I (Lucy) have been thinking lately about what it means to be a DC writer.

This has been occasioned in part by reading the current issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the U.S. Poets Laureate Issue, which includes the amazing DC Authors’ Houses project, by guest editor Dan Vera and BPQ editor Kim Roberts. It’s fascinating to see pictures of houses where Washington writers lived—writers from Anthony Hecht to Zora Neale Hurston, and to read stories of Hecht’s life in DC, of William Stafford’s struggles with the city and its bureaucratic ways.

Dan writes in his introduction, “A few, like Randall Jarrell relished his time in DC, while others like Elizabeth Bishop, who spent two miserable post-war years here, couldn’t wait to leave.”

There’s something strange, or funny, about thinking of poets living in DC—and, especially, writing about DC. I first thought about this when I read BPQ’s excellent DC Places Issue.

I’ve struggled to articulate what it is about DC that feels different than cities like New York and San Francisco—“arty” cities where you’d expect to find poets. A few months ago, I mentioned this to a friend who’s a visual artist, and she thought for a minute and said, “Those monuments are built to elicit the same reaction from everyone; it makes you feel part of the human race to be there, but you’re not invited to feel like an individual.”

I’ve thought about my friend’s point a lot. May Miller’s poem “The Washingtonian,” the last poem in the DC Places issue, describes that feeling for me beautifully. The word “cold” comes up again and again in poems about DC; in Miles David Moore’s beautiful poem “Full Moon on K Street,” he writes, “No natural light penetrates / this street; the lampposts rule. / The high-rises have mothered / them from their concrete wombs, / bidding us rejoice in coldness.”

I think “coldness” here, as in other DC poems, is a way of drawing a line between the inhuman monuments surrounding us and our own undeniable humanness. It’s not romantic the way New York is, but I think in some ways DC is the best place to be a poet, with its bright line between cold and warm, monumental and merely human.