Ugh, darn those parking tick– Oh, wait. April Fools!
Ugh! Nothing like a darn parking ticket to ruin your Saturday morning market trip.
Unless that ticket is a ... poem?
Gotcha!
Downtown drivers were surprised to find those dreaded white slips on their windshields Saturday, but it was all an April Fools’ Day poetry prank organized by Columbia’s poet laureate, Ed Madden.
The beauty and the humor of the poetry prank was all about creating “this moment of disruption for a person,” said Ethan Fogus, one of the volunteer poetry guerillas who distributed the “tickets.”
“We don’t tend to think of poetry as something that’s in our daily lives,” he said. As he watched someone notice their ticket, “You could see the pause, and you could see it affecting them. The media you take in matters, and the fact that poetry is really well composed and well thought out, that’s significant, just the act of meditating on that.”
The poetry parking tickets were the first of several projects in Columbia celebrating April as National Poetry Month.
The next time it rains, be on the lookout for sidewalk poetry. Poems will be painted on handful of sites with invisible paint that only shows up when the ground is wet.
Plus, South Carolina poets will be providing selections for the upcoming Indie Grits film festival. Keeping with the festival’s theme, “Visiones,” there will be a mix of English, Spanish and multilingual poems.
Reach Ellis at (803) 771-8307.
This story was originally published April 1, 2017 at 10:31 AM with the headline "Ugh, darn those parking tick– Oh, wait. April Fools!."