Crystal Falls library hosts live poetry night with Marquette poets

A free poetry night at the Crystal Falls District Community Library brought Marquette voices into Iron County and gave local readers a chance to hear verse performed live without leaving town. The library’s Adult and Young Adult Book Clubs had spent the month reading poetry and then shared some of their favorite poems, turning the evening into a community conversation instead of a one-way reading.

The featured poets, Troy Graham and Soph Bartolotta, reflected the range of creative work coming out of Marquette. Graham has been described as a U.P. singer-songwriter and poet who has worked in the Marquette music scene for more than 20 years, using songs and poems to cope, explore the world and shape his thoughts. Bartolotta, who also goes by Soph, paints, makes music and writes poetry. Her self-published 38-page work, To Be Human, includes original poems and illustrations, and her writing draws on human experience while she pursues art education at Northern Michigan University.

The program fit squarely inside National Poetry Month, which the Academy of American Poets inaugurated in April 1996 and now marks every April with thousands of participating organizations. In Crystal Falls, that national celebration reached a smaller scale but a sharper local purpose: giving residents direct access to live literary performance in a county where arts events often mean a drive to a larger city.

That matters in a place like Iron County, where the library at 237 Superior Avenue has long served as more than a book-lending stop. The Crystal Falls District Community Library says it was reestablished as a district library effective May 22, 1989, under Michigan’s District Library Establishment Act, and its regular hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with Sunday closed. The free poetry night showed how a small public library can function as a cultural anchor, connecting local readers, youth clubs and regional writers in one room.