February Happening: Poemflowers!

Check out this fabulous image of a paper flower workshop from 1765 by
Robert Benard nach G. R. Lucolle. This is totally what the Museum will
look like while we're preparing for Poemflowers: A Happening.
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Here at the Museum we regard Valentine's Day with a great deal of suspicion. Now, we do like love. Love is wonderful. But Valentine's Day is a stressful, demeaning, often dispiriting holiday for many people, and we don't like that at all.

So we're going to hack your heart day. Just a little bit.

Imagine that you, dear reader, are walking down the street and someone hands you a flower. And that flower turns out to be made out of a poem. A love poem. A love poem for you, the unknown passer-by. Because we all fall in love with strangers sometime. Because you deserve a love poem just for being part of the lonely and glorious and painful world we're all falling in and out of love with all the time.

In the days leading up to the 14th, we're asking all the talented people we know to write love poems for strangers. We're going to take those poems and we're going to turn them into paper flowers. And we're going to hand them out by the bucketload to strangers in the street on February 14th.

And we'd love it if you helped. Interested in taking part in Poemflowers: A Happening? Write a love poem to a stranger and email it to us here on or before February 6th and we'll print it out, fold it up, and give it away. We'll also be posting paper-flower-folding tutorials on our Facebook page in coming days, and if you want make your own flowers and get dressed up and give gifts to strangers too, wherever you happen to be, why, we'd be honored to have you join us. (Let us know if you're near our base in San Francisco and we'll make sure you can come along with us!)

We don't hate Valentine's Day. We just hate how many people don't get to celebrate or feel celebrated. So we're coming out to show you some love -- yes you, the stranger, the unknown, the face in the crowd, the person we smile at on the train, the person we're too nervous to smile at on the train. So if someone hands you a flower on the 14th, take it. Keep it. Enjoy it. Because we're a little in love with you.