When I first came up with the idea for Ring Ring Poetry, I imagined March and April, the beginning of spring in Minnesota. People just itching to get out and into the first nice days of spring. 2013 was not about to be one of those springs.

It stayed incredibly cold much further into March than I was expecting, but luckily, I’d already rescheduled the project from April to May and June. Now that the winter weather is finally reluctantly loosing its grip on Minneapolis and Saint Paul, we are stumbling from our cars and homes bewilderedly, some of us overeager in t-shirts in twenty degree weather, some of us a month behind, thinking that since it’s finally beginning to melt it must still be March.

But here we are, in early April, National Poetry Month in full gear, beautiful and brutal and filthy and stunning words as surprising as the things relinquished by the receding snow. (Just this afternoon I discovered I’d left my sprinkler out next to the garden the whole winter… here’s hoping it’s not so rusted it doesn’t work.) I’m excited to be unveiling this website, and excited that my project is coming to fruition. I hope that when May rolls around, you’ll find yourself standing somewhere in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, with your phone to your ear, listening to a poem written for that very place by a poet you may or may not have ever heard of. Maybe you’ll find yourself on your own street, maybe somewhere you’d never been before and had no idea existed.

I’m going to do the slow unveiling during the course of April. Some of my VERVE cohort (fellow spoken word grant winners through Intermedia Arts) have leapt at this opportunity, Coffee House Press has put me in contact with a few of their poets, a Greywolf Press Poet, and some poets I won’t put in any boxes just yet. I will be doing a number of the poems, including the first poem on May 2nd. I look forward to our coming months together, Twin Cities.

-Cole