Karl and Tupac: Two Poems about the Pratt

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street Transcript: Baltimore native Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) loved the Pratt Library so much, he wrote a poem about it, asking, “What is it, easier than a church to enter… this center, that … leads to everywhere?” Shapiro was attending librarian school here in 1941 when he was drafted into the army. While serving in the South Pacific, he wrote poems about the everyday life of a World War II soldier. His poetry won him a Pulitzer Prize and acclaim as a voice of his generation. He never did become a librarian but had a noted career as a poet, an outsider who explored middle-class life in books like The Bourgeois Poet and Poems of a Jew. In 1985, another outsider and voice of his generation serenaded the Pratt. Fourteen-year-old Tupac Shakur and crew won second prize in a Pratt Library youth rap contest with his song “Library Rap,” which opened, “Yo’ Enoch Pratt, bust this!” An avid reader, Tupac had no trouble telling kids to “heed my advice, ‘cause it’s not hard / to get yourself a library card.” For more on Tupac’s Baltimore years, see site #9.