(image from the official Julius Meinl website)

There are certain times of the year when we celebrate coffee. There’s the International Coffee Day, for example, which takes place on October the 1st every year. There are the many international Barista championships, the International Queen of Coffee Beauty Pageant…and then there’s the PayWithAPoem initiative.

As someone who loves both coffee and poetry, I feel the need to write an entire blog post dedicated to this event.

What is the PayWithAPoem initiative?

This global event was initiated in 2015 by Austrian coffee manufacturer and retailer Julius Meinl in honor of World Poetry Day. Basically, on March 21 of every year, you can step into participating shops and pay for your coffee with an original poem.

The official website of Julius Meinl provides resources for this initiative (the one they made for 2016 is here). The hashtags “#PayWithAPoem” and “#PoetryForChange” are often used on social media by poets and shops to indicate their participation.

Which Philippine shops participated in this year’s PayWithaPoem initiative?

Since the official map of participating shops on the Meinl website didn’t yield any hits for the Philippines, I had to turn to Google.

In a country like the ours, where many small and medium-sized businesses don’t have a strong social media presence, Google is admittedly not the most reliable tool for compiling resources. However, it felt like the only tool I had at my disposal. That, and Tagboard, which helped me crawl through social media sites via hashtags.

My feeble cyber-detective skills were severely tested, and on World Poetry Day itself, my research turned up only 3 names:

• The Bunny Baker
• Kamuning Bakery (there was also a March 19 article on GMA-7 news advertising Kamuning Bakery’s participation)
• The Warrior Poet Art Cafe

I use the term “shops” and not “cafes” or “coffee houses” because of course you don’t have to be a cafe or a specialty coffee shop to participate. Also, I wouldn’t strictly classify Kamuning Bakery as a cafe. It is, in fact, a local culinary institution, having been around for 77 years.

Of the three shops listed, only Kamuning Bakery posted updates about patrons’ contributions to World Poetry Day – leading one to wonder how successful it was at the other cafes mentioned. It seems like it was a good day for Kamuning Bakery, however! Lots of lovely contributions shared on their Facebook page, for example:

Why Would Philippine shops want to participate?

That’s a good question. I guess one way to find out is to ask the establishments that participated, and the ones that knew about it but chose not to participate. I may get back to you later on this.

Speaking for myself, as a coffee-lover who loves literature: I want more people to see for themselves how coffee can fuel the creative writing spirit. I want more people in my very literate country to participate in World Poetry Day, and I want more shops to offer an incentive for that!

If you know of other shops located in the Philippines that participated in the PayWithAPoem initiative, either this year or in the past year (2015, when the movement began), please let me know in a comment on this post!