news | Monday November 26, 2012

GET ME OUT OF HERE

You’re invited to participate in the writing of GET ME OUT OF HERE. A project being produced by Sachiko Murakami. Information on how to be a part of her project is below.

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I have been writing about airports. Or, rather, I have been reading about airports, and finding it difficult to write about them. I find it especially difficult to stay present enough while in an airport to notice anything to write about. Not even carrying around 50 Things To Spot at the Airport is enough to keep me present. This difficulty has given rise to a lot of questions about writing for me, mostly about poetic inspiration. Meanwhile, as you may know, I’ve become more and more interested in the practice of community-built poetry (see: Projectrebuild.ca, Powellstreethenko.ca).

So, here’s the experiment: I’m crowd-sourcing inspiration. I need your help to write these poems.

This project will consist of two parts:

1. To build the manuscript: I need 100 observations/impressions/field notes of things, events, people, feelings, or anything that arises to catch the mind in an airport – in one sentence. If you are going to be in an airport in the next three months, I want your observations! These observations need not be “poetic”. They need only be one line. I will then write a poem in response, using your line as an epigraph. This will form the basis of a poetry manuscript.

There are only a few rules of this game: that you actually – go – to an airport and make an observation (i.e. this will be a documentation of airports from November 23 2012 – February 28 2013, not of airports that you have experienced in the past); that you limit the observations you send to me to one per airport (up to two per trip! – at arrivals and departures); and that I must write a poem in response to every observation I receive (up to 100) – the idea being that I don’t get to pick and choose my sources of inspiration.

2. I will also use, with each person’s permission, the lines I receive in an online iteration of this project, akin to Project Rebuild.

Should you wish to participate, please send me your line in a Facebook message or in an email (sachiko.murakami@gmail.com), along with the date and airport in which you wrote the line.

Unfortunately, I can’t pay you for your observations (this being poetry, and all). Should this project become a book, I will of course gift you a copy.

Participation is open to anyone. Please forward to anyone you might think would be interested.