Back in 1982, maybe 1983, as the story goes, Anne Herbert wrote “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” on a Sausalito restaurant place mat. The notion, which was later the subject of a book, sparked a wave of countless acts of kindness and generosity, small acts intended to bring cheer from helping a person in need to buying coffee for a stranger. The effect, as you may know, is contagious in a “pay it forward” sort of way, one random act leading to another, an effort that stands in stark contrast to the phrase from which it likely turns, the tragic and random acts of violence.
A Random Act of Poetry, while an act of kindness in its way, is just as random but with a bit of focus, aimed at bringing beauty into our world by painting poetry in the public square (both literally and figuratively). What would happen if you left a poem next to the coffee machine for the next unsuspecting person who takes a break where you work? Or if you tucked a poem into the box of bagels you drop off for your favorite teachers? Or maybe, in the spirit of Herbert’s first public act, you left a poem written on the place mat or napkin on the restaurant table after lunch?
There are those who will say that poetry saved them. Maybe poetry in the general sense, maybe a single poem in the particular. (I might be one of them.) What if the poem you left lying around somewhere (in a random sort of way) became, for someone, just such a poem? What if it just made someone smile, for a brief minute?
It could happen.
Commit a Random Act of Poetry
Share poetry with the world (your world) today, on Random Acts of Poetry Day. Download our little e-booklet of ideas or generate a random idea of your own. We’d love to see what you do, so post your random act on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #raopoetryday ( follow us on Twitter at @tspoetry and Instagram at @tspoetry). Come back tomorrow and we’ll have a fun wrap-up featuring our favorite Random Acts of Poetry that we saw.
I got a head start and already dropped off some poems over the last few days, leaving Donna Vorreyer’s “How to Start Again” for the housekeeper in a Nebraska hotel room and a piece of Antonio Machado’s “Proverbs and Songs” No. 29 on a curb and some person’s dirty windshield.
Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking
Need Poems to Share? Try Some of These
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10 of the Best Haiku (scroll down when you get there)
Top 10 Question Poems
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Photo by Michelle Ortega, used with permission. Post by LW Lindquist.
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L. L. Barkat says
I love that you hand wrote these. There is something so special about that. Very much like a gift.
And I wasn’t aware of the history of the originating phrase. Enjoyed learning!
As to the invitation in today’s mailing, to “tell us a poem” or a “poet,” I was thinking maybe Neruda, for his way of bringing both the intimacy and social aspects of poetry to the page. From love poems to political poems, he surely shows us the power of words. Poetry can be beautiful, it can be fun, it can be challenging to our ideas about ourselves and our world. Neruda, yes. He has shown me all of that.
Will Willingham says
Neruda, yes. 🙂
I have so enjoyed The Book of Questions since Maureen first mentioned it. This one seems fitting, given your comment (and Glynn’s travels to London):
XXXII
Is there anything sillier in life
than to be called Pablo Neruda?
Is there a collector of clouds
in the Colombian sky?
Why do assemblies of umbrellas
always occur in London?
Did the Queen of Sheba
have blood the color of amaretto?
When Baudelaire used to weep
did he weep black tears?
Rick Maxson says
For RAOP Day
My longest remembered long childhood poem that I can still recite by heart:
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell http://www.jsward.com/shanty/poems/NancyBell.html