When Sonnet L’Abbé decided to confront random passers-by with poetry this past Saturday, she went with the spirit of the holiday weekend and chose verses that were mostly thankful.
Armed with a medley of Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Robert Service, William Stafford, and one of her own invention, she participated in the second annual Random Acts of Poetry event, an initiative designed to bring poetry to chance listeners from Oct. 3-9.
With downtown Toronto as her stage, and anyone at all as her audience, L’Abbé read forty to fifty times each day. She tackled reciting at Robarts Library, the Yonge and Dundas advertainment-blitzed area, Harbourfront, and the spaces in between.
The audience was varied; it included cops on bicycles, dolphin-rights activists, streetcar passengers, and sometimes couples-one half reacting enthusiastically, the other not so much. L’Abbé explained that they almost always exhibited an initial apprehension.
“They probably thought I wanted money,” she said after one bout of surprise-attack recitation.
Following the guidelines of the international movement, once she gauged her subject’s reaction to an introductory poem, L’Abbé would present them with a ‘menu’ of her selected poems. She would then read their requested selection, an array of poems lasting twenty to sixty seconds in length.
“As I read, you could see them opening up, you could see them realizing that I wasn’t offering rhyme sing-song syrup but considered, thoughtful poetry, and they listened and surprised themselves by appreciating it”, L’Abbé explained her experiences converting skeptics.
As far as individual authors went, Walcott proved “encouraging”, Larkin was “wry, almost caustic”; as far L’Abbé’s own work: “Well, I suppose it’s not up to me to describe it,” she said. All of them were chosen because of the undertone of gratitude that the collective authors convey.
“Robert Service expressed thanks for rest and sleep, and then for a clean conscience and little moments of friendship; Dickinson [expressed thanks] for escape.”
Sonnet L’Abbé published her first book, A Strange Relief (McClelland and Stewart), in 2001 and is currently working on her second, Killarnoe, a work “about the exchange of energy that happens in speech, the strange agreement that language is.” Individual pieces have been published in several collections.
L’Abbé described Random Acts of Poetry as “public art.” The purpose of the week is to make poetry familiar to a public that may misinterpret its accessibility, and to spur a movement away from the perception of art as existing on what she calls a “rarefied” plane of “galleries and graduate schools.”
Initiated by British Columbia poet Wendy Morton, Random Acts of Poetry is an international project consisting of twenty-seven Canadian poets and ten poets from England, Scotland and Ireland.
L’Abbé’s views poetry as something that can refocus people to “the world inside their own heads.” Realigning the competitive and negative messages that individuals receive-“Don’t you want to be prettier, richer, more powerful, more comfortable than your friends”-towards a focus on the reaffirmation of self.
“Poetry says: you are wise, you know beauty when you see it, you believe in truth, you are discerning.”
