Back to Burma Shave
Poetry

The “Back to Burma Shave” project was a Fall 1999 assignment for the English 205 Poetry Writing class at Boise State University. Students studied the famous roadside Burma Shave signs and then were assigned to write Burma Shave style poems, but site-specific poems relating to structures, events, activities, individuals and organizations at the university.

Follow the signs to the poems. Click on the photos below to see enlargements and to read the students' poems.

Student poems—with authors' names removed to protect the guilty and to insure fairness—were then voted on by the class. Six were selected to be “signed.”

Installation day arrived and students, in their six respective Burma Battalions, reluctantly departed from class to place their nouveaux Burma Shave signs.

Adjacent to a bronze statue of the university mascot (a bronco), a concerned class member offers advice to a Battalion member installing an equine equipment poem.

Out alongside University Drive, another Battalion member fusses over a versified poetic parking rant . . .

. . . while, on the other side of the Administration Building, Boise's NBC affiliate, KTVB-TV, captures the installation of a “Shaver” about enrollment difficulties.

A concerned student eyes the free-speech lament posted beside the Student Union.

Two photographs show the beginning . . .

. . . and end of a poem with a message for smokers posted outside the Liberal Arts building.

By the Janet Hay Memorial (Hay, recently deceased, was a State Board of Education member),. . .

. . .a more serious poem was placed.

Students and the poem's author (center) discuss the site.

View of Boise State University's poetickal quad (bronco poem foreground, enrollment poem in distance).