Mayor promotes poetry at meeting

Yorkton Mayor Bob Maloney showed Monday he accepted the Mayor's Poetry City Challenge.

Initiated in Regina, the challenge is for participating communities to have a poet from your community read a poem at the start of your Council meeting in March or April. Thirty communities from Victoria to Cornerbrook took part in the first challenge.

"The purpose is to recognize UNESCO's World Poetry Day on March 21, and National Poetry Month, which is celebrated in April in both Canada and the United States. This initiative is a celebration of poetry, writing, small presses and the contribution of poets and all writers to the cultural life in our communities," said Maloney at the regular meeting of Yorkton Council.

As a result Maloney asked Joyce Bagley to help mark the event.

"Bagley is a member of the Saskatchewan Writer's Guild and was co-ordinator of the Parkland Writers' Alliance in Yorkton for over twenty years. She wrote children's poems for a CTV production, "Poetree and Friends" and won a Saskatchewan Writers' Guild contest for her children's poems. She also won an award from "Inscribe" for religious poetry. Joyce is a volunteer for the literacy program in Yorkton. She will read one of her poems that was published in the Saskatchewan publication, "Folklore"," offered Maloney.