WORLD POETRY DAY

“O cup of coffee, black and foul, thou bitter bean who swallows sleep and leaves me wild-eyed as an owl.” – ODE TO COFFEE (Steve Vernon)

There used to be a little coffee shop on Blowers Street that was known for its owner who was a great supporter of the local arts. Once a week he would hold a Poetry Night where local unsung underground poets would come and read their latest work.

The coffee shop was called THE GREEN BEAN and has been closed for an awful lot of years – although I have heard that there is a GREEN BEAN coffee shop in Dartmouth.

I do not believe there is any true link between the two shops.

The Blowers Street GREEN BEAN was a bit of a dive but it was ALWAYS a great place to hang out and I really enjoyed their breakfasts – which were all-organic, a big thing back then.

There were about a dozen or so poets who would show up nearly every week and we would stand and shout out our poetry – mostly to the same old audience, meaning mostly to each other. My wife and I used to love going down there and reading our poems and just enjoying the atmosphere and the weird word-nerd camaraderie.

I always made it a point to order a cup of coffee – just because I knew that the owner wasn’t making much money in general – particularly during these poetry evenings.

So I was tickled by this article that I read this morning concerning WORLD COFFEE DAY.

World Poetry Day is on 21 March, and was declared by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1999. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, to “give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements”. 

WORLD POETRY DAY was generally celebrated in October, sometimes on the 5th, but in the latter part of the 20th Century the world community celebrated it on 15 October, the birthday of Virgil, the Roman epic poet and poet laureate under Augustus. The tradition to keep an October date for national or international poetry day celebrations still holds in many countries.^[1] It is still 5 October in the UK.^[2] Alternatively, a different October or even November date is celebrated. – From Wikipedia

Click this picture if you want MORE info on WORLD POETRY DAY

Today is World Coffee Day and the Julius Meinl chain of coffee shops have been honoring this day since 1982 by giving a free cup of coffee in exchange for an originally written poem.

This coffee shop poetry-for-coffee event is going on mostly in Europe. I checked the map and the only cafe in the entire continent of North America is a coffee shop in Chicago – which is too bad because I would LOVE to walk into our local Starbucks and shout out a poem and claim my free coffee today!

Well, even if you cannot take part in this event you can still blog about it or Tweet about it over on Twitter, using the hash tag #PayWithaPoem.

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So – to celebrate WORLD POETRY DAY allow me to share with you a short poem that I wrote an awful lot of years ago. It was published in the June 2002 issue of CANADIAN WRITER’S JOURNAL as well as in the pages of Nancy Purnell’s LUNATIC CHAMELEON.

Let My Words Take Wing
By Steve Vernon

Writers have to sell to live –
this is truth, or so I’m told
but the moment you believe this lie
is the moment you begin to die

Take a look at sparrows
squatting on hydrowires
like so many feathered clothespins
indifferent to the megavolts
of stolen river current
winding through their brittle feet

That’s art:
independence of existence
indifference to power
and if you’re lucky, wings.

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Yeah, that was the thing about poetry. Back then, selling a poem was basically a cup of coffee proposition. You get paid two dollars or five dollars and you were a huge success. I had a couple of fifty and seventy five dollar poem sales – and one poem that was actually picked up for the princely sum of five hundred dollars – but truthfully, poetry was NOT a financially feasible form of art for me.

Which is why I don’t write much poetry these days.

So – how many of you folks out there have shouted out poetry in a coffee shop?

How many of you Haligonians remember the Green Bean on Blowers Street?

How many of you fellows have successfully got away with wearing a black beret?

 

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

GUEST BLOG & INTERVIEW – Heather Kamins – BLUESHIFTING

April is National Poetry Month!

A lot of folks don’t realize that I have published a fair bit of poetry over the years.

Today’s blog entry is a part of the Upper Rubber Boot Book’s “COUPLETS” blog-tour – in which poets are paired up to write on each other’s blogs to help promote NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!

Hurrah!

My guest-blogger today is Heather Kamins – the author of BLUESHIFTING – a collection of poetry recently published by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

You can follow the blog tour by hitting the link on this image.

Devolution

We watched wilderness raze the buildings, a city block

gone like a moment of dust, our civilization losing

itself before us. Who were we to stand in the way of progress,

the trees wanted to know. Our protests are useless

against this regime. Remember those days

when we used to lie on a plastic-strewn hillside

and look for patterns in the smog? When we first kissed

beneath the incandescent lights on a diesel-scented evening?

