Poets Onboard for Busing’s Best Behaviours

19 August 2014

Poets Onboard for Busing’s Best Behaviours

National Poetry Day is being celebrated this year with poets in residence onboard some of Auckland and Wellington’s main bus routes this Friday.

In Wellington, leading national poets have been invited by NZ Bus to perform on various Newtown, Karori, Lyall Bay, Khandallah and Seatoun routes on Friday morning.

The day coincides with the launch of NZ Bus’ etiquette campaign busbetter with the Bugbears www.busbetter.co.nz so the theme for the poets is public transport etiquette.

At NZ Bus we want to encourage everyone to be more aware and considerate of each other when travelling by bus around the city. And we thought who better to do the talking than the people who live here, our local poets. We call it ‘poetiquette’.

“Getting on buses to perform to commuters is a great way to show every day Kiwis how accessible poetry can be. There’s no need for a stage or microphone, we just need an audience every now and then. Poetry can be performed anywhere for anyone” says New Zealand Slam Poet 2012 Champion Ali Jacs.

Teaming up with poets is not new to NZ Bus having previously supported Poetry in Motion in the late ‘90s.

“Public Transport etiquette is just one way of saying that passengers on our buses should expect to have a comfortable and safe trip every time”, says NZ Bus CEO Zane Fulljames.

“We thought having cartoon characters, the Bus Bugbears, and their messages through the medium of poetry would be a fun way to get that message out there – that there are conditions of carriage we expect people to adhere to on our buses to respect the other passengers, our drivers and the actual buses,” Mr Fulljames said.

We have kick started the poetiquette campaign with Block the Way Ray.

The public is encouraged to enter their own poetiquette poems at http://busbetter.co.nz/poetry-competition and be in to win a $500 charter trip for their school, or a year’s worth of free travel on an NZ Bus service. The competition closes 3 October.

ENDS

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