Listener Poet Jess Skyleson, Cohort 13 alum, recently brought their practice of listening and creating sound poetry to the Boston edition of the Figment Project, an art festival focused on interactive artwork and audience participation. There Jess presented "The Write Crowd," a large-scale poetry project designed to create a crowd-sourced audio poem. Drawing from their own past published poetry, Jess built a word board of random words/phrases and invited participants to select one, then recorded each person speaking their selection aloud.
Nearly 300 attendees joined in, including (quite unexpectedly!) fellow Listener Poet Monica Storss of Cohort 10, who snapped a photo with Jess at the festival. Afterwards, Jess brought all of the audio recordings together, in the order each word was selected, to create one surprisingly cohesive poem.
Spoken in a chorus of 279 voices, where none of the participants knew which word would be selected before or after their own, the crowd-sourced poem is a testament to the power of community creativity, random chance, and our collective subconscious: allowing us share and re-discover our words anew. You can learn more about the project and listen to the final poem by clicking the button to visit Jess's website.