Can poetry inspire people to discover their city of foot?
We are looking for your help in making this happen – we want you to write a haiku inspired by a city walk or somewhere special in your neighbourhood, and share your poem with residents and visitors alike.
It is really simple. A haiku is a poem of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. You can find examples of ones that other people have written by checking our map – we ask you to write your own and tell us the place on the map that you would like it tagged to – the place or walk that inspired you to write it.
A bit of history….
Back in October 2011 in Vancouver, Canada the Haiku encounter project (then called the Haiku walk project) was to be featured as part of an international Walk21 conference but we couldn’t raise the funds to travel let alone get the Haiku walk project underway on the ground there.
This site lay dormant, but in 2016 we are making great strides with getting London residents writing haiku about their neighbourhoods, through running a series of Haiku walkshops on the First Thursday of every month, beginning in February and ending on Thursday 6 October on National Poetry Day. You can read all about these and read the haiku composed by downloading nifty anthologies as fold-your-own zines on our First Thursday: haiku on foot webpages. You can download our presenter with maps of routes for each of the walkshops.
Our supporters (all donating their time) include
- Andrew Stuck from Rethinking Cities in London
- Andrew Ellis a Digital Designer, from Boston / NYC….
- Professor Isabel Dyck, Geography faculty, St Mary’s University London
- Kate Miller and fellow poets of South London Stanza of the Poetry Society, London
- Arthur Orsini of Urban Thinkers, Vancouver, Canada
- Maureen Roberts & Abira Hussein from the London Metropolitan Archive
…we would love to hear from you if you can lend us your support….