On this day in ...... 2011 (today), is celebrated the 11th annual World Poetry Day, the date having been set aside in November 1999 by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The day is set aside to mark "the important role of poetry in the arts and in cultures throughout the world and over time," "to promote the efforts of small publishers with regard to publishing poetry," and to foster "a return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, as well as strengthening the association between poetry and other forms of expression, such as dance, music, and painting." It's a good day to read aloud a work by Eavan Boland, the Dublin-born daughter of a diplomat. (credit for above right photo of Boland; credit for below left photo (c) Graham Horn) A day to ponder, perhaps, the feminist message in Boland's The Dolls Museum in Dublin. Or to hear human rights questions of memory and forgetting evoked in her poem That the Science of Cartography is Limited, whose words include these:
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
