​If the city of London goes for our sidewalk poetry idea Dec. 1st, it will be a first for Canada, and a model for other Canadian cities.

I expect we would put together a comprehensive information package containing everything other cities would need to know, based on our experience.

http://www.londonpoetryopenmic.com/news/sidewalk-poetry-gearing-up-for-the-presentation




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In preparing for our Dec. 1st presentation to the London Arts Council (LAC) of our idea to stamp poems in fresh cement as it’s being poured in sidewalk repairs, I’ve been working with three very industrious 3rd-year English students. They hail from Prof. Manina Jones’ class called Literature, Creativity and the Local. Together, we’ve been surging forward at high speed.
 
Jennifer Ball (L), Leizel Rafanan and Noelle Schmidt are getting a first-hand view of how poetry can be propagated outside of campus. They’ve been doing research, making petitions, asking for letters of support, refining the idea and writing the proposal.
 
Yesterday we met with Joel Barton, a former member of Manina’s class who is now, by chance, a member of the LAC board. He gave us an idea of what a good presentation consists of, as well as the kind of information we should know, much of which we had not thought of.
 
Here’s what we have now, going by what the St. Paul, Minnesota version of our arts council told us of their experience, and from injecting our own ideas:
 
LAC would set up a yearly city-wide contest for people who would like to get their poems imprinted. Of probably five poems selected each year, two or three might go to the city’s grade 11 and 12 English students. The rest would go to anyone else. A  panel of volunteer judges, composed of poets, English profs, etc. would select the winners. (The first contest in St. Paul brought in more than 2,000 poems.)
 
One of our own ideas is that a committee of gung-ho volunteers, responsible to LAC, would be set up and have as its prime function keeping the city excited about the project from year to year. It would also select the panel of judges.
 
Once the poems are selected (all short ones, of course), they would be turned into stamps. In St. Paul each stamp is designed in terms of font, letter size, etc, then the letters are cut from plastic and built onto an aluminum frame, five frames per year. A stamp supervisor, in his own van, follows the repair crew from one repair site to the next, making sure the cement is of the right consistency, and stamping in the poem. If there were, say, one hundred repairs made in a year, at random locations, then each poem would be impressed in the sidewalks twenty times in twenty random places before it is retired.
 
City office staff would organize and co-ordinate. Other than setting up the contests and promoting them, they would liason with the committee, and also make sure all residents near each repair would receive advance warning via flyers so they could refuse to have a poem in front of their residences if so desired.
 
The finishing touch would be a map added to the city's website with locations of all the poems so citizens could plot tours by car, bike or foot. Additional information about the poems, poets and the project would be included.
 
Jennifer Ball has taken responsibility for gauging citizen enthusiasm for the project. She made up the petition as well as a draft letter of support. Please make use of this letter if you would like to support the idea. Just sign it as is or use it as a template to write your own. And please sign the petition below, if you haven’t already.
 
Thanks, Stan Burfield
organizer,
London Open Mic Poetry
 
 
 
Below is a draft for a letter of support for the Sidewalk Poetry Project. You are welcome to edit, modify, use this as a template, or write your own letter to suit your thoughts and perspectives. We ask that letters include your signature if possible. If not possible, no problem. You can return the letter to us, by e-mail. If you have an electronic version of your signature saved, you can copy and paste it into the letter and then send it (but if you don't, no worries--send it with your typed name and email address); or you can print it out, sign it, scan it and send it. We will include your letter in the appendices of the proposal document. Thank you for your support.
 
 
Dear London Arts Council,
 
 
I am writing to show my support for the Sidewalk Poetry project proposed by the London Open Mic Poetry organization. I believe that this is an exciting creative project that will benefit the community of London in many ways.
 
The project offers an opportunity for the city to support literary culture throughout all areas of the community. It opens new doors for engagement with poetry for all demographics, making it accessible and adding a new dimension to readership. The project will help develop interest in poetry for younger generations by bringing it into their lives outside of the dictated school atmosphere, and allowing them to discover poetry on their own terms, making it a part of their lives as they read the same poems regularly while they grow up. The project will also foster community involvement in the arts, and offer poets the honour of making a lasting impression upon their city.
 
I believe that this project is an excellent opportunity for this city, and I eagerly await the chance to witness it unfolding in the future.
 
 
Sincerely,
 
 
 
(If you want to use regular mail (must be received by Nov. 30th), send it to me and I will include it in the documentation at the presentation:)
 
Stan Burfield
Apt. 1104-112 Base Line Rd. W.
London ON
N6J 1V4
 
PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION HERE.



