I was inspired to read about Lynne Hayes. Her cool idea? A “Take-it-to-the-street-poetry project”. The project prints and distributes booklets of poetry worldwide, without cost, in public places. The theme of her project is “people getting words to people that don’t get words.”
The first round was a huge success with over 700 views on YUDU and over 150 participants who sent their words and art. Submissions came from a diverse group ranging from a young boy age 9, to noted contemporary writers such as John Burroughs, Anatoly Molotkov, Jason Hardung, Puma Perl as well as several writers from One Stop Poetry: Luke Prater, Annie Perconti, Weston Fosdeck and others. Seven poetry volumes were delivered to sites all over the world. People took the words to hospitals, libraries, coffee shops, placed them on cars, in bars, restaurants, on bus benches, motorcycles, and handed them to the homeless.
My short poem, “Possibility”, has been submitted for inclusion in the project’s next effort, due for release in June, 2011. “Possibility” is available for viewing on my site in the Poems section.
Bruce Arlen Wasserman assembled his first poetry manuscript with a typewriter on the kitchen table when he was seventeen, farmed and worked as a blacksmith, drove a tractor-trailer in college, edited professional journals, wrote as a freelance journalist and is a dentist. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award. He writes poetry and fiction. His book, THE BROKEN NIGHT, was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2022.
Bruce received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books. His writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, the Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Beyond writing, he creates visual art as a potter at Bruce Arlen Wasserman Studio, where he draws from the reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form.
An Undiscovered Country (Horace Simerman Press, 2011) is going further in its travels around the globe. The collection of poems by Bruce Arlen Wasserman exploring love in all its dimensions, is now being sold in Norway, Finland and Sweden and is being carried in the UK at Waterstones, which has nearly 300 shops in Britain and at Berkelouw Books in Australia, one of Australia's oldest booksellers.
These locations add to the expanding worldwide distribution network already in place for the collection. It is being marketed by booksellers in France, Germany, Australia, Japan and Croatia, as well as online in the USA at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com and at other locations worldwide through independent and online booksellers.
Wasserman’s work takes an in-depth look at love in a unique way, exposing the sedimentary layers of this topic that traverses cultures to cut right to the root of the human condition. In addition to its unique poetic point of view, the work is being touted as a pivotal new look at relationships.
