Random Acts of Poetry

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October 3rd - 9th: A celebration of poetry and literacy in cities across Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

The second annual Random Acts of Poetry week is a Canadian initiative that promotes poetry, poets and literacy in a fresh way to everyday people in their everyday lives. This year, 27 poets from across Canada will be joined by 10 poets from England, Scotland and Ireland, making the event truly international after only one year. Watch for local poets from your community reading poems to people on the street, at bus stops, schools, libraries, hair salons and in local schools.

Sponsored by Abebooks.com in association with Victoria READ Society.

"What do I like about the notion of random acts of poetry? Its playfulness, its populism, its commitment to the notion that poetry is everywhere, not just in textbooks and English classes."

-- Jannie Edwards

"Poetry is pretty well invisible in the mass media and most people's lives. Random Acts will put poems and poetry books into people's hands - people who would normally not read a poem. Why poetry? Because it's the song of our species and right now, many songbirds are threatened, if not endangered."

-- Elizabeth Zetlin

The Field Next To Love

My Aunt was fat. She wore her moustache gladly
to church. I am pie-deprived. I pursue my
moustache relentlessly. Admire iconoclasts.

My Aunt sang hymns with a voice like grass held
between your thumbs and blown on. Her God her Master,
submitted to with fervour. My God’s in hiding.

My Aunt said hoity toity and by golly. She’d been
wedlocked sixty years when she died. I know the
meaning of icthyophagous. I’ve been divorced.

My Aunt wiped hendirt off warm eggs as she
listened in on the party line. I flame my enemies
electronically, send blind copies indiscriminately.

My Aunt and I had nothing in common, yet
I loved her. She was blood, she was kin,
she was above all

familiar, and in me, familiar occupies the field
next to love; there are places along the border
where I cannot tell one from the other.

-- Marilyn Gear Pilling

Gary Hyland poems Winston (mascot), Monica and Kevin, proprietors of Bobby's Place in Moose Jaw. Photo credit: Will Stevens

Random Acts of Poetry

“I love to promote poetry anywhere, will stop strangers to read them poems and otherwise commit random acts of poetry. I thought it would be a good idea for poets across Canada to do the same thing.”

-- Wendy Morton, Founder