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​Those of you who have watched the stop-and-start progression of the idea of sidewalk poetry for the last couple years may be relieved to know that during this 5th season of London Open Mic Poetry there will be four people working on it, so that now I can guarantee that the idea is definitely going to be refined, thoroughly researched, a proper proposal written and then, finally, the submission made to the London Arts Council (LAC). 

Three energetic young students of Manina Jones' third-year class at Western, "Canadian Literature, Creativity and the Local", have volunteered to pour themselves into the project as part of their class work, and because they are very enthusiastic about the idea. 

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the idea is to get the city to stamp poems into the city's sidewalks as they are being repaired with new cement. An annual city-wide contest would decide on a few poems to be made into stamps each year for all that year's repairs. The poems would then be pinpointed on a map on the city's website. Citizens could use it to chart a route between poems, for a foot, bicycle or car adventure. My own motivating fantasy is that a child on the way to the bus or school would step over and look at a poem every day, and, as the years passed and as the child's mind developed, it would gain new insights into the deeper meanings in the poem, which would then become a part of the person's entire life, and poetry would become one of the pleasures of the grown adult. 

The three students working on the project are (in alph. order) Jennifer Ball, Leizel Rafanan, and Noelle Schmidt.

We will keep you informed of progress, and hopefully keep you excited about the project. Let's face it; the more support we have, the more likely it will be that the city goes for it too.

Photo: This is one of over 700 impressions of nearly 50 poems in the sidewalks of St. Paul, Minnesota, the first city to institute this idea, and, as far as we know, the only one. During their first year, 2008, over 2,000 submissions were made!

We are in the process of making a radical departure from our past.

We have always been a single-event organization run by a single organizer. But during this month, April, 2016, which is coincidentally National Poetry Month, we are breaking out of that mould, becoming a multi-event organization with each event run by its own organizer.

And now, instead of the one central organizer trying to plan every detail, which is only possible to a certain extent, at least without causing seriously debilitating anxiety, he is stepping back to allow others to take over the planning of their own spin-off events

This relaxation, openness, and "spontaneous" growth of new events and poetic happenings could continue indefinitely, as more people become aware of us, are excited by the possibilities, and create their own ideas. And the more that poetry becomes a part of the landscape of London, the more people will begin to see it everywhere, and not only throughout the city, but also in the community-building social media. Poetry could become the fashionable art of London.

It would follow that this rapid growth in quantity (as we create more spaces for poetry, and so excite more people) could provide a rich breeding ground for changes in quality as well.

Thanks to an idea by Frank Beltrano, we will launch a series of readings in the Chapters book store near the White Oaks Mall, probably in May. At each monthly event, organizer Andy Verboom will be pairing one of the featured poets who has earlier read at our four-season series at Mykonos Restaurant with a lesser-known poet who has not yet been published in book form. Andy is in the process of working out the format but it will include readings by each poet (a longer one by the featured reader), some form of conversation between the two, and of course questions from the audience. These new organizing ideas are so exciting that we may try to adapt them to the larger stage at Mykonos.

We are launching an E-journal, wherein each month the open mic readers at our events will publish one of the poems they read that month (if they would like to), along with a photo of them reading it. Also, the featured poet's three poems, interview and bio would be included, and possibly those of the poets reading at that month's Chapters event. The organizers (publishers, editors) of this publication are Koral Scott and Christine Ellwood.

Our already-announced series of Guerrilla Poetry readings in the central library (if it goes as planned) will have a spin-off in the Chapters book-store near White Oaks mall. It will be organized and hosted by Brittany Renaud. (The original series in the central library down-town is launching this Saturday, April 23rd, at 2 pm.)

London Open Mic Poetry is rapidly changing from a Mykonos event series into an umbrella organization. It now has eleven members. Projects that have been put off for lack of people to run them may soon be launched by new people who may want to work with us in the future.

For instance, we need someone to head our Prison Poetry project, a woman (since it would be in the women's prison in the Kitchener area) who has the time, the energy, the right expertise, and who has experience dealing with institutions.
We need people to try to start workshops and possibly open mics in other long-term care institutions.

We need someone to promote with the city our idea of having city workers stamp impressions of poems into side-walk areas as they are being repaired. This has been done successfully in St. Paul, Minnesota.

We need people to carry out our dream of exciting the city's high-school English students in poetry, possibly by means of a city-wide contest.

As London Open Mic Poetry grows in size, its abilities are also growing. For instance, we now have a social media expert on board, Koral Scott, who is reorganizing our presence on the internet to make it more effective.

We're open to people and their ideas. We're no longer just imposing our own.