Spontaneity becomes poetry’s savior

THE MCGILL DAILY
October 13, 2005


By Leah Garfield-Wright
(Culture Writer)


A nationwide celebration of poetry and literacy began with a 60-year-old’s creative but mild attempt at evading the law. Wendy Morton, a poet from Victoria, B.C., used the “power of poetry” to avoid a speeding ticket by reading one of her poems to the cop. From this incident, a project was born.

Now in its second year, “Random Acts of Poetry” (RAP) is a nationwide effort to promote poetry by eliminating the didactic approach that monopolizes our exposure to it.

“I love to promote poetry anywhere and will stop strangers to read them poems…I thought it would be a good idea for poets across Canada to do the same thing,” says Morton, whose initial, truly impulsive recitation did, in fact, relieve her of a speeding ticket. This year, 27 poets from Canada and ten from the U.K. and Ireland devoted a week to moving poetry “off the page and on to the stage.”

McGill alumna Carolyn Marie Souaid joins Montreal poets Fernand Durepos and José Acquelin to make up this year’s RAP line-up from October 3 to 9. Souaid is the only anglophone of the three. Since first leaving McGill with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1981, she has published four volumes of poetry, with a French translation of one of them due soon.

Although Souaid admits that her expectations are not as lofty as Arthur Rimbaud – who claimed that his writing would change the world – she is “all for upsetting the applecart.

“In my view, people these days are far too complacent, far too accepting of whatever the bureaucratic machinery chooses to dish out,” she said.

Souaid admits to hating poetry as a kid. “School turned me completely off because I always got the feeling that I was missing the special key you needed to unlock the mystery. Poetry was an animal you had to dissect for parts…similes, metaphors, and themes…in order to appreciate it.” Her sensitivity to poetry’s intimidating nature compels her presentation toward an artistic revelation, not pedantic analysis.

Souaid returned to her alma mater to carry out what she saw as the duty of bestowing verse upon willing ears and breaking down the walls between poetry and people. 

On the steps of the Arts Building, she approaches a student and, following a brief introduction and explanation, receives a curiosity-driven affirmation from the student. Suddenly, an unexpected feeling creates an aura of intimacy. Souaid is kneeling down, a rose in the lapel of her dark suit (a tribute to Pierre-Elliot Trudeau), and though little more than a poem is actually shared, the ironic marriage of surprise and proximity succeeds in dispelling the potential awkwardness of this proposal.

Souaid leaves as she came, sprightly and spiritedly. Later, she reveals her sense of accomplishment at demystifying “something that had been perceived as being esoteric, abstract, and just plain incomprehensible.” One of her visions of the project, shared by other participating poets, is to merge poetry “for the small academic elite, something for literary types to dissect, analyze, classify” with poetry “for ordinary people – something to help them reach a kind of spiritual and emotional ‘place’ in their lives.” She is convinced that the latter type of poetry – and its liberal and liberating nature – is essential to popularizing the art form.

As a conclusion, or perhaps an introduction to regular poetics, the recipient receives not just the spoken word but the written, too. This year, Souaid gave away 50 editions of her latest volume of poems titled Satie’s Sad Piano. Abebooks, a supporter of independent booksellers, is a sponsor of RAP and donates the books. The other main sponsor is Victoria READ Society, a non-profit literacy organization, which has been working for nearly 30 years to improve literacy and numeracy skills of people in the greater Victoria community.

A final assessment reveals that the essence of RAP relies on revisiting art as a tool of activism and people as instruments of interaction. The promotion of these potentially powerful acts ultimately leads to a reevaluation of poetry’s place in modern society.



To learn more about Random Acts of Poetry, visit www.abebooks.com/docs/randomactsofpoetry. Also, look out for another project in which Souaid participates called “Circus of Words.”


(Reprinted with permission of the author)