Poem for Rent

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poem for rent in Qiryat Chaim, Israel

Poem for Rent is a nonprofit project for arts distribution. This is done mainly by posting poems on bulletin boards, in the same format like standard "house for rent" posts, with several detachable tear-offs in the bottom. One difference is that instead of a telephone number, quotes from the poem are written on the tear-offs. This way, anyone who passes by can read the poem and pick a tear-off with a quote he liked from the poem.

[edit] History

The first poems for rent were posted in Israel during October 2005. One of those was documented in the Hebrew creation site Tzura [1]. Those were poems of famous Israeli poets such as Yehuda Amichai and Nathan Zach, as well as poems of the Polish poet, Nobel Prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska. During 2006, the concept expanded to other types of arts, such as painting for rent and comics for rent. By the same time, the project has also expanded geographically: poems for rent appeared also in Switzerland and The Netherlands. In its summer 2006 issue, the Dutch poetry magazine "Awater" dedicated an article to the project, titled "Wat Bezielt" (What Inspires). [2]