The Write Crowd

This crowdsourced poem was created during Boston's Figment Project participatory art festival, held in Somerville, Massachusetts on July 25th 2026. It is built directly from the input of nearly 300 attendees.

Each participant selected a word or phrase from the board (options drawn from my own poems) and was recorded reading it aloud.  The new poem thus unfolds from these individual decisions, made without knowledge of what word/phrase was recorded before or after their choice. It is read in a patchwork of voices, in exactly the order each word was selected and recorded by the participants.

Together we collaborated through  a network of countless choices, chances, and crossed paths, revealing unexpected connections and insights. As we transform the individual words of my past, our new joint poem demonstrates the creative power of community, and the mysteries of our collective subconscious to capture hidden meanings within our shared experiences.