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Street Poetry
In context of project: SLOVENIAN BOOK DAYS
http://www.maribor2012.eu/en/nc/event/prikaz/3266544/
Street Poetry is a street action by the Slovenian Book Days literary festival in Maribor, staged to bring poetry closer to a broader audience. Project author Nino Flisar invited 10 poets of the younger and middle generation to participate in this year’s event. The work of participating poets will appeal to passers-by from 70 billboards, set up in six partner towns of the European Capital of Culture from September 1st to September 10th, 2012. Participating poets include David Bedrač, Anja Golob, Stanka Hrastelj, Alenka Jovanovski, Petra Kolmančič, Katja Plut, Ivo Stropnik, Denis Škofič, Jan Šmarčan and Lučka Zorko.
We are all too used to billboards signalling upcoming events or advertising the newest and latest products and services, as these giant urban spaces are only rarely used to parlay a different or more unusual message. So why not poetry? Why should this omnipresent “aggressive medium” be used solely for commercial purposes without ever turning to art? Four years ago we decided to enrich our city with a bit of poetry by Maribor-based poets, which would appeal to all passers-by. During these four years the inhabitants of Maribor became well acquainted with contemporary poetry. The year of the European Capital of Culture enabled us to expand the fifth instalment of our project onto other partner towns and include poets from the entire Eastern cohesion region. We are well aware of poetry having a narrow “target audience”, but sometimes an idea simply needs a slight push to reach the people and our action is a great opportunity to bring poetry to a broader audience. The group of potential readers is over 200.00 people deep, which is reason enough to “contaminate” the city streets with an aesthetically pleasing and content-rich dose of poetry in order to make people aware of the existing artistic contents and make these contents a part of their everyday lives.
Project head Nino Flisar on selected poetry: “Poetry is very diverse, so it is difficult and also unfair to try and describe it in a few simple sentences. I would prefer the people take their time, read it and form their own opinion. Let me stress that I have intentionally chosen quite a few poems about modern urban life patterns, including their characteristics and inevitable traps. I wish for people to stop and think, to ponder on their life and the environment they live in, to sometimes question a thing or two, try to view it from a different and even critical perspective – and, if some of those things turn out to be bad, to try and change them, be it on a personal or social level. This is the reason behind billboard poetry, because poets are subtle observers and confessors and poetry is always stacked with deep feelings of the world and life, happening here and now. Many-a person can and has found his true self in a single poem; a poem is a means of debate and communication – and that is precisely the aim of street poetry.”
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