We all know most writers, instead of making a living, get paid in dreams, hopes and intimations of immortality, but mostly in beans, poets even more so.
For International Poetry Day, March 21, 2015, companies around the world are making the myth come true. Not the dreams and immortality part, but the beans part. Coffee beans, that is. At selected coffee shops around the world, poets will be able to exchange a poem for a coffee of their choice.*
Triple strength espresso may require something akin to Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, while a cup of Kopi Luwak calls for something from Bukowski or perhaps Burroughs, and a double-double caramel macchiato needs must necessitate something Shakespearean. To add whipped cream or not whipped cream, that is the question…..
You can find out which cafes are participating by either wandering around as lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, until all at once you see a crowd, a host of rhyming guys named Bill, or for the more practical by using the hashtag #PayWithAPoem on Twitter, you can also find out more from the Pay With A Poem Facebook page. You can also watch the entertaining Pay With A Poem video below.
I say add a bag of peanuts and pass a UN resolution to make it a permanent, year round phenomena. Will versify for victuals. Free verse for free food! Sonnets for sandwiches! Haikus for hamburgers! Limericks for lime spiders!
(*Some conditions may apply.)
