World Poetry Day: Awesome Payment For Coffee And What 12 Poets Did For Their Day Jobs


World Poetry Day has seen Twitter light up with users’ favorite poems over the last several hours, with poems being attributed to Neruda, Frost, Eliot, and Tennyson.

According to The Journal, there are a variety of Dublin coffee shops that are taking poetry as payment for coffee for World Poetry Day, with participating coffee shops including Clement and Pekoe, Kaph, Nick’s Coffee Co, BB’s, Books Upstairs, and Two Pups Coffee in Dublin.

World Poetry Day sees both spoken and written poetry being used as payment for Dublin coffee shops. Certainly, the move is welcomed by coffee aficionados looking for their latest cup of joe, and definitely by both aspiring and known poets looking to spread their poetic word.

In addition to this, Mashable has also released a World Poetry Day list of what some of the best-known poets did when they weren’t writing poetry. Maya Angelou, for instance, was a nightclub crooner while T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk. William Butler Yeats was an occult magician and Robert Frost, one of the best-known American poets ever, was a failed farmer. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was perhaps unsurprisingly a hopeful harpooner; Emily Dickinson was a “keeper of cats;” Wallace Stevens an insurance salesman and William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician. The beloved Jack Kerouac kept busy doing railroad work, Phillip Larkin was a public librarian, Pablo Neruda was a diplomat, and Charles Bukowski was a mailman.

Oprah spoke to celebrities to find out what their favorite poems were, and broadcaster Diane Sawyer had high praise for poems in April 2011. On an occasion such as World Poetry Day, it is perhaps only fitting that her words reflect the beauty of poetry as a whole.

“For me, poetry is the compressed experience of an emotion,” she said. “I’m not great at long novels. But I love a sharp, compressed arrow straight to the heart.”

Perhaps one of the best-known movies that discuss poetry is Dead Poets Society, where John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his young charges that language, specifically, was designed for one purpose. No doubt, several on World Poetry Day are exercising that purpose and more when it comes to poetry and language.

Mic says that a new love poetry ezine has come out on World Poetry Day celebrating not necessarily the best in love poems, but poetry as a whole. Kill Yr Darlings; Tweet Yr Drafts is designed to honor those poems that we may have written as our hearts were newly broken, and ezine co-founder Sam Escobar said that the genesis for the ezine actually came about at a bar.

“None of these poems are ones we would necessarily want to submit to a poetry journal or contest, but they’re dear to our hearts,” he said.

The key idea behind the ezine is that it contains the element that is so very dear to all love poetry – it’s raw and speaks a truth that in so many ways could not be spoken through any other medium, according to Mic. A love of language and of poetry is what unites all of us, particularly on World Poetry Day.

Perhaps no one understands this better than Shane Koyczan, Canada’s best known spoken word poet. On World Poetry Day, it might be an idea to remember what he once said about poetry.

“Look directly into every mirror,” Koyczan said, according to Goodreads. “Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: We were here.”

On World Poetry Day, poets and poetry lovers alike should remember that poems can be our stories for the world that marks that we were here.

[Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images]

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