A little bit about 100,000 Poets for Change, which took place on the 24th of September.
100,000 Poets for Change is a worldwide event to promote awareness for change and culture. The idea was to hold poetry related events, all around the world, by volunteers of course, and to wake and shake the world up. In each participating country and city there was 1 or a group of organizers, trying their best to do something meaningful. I can’t tell you about all the events, because there are too many to count, but you can check online what happened in your area (link at the bottom).
When a friend of mine, called Adam, told me about this event I was skeptical. I’ve been working in 4 jobs lately (yes – imagine that, now try to fill up a schedule with it), packed with studies and papers, and my band was ready to the return to the stages after months of silence (I’ll tell you about it in later journals). I checked online, realized there were 3 different Israeli organizers, and decided that they can manage on their own. So I forgot.
A month later Adam tells me he really needs another hand on this project, and asks me to join again. I said to myself – well, you know, it’s a worthy cause, and maybe if I won’t do too much I might handle it. So I said I’ll try. We’ve met Prof. Karen Alkalay-Gut, which was the one who brought Adam into this, and talked about few things. From here to there I found myself neck deep in a HUGE event. And when I say huge this is what I mean –
We held 4 different events throughout the day. 10AM Saturday morning we went to Tel Aviv’s beach walkway and pictured over 100 people holding with words they picked to create a huge poem (soon to be uploaded online). At 3PM we had poetry reading at Bookworm Book Store, with over 15 readers and 50 listeners. At 6PM we had a reading at CafeCafe Coffee Place, again – 16 readers and about 45 listeners. And at the evening, start 9PM, we held the biggest event at Papa’s Restaurant. At this last event we had about 18 readers, half of are the elite of the poets in Israel, the other half are a mix of really unknown upcoming artists and a few in the midrange.
Throughout this thing we were interviewed to the radio and running around like crazies to make sure everything was working great. And it was amazing. It was really amazing. The entire team who worked on this – everybody were amazing. This turned out to be one huge poetry event with a sum of over 300 participants. For a country where a casual poetry event has barely 20 participants – this is was a huge success. We were all surprised at our capabilities.
Yup, crazy times.
Did you have a 100,000 Poets for Change event? If so, tell me about it.
More soon.
– Omri.
The site: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange