the neighborhood poetry project (2018)
This experimental poetry/walking workshop explored poetry as a way of listening to places, from cities to favorite places in the woods. Participants worked together to write and design a book of poems about specific places in the Pape-Danforth neighbourhood. The workshop will culminated in a walking tour of the chosen sites on April 28, 2018.
This text is part of the resulting publication (available here: front / back)
“This is an invitation.
These poems were created during the course of a two-week workshop at the Pape branch of the Toronto Public Library called “Listening to Place: The Neighborhood Poetry Project." This workshop, held in April of 2018, is a a collective exploration into how poetry might offer a mode of deep listening to place. Could the process of writing poetry open up alternative ways of being in conversation the places we dwell, in the context of ongoing settler-colonialism?
The Neighborhood Poetry Project also emerged from my own belief that all places deserve art and culture that reflect and celebrate their specificity. Often descriptions of neighborhoods and places emerge as part of the waves of gentrification, development, or tourism which also herald displacement...but what of the other ways we can persistently engage, think, honor, celebrate, grieve, archive, and listen to places in their particularity?
During the first workshop, we shared stories about places and read Archer Pechawis’ poem “Bones,” which invites the reader to listen: “the bones of T’karonto listen to us / waiting for the first stroke of the Clock of the Long Now / waiting for us to listen.” We asked how we might listen to the bones of this city, “hidden under time and ambition / the blind freight of generations?" In the second workshop, inspired by the prompts (included here), we wrote in places within a 10 minute radius of the Pape library (by foot). These, plus a later solicited submission about The Only Café, are the resulting poems.
The workshop concluded with a reading/walking tour on April 28, 2018 as part of the Toronto Public Library’s “Poetry Weekend.” But this is not the end--this is an invitation!
If you’re inspired by this small publication, please feel welcome to host your own Neighborhood Poetry Project and/or to get in touch!”
This project was supported by the Toronto Public Library.