Dionne Brand, Toronto’s poet laureate, has launched a new project in cooperation with the City of Toronto and the Toronto Public Library aimed at bringing poetry into the public sphere. The endeavour, called Poetry is Public is Poetry, involves the public display of passages by 34 writers, which are combined with visual art by illustrator Frank Viva. Participating poets include big names such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, Jan Zwicky, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, and Anne Simpson, as well as younger poets such as Jacob McArthur Mooney, Paul Vermeersch, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Angela Hibbs.

The first stage of this project includes five panels that were unveiled last week at the Toronto Reference Library. Two to four annual installations at various libraries throughout the city are planned for the future.

A City of Toronto press release quotes Brand on the rationale behind the new project:

Committing verses tangibly to the public space will enrich the interior life of the citizens. Poetry beautifies public space, pays respect to the intelligence of the citizenry, gives respite from the grind of daily living, and engages the city’s humanistic ideals.

It also serves as a countermeasure to the ubiquity of billboard and other advertising throughout the city, for which everyone can be grateful.