Bryan Ripley Crandall is our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for #VerseLove. You can read his prompt and the poems he inspires here. Today, he challenges us to write Poetic Drive-Bys.
He explains: “Every April, during a six-week unit on poetry in Kentucky, I’d assign students to think of a person, place, or thing worthy of a poem, and write it as if you are gifting random thoughts/ideas/verse or insight for another. We began calling these ‘poetic drive-bys’. Students loved this, often chalking poems on a neighbor’s driveway or creating one to hand to strangers at the mall (a few even ‘tagged’ abandoned buildings with their writing and one young man drove around handing what he wrote to fast food employees working in drive-thru windows). Write a poem for the boy who bags your groceries, or the sidewalk where you walk, or for the stranger you see in the park.. The goal is to craft a poem that you can leave for another to find (maybe a specific someone or maybe not — make it a poem to be discovered or gifted.”
In my county in middle Georgia. I’m leaving QR Codes with poetry videos throughout the square. Below is an example of one. I’m reading here with Ethan Jacobs, whose book Dust will be available on Amazon this spring. This is for YOU, dear reader: