Tag: events

25th Anniversary Celebration

celebration

2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website.

To celebrate, I’m hosting an event:

“The Niagara Falls Poetry Project: Celebrating 25 Years of Discovering, Preserving, and Recovering the Literary Heritage of Niagara Falls”
 
Help celebrate National Poetry Month and the 25th anniversary of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project,  which collects, preserves, and promotes the poetry written about Niagara Falls. Poetry on the site ranges from 1604 to the present, includes all poetic forms, and ranges from the humorous to the erotic to the religious, powerful literary imaginings of Niagara Falls to limericks and doggerel, from the raptures of the sublimity of the falls to the despair of the despondent and suicidal, from the battles fought here to the stunters and daredevils seeking instant fame.
 
Andrew Porteus, curator of the site, will be joined by poets in a fun-filled short program including the historical significance of the poetry of Niagara Falls, and  reading some of their own poetry and some of the significant historical poems. 
 
This event will also mark the launch of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition, a juried competition with poems in any form, on the theme of Niagara Falls, (the waterfalls and/or the two cities), with a special award for the poem that best exemplifies the “Spirit of Niagara Falls.” Poems will be added to the website, and published in an anthology of Niagara poetry.
 
Paper will be provided for those inspired to write a poem on the spot,  before or during the program.
 
There will be cake!
 
Thursday April 9, 2026 at the Niagara Falls History Museum, 5810 Ferry St., Niagara Falls, Ontario, from 7-9 pm.
 
Contact aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca for more information

 

Salon of the Refused – St. Catharines

 

salon

Poetry Exchange

 

exchange

Join us for the Poetry Exchange, at the Niagara Falls Exchange, 5943 Sylvia Place, Niagara Falls, Ont., January 16, 5-9 pm. Bring along your poetry or your favourite by someone else, to read, and listen to other local poets reading their poems. Light refreshments are provided.

Realtime Notes: 24 July 2019 at 20:29 by Nick Asbury

asbury
Nick Asbury

standing under the niagara falls
trying to catch the news
in the teaspoon of a poem

 

No. 1286
#mueller  #trump  #brexit  #borisjohnson

Source:  Nick Asbury.  Realtime Notes, Volume 2: 17 August 2018 at 08:51 – 17 August 2019 at 08:39.  Asbury & Asbury, 2019

From a blog post on October 25, 2019: [Realtime Notes] “is a series of poems written in rapid response to current events, both personal and political. I write at least one a day and haven’t missed a day in two years, two months and seven days. I post them on Instagram.”

From the Irish Times May 26, 2021.  John Self.  Realtime Notes: All the News From Bad to Verse: Nick Asbury’s Poems Cover the Whole Gamut of Living Through the Past Four Years.

The Development of the Poetry Walking Tour of Niagara Falls Using Mobile App Technology by Andrew Porteus

mrp
Brock University conferred on me the degree of Master of Arts in Popular Culture at the virtual convocation ceremony held in mid-October, 2020. Part of the requirements was to complete a major research project (MRP). My MRP was the development of a poetry walking tour of Niagara Falls using mobile app technology. The tour is available for android users (iOS will be coming) – click here for the instructions for using it.

I had previously posted about the Poetry Selection Event that was part of the development of this tour. Here’s a link to that post.

In addition to developing the walking tour itself, an academic paper had to be written about the project. This paper is now in the Brock University Digital Repository and can be accessed using this link. I have included the abstract below.

Please feel free to send feedback if you use the walking tour app or read the paper.

Abstract:

The Niagara Falls Poetry Project (NFPP) has been an ongoing research-creation project for many years. In addition to being a site of poetry of place it is also a site of recovery and discovery of Niagara poetry. This MRP used social construction of technology and of literature theories as a framework to develop the Poetry Walking Tour of Niagara Falls (PWT) to extend the NFPP. Twenty-four points of interest were selected following a route along the Niagara River, passing Niagara Falls. Content analyses and close readings of the poetry on the NFPP website were conducted to preselect suitable poems to present to a panel of poets, academics, and end users at a Poetry Selection Event. Using the participatory design techniques of crowdsourcing and a modified Delphi method, the “best” poem for each of the points of interest was selected. The poem, explanatory historical and literary material, images, and multimedia were added to the Interpretours platform website, which was then used to populate the GuideTags mobile app for smartphones and tablets. The end result is a fully functional mobile app GPS guided walking tour of Niagara Falls that alerts users to points of interest that highlight the poetry and history of Niagara Falls. The role of the PWT in the local economy as a tourist attraction, particularly for the heritage and literary tourism sectors are contributions of the project