NEW ORLEANS – In the middle of the day, in the middle of the street, a New Orleans poet is now for hire.
All you have to do is give Benjamin Aleshire an idea and about ten minutes and he’ll create a custom-made poem just for you. Or just for anybody you’d like a custom-made poem written for.
WGNO News with a Twist features guy Wild Bill Wood is watching Benjamin as he bikes to work and sets up on Royal Street near St. Peter.
Benjamin works mostly on weekends.
That’s when he bangs out his beauties. Bangs out means he types them. Yes, on a typewriter from the sixties.
Other than hiring Benjamin Aleshire to write a poem just for you, how can you celebrate “National Poet’s Day”, well, here’s what the website suggests:
Poet’s day is dedicated to the long history of poetry in the world, and most especially to those who fill our world with the passion and wonder that flows from the tip of their pens. Each form of poetry is unique to the author, as poetry is inevitably born from their feelings and personal experiences, and those experiences are not replicated even in another sharing them. If you’ve ever written poetry in your life, and we all know you have, on Poet’s day it’s time to pick up that pen again and let your inner self spill upon the page like blood upon a dance floor.
Take up the pen, and write what’s in your heart today! Whether you are describing a sunny morning in a garden, the tumultuous rumble of people on a city street, or the final struggling moments of a dying robin in the lawn, bring the world through your eyes to the page. The best celebration of Poet’s Day is to compose works of poetic art, and compile them for submission to one of the hundreds of amateur poetry publication in the world today, who knows, a hundred years from now you may be considered one of the greats!