About two months ago, in November 2006, one of the largest Finnish diary manufacturers Valio rolled out a series of milk containers with poems printed on the sides of eight different cartons each carrying a different milk product and a different poem. Valio has commissioned six contemporary Finnish poets, from already established to promising young talent and even a Finnish rock-star poet, to write short poetry suitable for milk containers.

All in all 18 poems (three by each poet) will be published in this unique way on hundreds of millions of milk cartons. It’s a great way to bring poetry closer to people. If you’re living outside of Finland you can still enjoy these poems and wonderful lucky cows on Valio’s milk pages, where you can also listen to each poem and print it out as it appears on the carton.

This great idea of popularizing art is not the first conceived by Valio. In the late 2005 they have commissioned several contemporary visual arts artists who were asked to come up with imagery for their milk cartons.

I really enjoy such campaigns as they bring life to everyday items we might not even notice anymore. Every time I grab milk from the fridge, I check whose poem is on the carton and read it even though I am not really a big poetry fan.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Art, Culture, Finland, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.