The City of Windsor’s Poet Laureate Emeritus Marty Gervais & Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern is planning to bring poetry to the community in an innovative way this year. ‘Windsor’s Resilient Voices’ is an initiative to celebrate National Poetry Month by placing short, six-line inspiration poems on interior advertisement spaces across the Transit Windsor fleet of buses and throughout select facilities beginning April 1, 2021.
Deadline to submit March 5, 2021.
Submission Form and program details: https://docs.google.
All interested Windsor poets, particularly youth (aged 14 to 24), are encouraged to submit original poems on the theme of ‘resilience’ to Windsor’s poets laureate. Gervais and Mulhern will work together to select approximately one hundred poems from those submitted to be printed for display on buses and throughout the community. The League of Canadian Poets selected ‘Resilience’ as the theme for National Poetry Month this year, explaining the theme as follows: “What does it mean to be resilient? We meet resilience in every corner we’ve ever been backed into, every hardship that we endure. Resilience is geographical, spiritual, historical. It’s the fight against climate change, the inner battle with mental health, the outcry for human rights and an end to systemic racism. Resilience is the backbone of generations of trauma, the silence at the dinner table, the bow to culture’s violin. Resilience is the courage to start each day anew. This National Poetry Month 2021, we celebrate, reflect on and respect the resilience that has made us who we are.”In placing the selected poems on buses and in facilities throughout Windsor, Gervais and Mulhern are taking the opportunity to deliver on the goals of the City of Windsor’s poet laureate program, which include promoting poetry to a wide and appreciative audience while strengthening the public’s relationship to literature. Since the start of the pandemic, the poets laureate have written over seventy poems that have been shared online. Funding to print and display the selected poems will be provided through the City of Windsor’s poet laureate program, and Gervais and Mulhern will oversee the submission and selection process. In addition to publication on the advertisements, the City will also provide certificates of recognition to the poets whose work is selected for the project. Submission Examples: THE BEST OF TIMES by Marty GervaisWe may think the only world is the one that is virtual – a laptop or smartphone but turn away, step into a garden, go for a walk pretend for a moment and gather up the clouds above you and give yourself a moment to dream SURVIVE by Mary Ann Mulhern my river-walk see a gooseWing broken and torn duck with a damaged will they survive wind, ice and snow we will too