Poem Walk

Furniture Press Books and twentythreebooks will present the 6th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry & Performance Festival every Monday night in April at the Towson Library in Baltimore County. To kick off the affair, we’re offering a walking tour of poetry in the downtown Towson area called Poem Walk: A Living Text.

We are collecting poems about place, environment, locale. Since submissions will be coming from numerous backdrops, we hope that the walk will reflect the thread that links small communities and big cities: the necessity for arts sustainability.

After we receive submissions, we will print them and laminate the pages. Then, we’ll post them in public spaces throughout Towson for all to see. A map with detailed poem locations will also be available in local businesses and storefronts, and it is our hope that the Towson Chamber of Commerce and local papers will promote and highlight the walk.

We are also working with Towson University to create a walking tour on its campus. Its students and faculty have been a vital component to the life and productivity of our literary community since our beginnings, and our partnership reflects the verve of ongoing activity.

Submissions guidelines:

1.We accept all genres of poetry, as long as it reflects the theme of space, environment, locale. Please limit all submissions to one page. Please send poems electronically to furniture.press.books@gmail.com with the following subject heading: Poem Walk Submission / [your name] / [title of poem]. We will not be able to accept all submissions since we are limited of time and space.

2. Along with your submission, please add your name, a short bio and a short statement about your relationship to a specific place (the place of the poem) and how you envision the arts as a sustainable and necessary part of your community.

3.  Deadline: March 4, 2011.

The Poem Walk will remain in the public sphere from March till April to promote the 6th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry & Performance Festival. If you can contribute time and energy to this project, please feel free to contact me (Christophe Casamassima) at the email listed above. This might entail a day of reading submissions, laminating pages, walking around Towson and posting poems, laying out the map, etc. If you have ideas about how to promote this project, and would like to write a review and/or make it public, again, please write me.

Christophe Casamassima & Douglas Mowbray