Vancouver to join historical 100,000 Poets for Change global event:
Poets in Vancouver to promote water stewardship
September 24, 2011: On September 24th, poets around the world (including Vancouver!) will create the world’s largest poetry event—a movement so significant its “100 Thousand Poets for Change” website will be permanently archived by Stanford University’s LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program. Stanford University calls this the largest poetry event in history. Michael Rothenberg, of Big Bridge, is organizing this planet-wide happening, which includes 600 events in 450 cities and 95 countries.
100,000 Poets for Change is a positive movement, with voices calling for social, environmental, and political sustainability. This mass gathering, happening at once in 600 different places world-wide, is truly momentous in that it comes in a day and age when, despite our globally connected world, there are many dissenting voices. 100,000 Poets for Change attempts to join everyone together for one day to celebrate poetry, art, and music, with a message to work toward peace and affirmative change. We hope this one day will echo positively for days, weeks, months, and years to come.
Each city participating in this event is planning celebrations and actions unique to their own locale. In Vancouver, BC, we are celebrating our rich natural heritage and biodiversity. We have the rare privilege to live in one of the planet’s most beautiful cities. We live near one of the world’s largest and last intact temperate rainforests. We are surrounded by mountains, fjords, and salmon-bearing waterways. Among us are First Nations, who have occupied this region for thousands of years and bring to us great cultural lineage and wisdom.
At 1:00 on September 24th, Vancouver poets and other community members will honor the traditional and annual Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and BC Rivers Day by actively restoring the False Creek East shoreline—a coastal region within the city containing water with very high coliform counts and a history of dangerous chemicals in sediment samples, which Fraser Riverkeeper and environmental lawyer Doug Chapman will present. We discourage young children to attend this part of the event due to a rocky terrain and numerous medical debris found on this beach every year.
Later in the afternoon, as part of Vancouver’s annual book fair, the Word on the Street festival extends to three days and is helping to sponsor the 100,000 Poets for change readings. From 3:30 to 5:00, poets from Christine Leclerc’s Enpipe Line project will read at the Carnegie Centre on Main and Hastings in classroom 2 on the third floor. Note that seating is limited. September 24th is also 350 Day, a call to reducing carbon dioxide emissions into our atmosphere. The Enpipe Line project is a collaborative effort by many poets to write more kilometers of poetry lines designed to engulf and overwhelm the structures that allow proposals like Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline to emerge. The Enpipe Line is now close to 50,000 kilometers long – far longer than the proposed twin pipeline project – and will be published by Creekstone Press. All afternoon and into the evening, the Carnegie Centre will have poetry readings, workshops, and an open mic session.
Local publisher Moon Willow Press, Word on the Street Vancouver, and non-profit Fraser Riverkeeper are sponsoring the local events.
Moon Willow Press’s Mary Woodbury, who is organizing this event with Christine Leclerc and Rita Wong, has worked collaboratively with Michael Rothenberg on several art and literary projects for more than a decade. She said, “I was excited to bring Michael’s vision of 100,000 poets to Vancouver, a great city that interacts with a long tradition of Canada’s envious natural resources and indigenous customs. Many of our natural resources are being direly threatened, including clean water, wild salmon and other fish, and our coastal rainforest. This poet event takes action to preserve probably the dirtiest shoreline in the city as well as promotes, very uniquely, resistance to the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline project – one that would devastate our coasts and northern rainforest ecosystem as well as perpetuate the destruction already seen in the Athabasca region in the highly resource-intensive extraction of oil sands.”
A sampling of these poet events on the 24th include:
- Albuquerque, New Mexico: 24 hour drum circle
- Morning ginko (haiku walk) in Nagoya, Japan
- The mayor of Cájar will organize Granada, Spain’s event with a local musical choir
- “Jazzoetry for Imagination” in the East Village, New York
- Contra la Violencia (Against Violent Art) in Mexico City
- Bar limericks in Limerick, Ireland
- Keystone XL protest in Omaha, Nebraska
- Free verse day in Kerala, India
- Music by Mousikoi Ixnilates and poetry readings in Volos, Greece
- Poet Michael McClure (one of Kerouac’s major characters) reading in Venice, Italy
A man who is set in his ways and well prepared for his upcoming retirement experiences an unexpected change in life when he wins a huge lottery. Rather than basking in enjoyment of the windfall, he turns inward and doesn’t tell a soul, not even his wife. During the six months he has to redeem the ticket, a series of events challenge him to reconsider the deeper purposes of his life and the source of true riches.
