I left poems on people's windshields
... and then I stopped
8 years ago, I started Car Window Poetry. A community project focused on writing poems and leaving them on people’s windshields—under the wiper blade where you might find a parking ticket or annoying flyer. But instead, it’s a kind word shared anonymously with you in mind.
Less than a week after college graduation in 2016, I moved back to Colorado Springs. I say I “moved back” because I had been there a few years prior for a summer internship. It was only for a month, so, understandably, I focused on checking off the tourist attractions. Garden of the Gods. The Manitou Incline. Hiking my first 14er.
But after college, I moved to Colorado Springs for my first full-time job. And although I knew it would likely be temporary, with Elizabeth and I now across the country from each other, I wanted to make the most of my time and immerse myself in the culture.
Through a friend I made at a coffee shop, I met a group of writers who encouraged me to attend a monthly youth poetry slam. I had never been to a poetry slam and certainly hadn’t thought something like this existed in Colorado Springs. But what I found was an assembly of middle school and high school students sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with a roomful of strangers. And they were talented, too!
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of this earlier—and if I wasn’t aware of the hidden pocket of artists in our community, there were many others that likely didn’t know either. That’s when I began to think about starting something, and that something became Car Window Poetry.
I wanted to create a platform for writers to share their words in a meaningful way. Maybe I was naive, but I believed that there was power in taking something that could ruin someone’s day—finding a slip of paper on their windshield—and making it beautiful. This idea that words could encourage and inspire hope.
Scribbling thoughts in my notebook, I thought of the name, sketched a card design, and built the website all in one night. When the first set of cards arrived, I wrote a few poems, took photos of the cards at Garden of the Gods, and officially launched Car Window Poetry with a series of social media posts.
My only goal after launching was wanting to host an in-person event where we’d write poems and leave them on people’s windshields together. After the event, folks asked what’s next. I didn’t actually know, but I thought it’d be cool to go into classrooms and do Car Window Poetry with students—except I didn’t know how to make that happen. So, I just found the directory for my local public school system and started emailing any teacher I could find.
Out of hundreds of emails, one teacher replied. Mrs. Willis. She invited me to come lead a poetry workshop with her fourth graders. And while we walked to her classroom, she said, “You know this is going to blow up, right?”
I’m sure I laughed it off, not entirely sure what I was doing. But after seeing a post about my visit to Mrs. Willis’ classroom, a former college classmate, who was interning at NBC Nightly News, messaged me on Facebook and said he wanted to pitch a story about Car Window Poetry to his bosses.
In my mind, there was no way they would go along with this. The project was only a few months old and didn’t have anywhere near a large social media following. But I told him to go for it. And one week later, he messaged me with an exciting announcement: NBC said yes!
That Halloween, a news crew traveled to Colorado Springs, interviewed me at my friend’s coffee shop, and shadowed me as I went back to Mrs. Willis’ class and led another workshop before sharing students’ poems in a grocery store parking lot. We hung around and captured people’s reactions. It was a surreal experience.
When the segment aired on Nightly News a few weeks later, messages started pouring in from people across the United States. Within the first year, Car Window Poetry went from being a local art project to becoming a global poetry movement.
I got to write poems with hundreds of students—both virtually and in-person. I heard from people about the poems they received and what those words meant to them, and I even wrote a children’s story based on a student’s poem during my first visit to Mrs. Willis’ class.
I don’t talk much about Car Window Poetry these days. Not because I’m not proud of it. I think it’s because I’m afraid of disappointing people. My relationship with the project has evolved so much over the years that, when people hear about it, they are often more excited about it than I am.
And again, it’s not that I’m not proud; it’s just that my body and ego couldn’t keep up with what I thought Car Window Poetry demanded. I burnt myself out. I got caught up in the attention and how to build on it. I found that people who boast kindness are often the least kind.
I started Car Window Poetry during an election cycle. Now that we’re back in another cycle, this one more bleak than the ones before it, I think about what we owe to each other. How we honor the humanity of those we may see only through a screen. How we view dissent not as an inconvenience but as a desperate plea to be seen and heard.
We tend to view the things we create as our babies; I think it’s more accurate to think of Car Window Poetry as the notecard beneath my windshield that I didn’t expect but now my perspective is forever changed because of it. The project still exists for people to participate in and continues to remind me what I’ve always known: our words are worth sharing.
