Just 6 days left before the April 15th deadline for the City Poems Contest! But that’s still plenty of time to write and/or revise a poem about a historical, ecological, or cultural site within the City of Vancouver that relates to the city’s origins or its multifaceted history.
Poems can be as short as a haiku or a couplet, or as long as 400 words. Prose poems are welcome too, as well as concrete or visual poems. Feel free to use an epigraph or quote a headline or a line from the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Site Finder or Places that Matter sites, which are superb resources that are accessible with a few clicks on the keyboard.
Or perhaps write about something you’ve seen at the Museum of Vancouver, Maritime Museum, or Museum of Anthropology–an artifact, carving, weaving, canoe, photograph, the buildings themselves. How about that crab statue/fountain in front of the Museum of Vancouver? The war canoe exhibit at the Maritime Museum? Or the monumental Bill Reid sculpture, “The Raven and the First Men,” in the Museum of Anthropology? There’s also so much public art in this city that could be written about! The controversial poodle on a pedestal on Main Street? Murals from the Vancouver Mural Festival abound.
By Debra Sparrow, Chief Janice George, and Angela George
There’s an online submission form set up to facilitate your poetry submissions, but you can also print off a form to email in your poem, or just mail it in to a post office box that I’ve rented just for the contest. More information is available both on the VPL poet laureate website and on a contest webpage on my website.
Fiona Tinwei Lam 