You could call it poetic licence. It took a young designer with little interest in rhyme or verse to put together a project aimed at weaving poetry into our everyday routines.
Until recently, Millie Chiu Yuet-ying regarded poetry as an irrelevant art form: it was either too abstract or 'too far away from real life'. But she found sudden insight, Chiu says, while watching a movie scene where a Parisian beggar was selling poems to passers-by.
'I realised how much handicraft and poetry have in common. Poems are like a piece of the writer's emotion: joy or sadness lingers in the words. It's the same with my bags - every stitch reveals my thoughts and feelings,' says Chiu, a creative media graduate.
She hit upon a collaborative exhibition to demonstrate how closely they were related. Poets contributing to the event would be paired with designers, who would create items inspired by the poems.
Together with her three partners at Totit, a collective selling hand-painted tote bags online, Chiu recruited a poet friend, Lau Chi-wan, and then the editors of the Chinese literary journal, Fleurs des Lettres.
The result is Poetic Life, a three-day exhibition to be staged over the Easter weekend, which will feature the work of 11 poets - mostly young writers such as Yiu Sheung-yee, Luk Wing-yu and Jennifer Joyce Ngo - and an equal number of craft or design outfits including Black Sheep Barn and Loso.