City of Belmont
Home Menu"...to invite poetry back in your life, all you need to do is pay attention, listen, and keep an open heart."
- Monica Korde, Belmont Poet Laureate, 2021-2024
Project POETRY 360
April 2025 Initiatives
Join us for an enriching evening with California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick and Belmont Poet Laureate Monica Korde.
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An Invitation from Belmont Poet Laureate Monica Korde
Poetry not only matters, but it is profoundly essential to our everyday lives. Why, you ask? Because it has the unique ability to wake us up to life in the most unexpected, miraculous, and humblest of ways. It may not solve our problems, but it can help us find order in chaos, heal us in times of grief, and offer us advice to thrive. In a single moment, poetry can connect us to others and to ourselves, transcending boundaries of space and time. And to invite poetry back in your life, all you need to do is pay attention, listen, and keep an open heart.
Project POETRY 360 aims to offer an immersive experience to reach everyone while cultivating the concept of having poetry all around us. I like to believe that if you haven’t fallen in love with poetry yet, you haven’t found the right poem yet! Verse in the form of written word and spoken word can truly awaken wonder and my thought behind this initiative is to invite every child, youth, and adult to befriend poetry, to fall in love with it, and to rediscover themselves by connecting with it.
This community-wide initiative will run throughout my laureateship tenure and will act as a gathering ground for poets as well as non-poets, reminding us of the possibilities poetry can hold. I endeavor to offer a variety of sub-projects, public readings, and arts and culture events all through my term and also bring special features during the National Poetry Month under this initiative, designed to nurture the connection between poetry and people.
Project POETRY 360 was launched in April 2022’s National Poetry Month, announcing two special sub-projects in collaboration with Belmont Parks and Recreation and the Belmont Library. Community gatherings, poetry readings, and a host of other literary and cultural events were also offered throughout the month. The original goal of my initiative was to build community through poetry, and it has certainly done that. As I move forward, the idea is to continue to bring visibility to poetry and to form a new canon of poets and poetry lovers around us.
I look at Project POETRY 360 as the bridge that connects each of us no matter where we come from or how different we are, and I hope that it enables the passage of ideas, thoughts, and words honoring the literary arts and celebrating diverse voices within our community.
To collaborate or connect, please contact me at monicakorde@gmail.com.
Poetry in Our Community (Past Initiatives, 2022-2024)
The following efforts were spearheaded by Monica Korde, Poet Laureate of Belmont (2021-2024), to make poetry more accessible to our community. Many dedicated initiatives occurred as part of her keystone "Project POETRY 360".