The concrete and steel we held sacred are sinking

into the mud of memory, everything collapsing

under the weight of its own flowers.

 

(poem excerpted from Heather Kamin’s collection BLUESHIFTING, from Upper Rubber Boot Press)

 

Mini-interview with Heather Kamins

1 – How do you create a poem? Do you have a specific ritual? Is there a process?

Heather: I’m constantly jotting down notes throughout my daily life: words, phrases, images, ideas. Often when I sit down to write a poem, I’ll grab something from the list to get me started. Sometimes combining disparate images or ideas can bring a piece together in an interesting way. I also like to write from prompts or random word lists (http://creativitygames.net/random-word-generator is a great site for that). It seems like starting from a place where I don’t necessarily feel inspired can push me to go deeper and make for more interesting poems.

2 – Who are your favorite poets?

Heather: Like many readers, I love Pablo Neruda. I love Richard Jackson, who ought to be more well-known than he is; he has these long, gorgeous lines full of images tumbling one after the other. I only recently heard of Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel prize last year, but he’s already shaping up to be one of my favorites.

3 – Do you have any advice for up-and-coming poets?

Heather: Read a lot. Write a lot. Lather, rinse, repeat. Give yourself permission to take risks, to play, and to let yourself fail. Keep a notebook and think of it the way an artist thinks of a sketchbook: a place to make lists of words and phrases you like, doodle, and sketch out drafts. I also recommend getting your hands on a copy of Gregory Orr’s essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” That essay completely changed my writing life by helping me identify what it was that made my better poems work, and understand how to reproduce it.

4 – What do you look for in a poem?

Heather: I like poems that combine some kind of anchor in the real world with imaginative leaps, startling images, and unique turns of phrase. Beyond that, it’s a bit hard to define… some poems just hit me the right way and resonate for a long time. I agree with what Emily Dickinson said on the topic: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

 

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If you want to pick up a copy of BLUESHIFTING there is a link attached to the cover image at the beginning of this blog entry. Just click it and it will take you directly to the publisher’s site where you’ll have all the information necessary to read this in any format you wish.

yours in storytelling

(and poetry)

Steve Vernon

Wind Talking

I remember the day that Hurricane Juan hit Halifax. I had spent the day at the waterfront at a Word on the Street Festival. I stepped out of the festival into the parking lot and the sky had turned a kind of color that was usually saved for cheap science fiction movies. Everything felt oddly still and you could hear the word “hurricane” being bandied back and forth like some strange noun from a language that nobody ever truly spoke.

That was the thing, back then. Hurricanes were something that happened in the newspaper or the movies. They happened in Florida or the Bahamas. They didn’t happen here in Halifax.

Well, this time they did. God said “Geseundheit!” and the whole city fell down. It was wonderful the way that everyone pulled together but still I would far prefer to have skipped all of those falling trees and flooded basements and just jumped into the kumbaya of sweet cooperation.

Since then, I have learned to beware of that word “hurricane”. Even when you spell it “tropical storm”. It is still a big old wind that is getting set to blow through Halifax.

So, I was tickled to read that some artists and writers have got together to create something positive out of this whole experience.

Read about it here.

http://www.katemessner.com/created-in-the-path-of-irene-an-invitation/

Belinda and I have spent the day watching old movies and kicking back waiting to see what Irene will bring us. We watched “The Great Buck Howard” with John Malkovitch. Never saw it before but I enjoyed it immensely. Also watched “Secondhand Lions” with Robert Duvall and Michael Caine – another solid flick. Last night we watched Jeff Bridges in True Grit. I still prefer the John Wayne version, but they both manage to hit some awfully sweet notes.

And I’ve taken the time to put down my own thoughts on Hurricane Irene.

 

Talking Wind

The lawn furniture is hiding in the shed

where I padlocked it safely shut

the barbecue bungeed to the deck railing

the clothesline umbrella folded safely

beneath the dining room table legs.

 

I’ve picked up

as the wind picked up

and the sky gets set

to let all of her breath out

in one long sigh

 

Soon, the rain will fall

sheets of it beating

down upon the ground

torrents, buckets, deluge, splash

God has left the tap running all night long

 

Soon, the trees will bow down

power lines whirl like skipping ropes

window panes hum and walls shake and shimmy

rose blossoms learn to fly

hard green tomatoes never reaching ripe

 

My family and I sit and watch old movies

pass words back and forth

wondering when the power will go out

we sip on cups of hot brewed tea and whisper summer

holding our breath until the wind finishes talking.

 

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon