Last week for the Poem Dispenser

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. The NCSU Libraries’ poem dispenser mitigates that misery by giving you a great poem to fold up and carry around in your pocket.

Through the end of April, the "My Poet, My Poem & I" poem dispenser is putting poems by great American poets—as well as the Libraries’ own bookBot—into the hands of passersby in the Ask Us lobby at D. H. Hill Jr.. After you select whether you want a poem by a human or the bookBot, the dispenser prints out a poem on a pocket-sized piece of paper, and even adds photographs of you and the poet.

The poem dispenser is the brainchild of Digital Research and Scholarship Librarian Markus Wust, based on a similar “Vandal Poem of the Day” project carried out at the University of Idaho Libraries and English Department. Built in the NCSU Libraries Makerspace, Wust’s dispenser combines a Raspberry Pi 3, a thermal printer and a small touch screen. The wooden housing of the dispenser was laser-cut in the Makerspace, as well.

“I had been working on some other projects with small label and receipt printers and wanted to do a project that could help promote the humanities at a STEM-focused institution,” Wust says. “Having colleagues who are published poets and who were interested in working on such a project, plus the existence of a creative writing program on campus, made a poem dispenser a natural choice.”

The store of poems includes work by poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the aforementioned Williams, as well as students and faculty in NC State’s MFA Creative Writing program. The bookBot poems, which use an algorithm to convert its book request data into poetic lines, will also be featured on the Hunt Library Commons Wall this month.

“Many people, especially at a science-centered educational institution like NC State, have an innate interest to experiment with technology and experience new things,” Wust says, explaining the popularity of the dispenser. “Also, the poem dispenser unites seemingly contradictory elements: fine arts vs. technology, traditional materials such as wood vs. electronics, and a traditional medium (paper) vs. computer display.”

The poem dispenser, and the Libraries’ other National Poetry Month programs, runs through the end of April.

Poem dispenser schedule
Monday, April 24: 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
Tuesday, April 25: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Wednesday, April 26: 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
Thursday, April 27: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Friday, April 28: 9 a.m.-12 p.m.