Poetry cans project - redux

These are some of the decorated labels for the tins of food that we collected to offer for the "Harvest of Hope" campaign. The food and gifts collected were to be distributed to migrant farmworker families who are temporarily based in the north Texas area. (Some of these families, I was told, live in their automobiles, and have few resources.)

I started the Poetry cans project back in 2000 or so as a way to offer poetry to working folks who may not have the means to buy poetry books or visit libraries. At Isla Mujeres (off the coast of Cancun, in Mexico), me and about six other women poets purchased cans of food and wrote poetic verses on labels we taped over the original product labels. Afterwards, we left the finished cans in the zocalo (central square) for folks to take as they chose.