Words in Place

Words in Place was a collaborative public poetry project based on a simple premise: that words not only reflect, but actually create the world around us.

Each iteration began the same way: a poet chose a public place they loved, I interviewed them there about their poetics and relationship to that place, and they wrote a poem in response. I then translated the poem into a visual and verbal piece that temporarily inhabited the chosen space — protest signs, chalk stencils on pavement, paper strips wound through birch trees, painted wooden cubes. The form changed with each poet and each place.

Collaborating poets included Kaia Sand, Sara Guest, Melissa Poulin, Alicia Cohen, and Allison Cobb, among others. Locations spanned Portland — the Park Blocks, Mount Tabor, Jamison Square, Harney City Park, the Willamette riverbank — and culminated in a showing at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

One iteration became a book. For her poem “She Had Her Own Reason for Participating,” poet Kaia Sand drew language from Portland Police Bureau surveillance files kept on activist groups during the 1970s and 80s — extracting every sentence that began with the word “she.” I brought those lines back into the public, on protest signs, at night, at the beginning and ending points of the 1978 Women’s Nightwatch Flashlight March. Strangers joined in. Kaia and I then made a collaborative book about the project, exhibited at a public library near the route of the march.

The project’s original website was later hacked and destroyed. This page is its remnant.