Transit Windsor brings National Poetry Month on wheels

 

Transit Windsor riders will soon be able to enjoy the works of local poets as they ride the bus, the City of Windsor says in a press release. 

April is known as National Poetry Month. Windsor’s Poet Laureate Emeritus Marty Gervais and Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern are planning to bring poetry to the Windsor community in an innovative way this year. Windsor’s Resilient Voices is an initiative that will celebrate National Poetry Month by placing inspirational poems on interior advertisement spaces across the Transit Windsor fleet of buses. This will also be displayed throughout select City of Windsor facilities beginning April 1, 2021.  

According to Tyson Cragg, the Executive Director for Transit Windsor, the poems are being displayed on Transit Windsor buses. This initiative was created by the City of Windsor’s Cultural Affairs office, and the city simply purchased on-bus advertising panels to display the poems.  

Cragg said Transit Windsor is happy to be a part of this initiative.   

“Transit Windsor is delighted to participate in Windsor’s Resilient Voices. It gives us great pleasure to see the mingling of arts and culture with public transit, and I hope that these messages provide hope and uplift people’s spirits in these difficult times,” said Cragg.  

According to the City of Windsor, over the course of this month, local writers and poets between the ages of 14 and 24 are encouraged to submit their works. The poem focuses on the theme of resilience. The League of Canadian Poets selected this as the theme for National Poetry Month this year, explaining the theme as follows: “What does it mean to be resilient? We meet resilience in every corner we have ever been backed into, every hardship that we endure.” 

 Victoria Hecnar, a student at the University of Windsor and a student of Gervais, said she has reasons to participate.  

“One of the panelists who were selecting all of the poems was my professor Marty Gervais, he told me about it, and I just thought it would be a great opportunity,” said Hecnar. “One of my poems talked about how there are still so many great moments left to come and we just have to keep our heads up and look forward to those and that is something I kept with me for years even before the pandemic hit.” 

Gervais and Mulhern have already selected 60 poems and are looking for more to be submitted.