To mark the one-month anniversary of the killing of Minnesota poet Renée Good and others, poets from all around California — including Petaluma’s Terry Ehret and other writers from the Bay Area’s 16 Rivers Press — will join together today in front of the state capitol building in Sacramento to take turns reading and reciting pieces of injustice-themed poetry.

According to a flyer being distributed as a call to poets all over to join in, the short readings — just two to three lines of poetry per poet — will be followed by “a 15-second-long group barbaric yawp.” Beginning at 10 a.m. on the west side of the capital, the four-hour action will end at 2 p.m.

In addition to Ehret and her colleagues at 16 Rivers, which is sponsoring the event, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick is also expected to participate in the vigil, along with an estimated 300 other California poets and authors.

These will include, according to a press release from 16 Rivers Press, writers who are “young, old, famous, obscure,” noting that the current state poet laureate will be joined by “county laureates, teen laureates, slam poets, spoken word artists, writers and friends.”

The event, which has been dubbed “A Courage of Poets,” is being described as a collective poem.

“Linking hands, poets and writers will offer our loud, one after the other, two to three lines of poetry in remembrance and in honor of Renée Good, Keith Porter, Jr., Silverio Villegas González and other individuals often invisible to the public and the media, who’ve been killed on the streets by ICE or in ICE custody,” states the press release.

The lines the poets speak will be of the reader’s own choosing. Participants are asked to deliver words that address grief, kindness, rage, resilience, despair, hope and joy, along with “ideas that champion diversity, racial justice, the environment, free speech and the Constitution.”

In calling the event “A Courage of Poets,” the organizers say they are adopting author Brené Brown’s assertion that courage “originally meant to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”

In naming the mass reading of poetry “A Courage of Poets,” the group is using the word as a collective noun, as in “a flock of birds.”

Elaborating on this in a press release from 16 Rivers Press, organizers say the name of the action will “emphasize the courage called for in speaking out against oppression.”