring the different styles, the students were able to get a deeper understanding of the genres.

“The students enjoyed limericks, freestyle and elegies the most,” she said. “Most didn’t like writing lyrical or creating blackout poems.”

Overall, she said the rhyme scheme and structured poems proved the most challenging.

Hermel said her favorite styles of poems were narrative and pastoral.

“I like nature and these forms are more friendly to natural subject matter,” she said.

Three poems hang in to window of downtown business Rustic. In total, there are 36 poems scattered in display window on Minnesota Street as part of the Downtown Poetry Path.

All 36 poems were hung in shop windows last week and will remain in windows through the rest of April

“We encourage people on day with gorgeous weather to walk downtown and read these poems,” Furth said.