The theme of this submission call is “Local Harvest”. Just what does that mean? It means what you believe it to mean. It may mean that you enjoy spring’s crop of freshly-grilled hot dogs, served with glee from street corners and storefronts throughout the city. It might reflect your carefully-planned trip to the downtown farmer’s market, or your lazy, late-morning stumble to the Strathcona market, where you browse mostly, but always buy a coffee and a bag of popcorn. It may mean the tangible joy you feel on a Saturday morning wherein, after a work week spent in front of a glowing computer screen, you finally get to sink your hands into the earth. Take the joy you plant with your marigolds and put it on the page. Cut your zucchini before it grows beyond the fence boards and make a poem of it. Consider the shamefully large number of food photos you have posted to Instagram. We want poems about lettuce, steak, french fries, corn dogs, organic carrots, your heirloom eggplant, cherry tomatoes, and the tacos you had at Tres Carnales last week. You up for it?

Submission Deadline: July 21, 2014.

The Edmonton Poetry Festival seeks poems on the theme “Local Harvest” for the next flight of The Poetry Route, a project that puts poetry onto public transit vehicles.

Tell us in 10 lines or less how you feel about food! We want to see poems about the family farm, urban gardening, best festival food, Edmonton food trucks, a memory of a favourite dish your mom used to make. What’s your comfort food or sexiest food? What’s your food power? Write us a garden alphabet. We want to hear it all. In this round of The Poetry Route, we celebrate your relationship with food!

The four winning poems will circulate on ETS buses and LRT cars for a minimum of eight weeks, and launches in time for harvest in September 2014. We provide an honorarium of $100 to each of the four poets whose work is chosen.

Submission Guidelines