City of Vancouver Cultural planner Miko Hoffman asked me to facilitate an interactive poetry activity for over 200 municipal cultural planners at the Creative City Summit held in Vancouver this year. Here’s the description: “Have fun writing a haiku or short poem about a special or memorable place in your town! Whether it’s a quirky building, funky neighbourhood, historic park, community garden, key landmark or something else, capture the essence of how you experience that special place in a few honed phrases.”
To get the creative juices flowing, I provided examples of place-based haiku (from Basho to Jack Kerouac), including a few gems from the poetry month event held by The New York Times in 2014.
Everyone had to rearrange themselves by province and region around the tables in the conference room, and then draft a haiku (or two or more if they wished) on post-it notes about a favourite specific place in their own town. Then they were asked to share their haiku with someone else at their table. It was a wonderful ice breaker. There was laughter and excitement in the room as participants shared haiku about their hometowns. The haiku were posted along the conference wall, from west to east, north to south. People enjoyed reading the results, taking photos, chatting about their favourite ones, or just chuckling in recognition. The muse had visited the conference room that afternoon! Here are some photos I took of a few of the poems, but there were so many terrific ones!
Here is the excerpt from Un/Write that I showed the participants to encourage them to write. It was animated by Lara Renaud with the help of Quinn Kelly (text, sound design), who were both students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art at the time it was made.