Anacortes Word Waves 2012 was a joint community collaboration for a public poetry literacy project that resulted in several public poetry events benefitting our community members, students and artists. Word Waves was designed to incorporate the spoken word, written word and word play.
For the word play portion of the project, local merchants and businesses helped to bring awareness through a Pen-A-Poem word game. A community word form was designed to involve as many community members as possible and offered kids and adults the opportunity to have the same word fun by creating their own poetry art works and submitting them to the word waves panel for choosing the winners.
The Pen-A-Poem form provided a list of 78 words that players could choose from and mix with their own words to create poems. There were five game categories that players could pick to write poetry about:
During the month of October, the Pen-A-Poem forms were placed at 20 plus businesses and the Senior Center, made available to teachers on the Anacortes School District website and used as a teaching tool at the Boys and Girls Club. The staff at the Boys and Girls Club made actual magnetic poetry pieces out of the game words and placed them on a class board for the kids to work on throughout the month of October.
We received about 300 entries. A few of highlights from the entries are:
Winners were selected in each category by a word waves panel and notified. The winners were invited to the ‘Evening of Poetry’ event at the Anacortes Library last night and asked to read their own poems.
Best Island, Water, Forest Theme:
Arlene R. Wechezak, “Anacortes Forest Lands”
Best written by a Junior:
Madison Berris, “Untitled”
Best Humor (tie):
Joanne Jones, “If I Were Queen of Dewey Beach”
Best Humor (tie):
Linda Henley, “Fishing in Anacortes”
Best Anacortes Business:
Margo Hurth, “Shore”
Best with Most Words used:
Marcia Neu, “This Rainy Place”
The winners were all very excited to have been selected. Five of the winners showed up to the ‘Evening of Poetry’ event to read their poems. The junior winner showed up with her whole family and stayed for the entire 2 hour poetry reading with smiling support from her family.
Winner, Marcia Neu, had this to say, “I wrote a poem a day (not nearly as long as my entry!) for 5+ years, but had been in a dry spell for the last year. Your contest gave me the impetus to get back into poetry writing again – thanks so much!”
Other notes of success from the 2012 word waves project.
