UA Poetry Center kicks off Global Vaccine Poem Project arizona.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from arizona.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lonni Whitchurch
For Lonni Whitchurch, a former high school English teacher from Bemidji, Minnesota, who has lived in Florida for 34 years, the next full moon is a perfect time for a book launch and to talk about ways the moon has influenced poets and creativity. (
The Old Farmer s Almanac calls a full moon in April a Pink Moon. It s named after the phlox, a pink flower that blooms this month.)
In
, the moon in its various cycles plays an important role in many of her poems. She describes how full tropical moons are haze and startle at once while in the Midwest, at Christmas, tinsel swings in the curve of a crescent moon.
Give us our world again!
Her poem became the model for the Global Vaccine Poem project, which asks people to add to a collective poem.
In five weeks, 8,000 people have visited the website, adding 1,200 stanzas. Their responses range from nostalgia for what life was like before to hope for what could come.
At vaccination sites at UA, Kent, the University of Texas and in Bisbee, people receive cards about the project while they wait the 15 minutes afterward.
“It’s a good time to write poetry because this is a powerful moment and there is a lot of emotion cooked into it,” Meier said.
Fostering friendship: Students care for dogs during pandemic dukechronicle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dukechronicle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“We had plans. We were going places,” poet Naomi Shihab Nyes wrote in her opening stanza of “Dear Vaccine.”
Her words serve as both invitation and inspiration for others to share their pandemic hopes, grief, humor and insight on an interactive community project called the Global Vaccine Poem.
The collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and the University of Arizona Poetry Center aims to create meaning from hardship, spread vaccine awareness and build on Wick’s Traveling Stanzas project that fuses poetry with everyday life.
David Hassler, director of Wick, said the ambitious project aims to include the voices of 1 million people.