Tag: coffee shop

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How to Plan a National Poetry Month Event in Your Town and Throughout All The Land- Stafford Challenge Day 65, Slice of Life Challenge Day 21

Special Thanks to Two Writing Teachers

Last year, Denise Krebs asked me to share what I had done to plan a National Poetry Month celebration in my rural Georgia town. Today, I’m sharing a list prose poem (I think I just totally made that combo form up) of How To Plan A Poetry Event In Your Town. I’m currently, still, and always in the planning stages, so these are some of the things I’ve done to plan this year’s event (and last year’s too). At the end of April, I’ll share a picture tour of these events that began in February this year (we couldn’t wait…). Stay tuned.

Painted canvas in the palette of awakenings poetry – ready for lettering!
21 Steps to a Town Poetry Celebration: A List  Prose Poem 

1.  Ask the local Arts Council to pick a theme that fits your town. Imagine the infinite possibilities when they pick Awakenings after two years of the same theme of Bloom. 
2.  Say a prayer of thanks that your community works together to make poetry happen and has given you the title The Crazy Poetry Lady. (Move over, Crazy Cat Ladies!)
3.  Ask a friend to write a poem on the theme (the one who writes a book instead).
4.  When he writes the book, set him up with a poetry reading and book signing event.
5.  Ask another local poet to read and sign his new book, too, in the coffee shop. 
6.  Think back to Fran Haley's post on The Poetry Fox and invite him to town with his Fox suit and his vintage typewriter to bang out poems in under 70 seconds when folks throughout the land give him a word and then watch them be amazed when he stamps it with his little fox paw print, suitable at once for framing. 
7. When he agrees to come from North Carolina, create canvases for the Chamber of Commerce windows of all the poets' verses. Paint the backdrops in shades of sunrise awakenings. Pretend you are a New York City window dresser and borrow easels and  buy fishing line and eye hooks to hang the artwork, then stand back and wonder if any Crazy Cat Ladies will loan you some poetry cats
to curl up in the window display. 
8.  Set up a Progressive Poetry Walk around the town square (read it in sections on stands). Since people will come throughout the land to see the fox, they’ll need something to read while they wait in the long line. 
9.  Make YouTube shorts of directions on how to write poetry for those who think they can't.
10.  Set up community poetry writing kiosks with QR codes to scan for directions and create a community Padlet to showcase the writing online. 
11.  Ask the Georgia Poet Laureate to come read her poems in the coffee shop, too. Jump out of your skin with excitement when she sends you two poems that will appear in her new book and allows you to put them on a canvas in the Chamber window. 
12.  Plan an Open Mic night so those throughout the land can come listen....read.....recite. Note that 2 other community partners planned them without your prompting this year….and smile that your seeds are blooming. Pray your garden will grow and grow theoughout the land. 
13.  Bask in the glow of what poetry does in a town and a state and a nation and a heart. 
14.  Invite all your writing group friends to  come to 1828 Coffee Company on April 25 at 6:00 to read their poems and drink the best coffee in all the land with you. Because Glenda Funk keeps a suitcase packed and ready, you know. 
15.  If they can't be here in person, invite them instead to record themselves reading a favorite poem or one they've written and send it to you or upload it to YouTube so you can make a QR code and put it in frames all around your town and throughout the land. 
16.  Create canvases of their verses to go in the Chamber windows, too, on your theme: awakenings. 
17.  Wonder why you haven't created a collection and put it out on Amazon.  
18.  Start a Word document of all the poems you'd put in a poetry collection on your theme.
19.  Decide to self publish a short collection and choose a title and create an action plan. 
20.  Bask in the joy of poetry and all the healing it brings to a heart and a town and a state and a nation and a world and a universe.
21.  Don't wonder where you'd be without the gift of poetry.  You don't even want to know.

and then wonder if you can rewrite 21 into a poem all its own…..try a Haiku….

you don’t want to know
where you’d be without the gifts
of life-changing verse

its healing magic
reaches in, awakens souls 
throughout all the land 

…
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Autumn Walk

I had a meeting in our local coffee shop yesterday and treated myself to a Hex Latte while projecting next year’s budget and goals with a community partner. From inside, the vintage paned windows make the outside world look a little bit like a dripping realistic painting – the kind of windows that have candles and snowdrifts in the winter and don’t have 20/20 sharp focus. It’s like I’m in a world of my own in there.

I confess: I was.

I had a moment, looking across the town square, when a brilliant flash of fall colors caught my eye. “I’m walking this square when I leave here. I’m sharing these pictures with others – this Hallmark Movie charm this time of year is too beautiful to keep all to myself,” I decided, right then and there in the middle of a business meeting.

We finished. I walked along, thinking in Haiku, as I mostly do. Here is part of my walk that I’m sharing with you:

charming small town vibes

fall displays on courthouse square

spiced chills in crisp air

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Underground Books

A colleague shared that she thought I’d enjoy visiting a bookstore she’d visited on her birthday.

The Underground Bookstore is in Carrollton, Georgia on the downtown square.

She was right. This place is charming, and the literary candles that use scents from items mentioned in their namesake books are delightful.

You step down into stairs so old they’re not built to code, and immediately the smell of books and the antiquity of bookshelves greets you like an old friend. Staff reviews line the shelves under featured titles, enticing you to read all the books.

And the poetry section……oh my! The poetry section had a few holes here and there (no Harjo, only one Limon, and only two obscure Collins) but still an amazing collection of those lesser-known poets and titles that sell the books. I came away with a couple of Sarah Kay books (one signed), one Collins, one Macfarlane/Morris (signed), and a book I needed for a book club that is already well underway – – Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

After dinner on the square, we went to the most aromatically-roasted coffee shop ever, the kind with old brick walls and people talking in comfortable chairs around a round table and folks on computers doing work, ……..and right there in the middle of it all, the two of us…….reading books.

We both worked on projects most of Saturday after visiting our own local coffee shop and Savored Sunday afternoon on the streets of another town this week, and the twist-up was a beautiful way to end the weekend and start the week ahead.

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#VerseLove April 5 – Poetic Drive-Bys with Bryan Ripley Crandall

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:

Poetry for others to find in a framed QR Code