The March Hare is a former poetry festival in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and was the largest poetry festival in Atlantic Canada prior to 2018. It started in 1987 or 1988 as an evening of poetry and entertainment at the Blomidon Golf and Country Club in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, designed to appeal to a general audience. The March Hare takes its name from the character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. According to Rex Brown, the name is also intended as a pun on the words here (celebrating a sense of place) and hear (since its focus is the spoken word).
The Hare took place in March each year. Loosely associated with the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University through the leadership of poet-organizer Al Pittman and the involvement of other writers who taught at Grenfell, the Hare was equally the brain-child of teacher Rex Brown and club manager George Daniels.
Although still anchored in Corner Brook, each year, the March Hare travelled to St. John's and Gander, Newfoundland. The event also took place in Toronto, Ontario, and other venues, provincial, national and international. In 2007, The March Hare visited seven centres in Ireland, including Dublin and Waterford. In 2011, March Hares were put off in Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The March Hare featured a plethora of authors, from Corner Brook (and Newfoundland) and from outside the province (and outside of Canada).
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “March Hare (festival)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
March Hare is poetry festival named after the character in Carroll's book, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. 1
The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. 1