Now it
is home we can spend
some
time together.
~ Laura Jean McKay from 'The Animals in That Country'
As the world was re-shaped by COVID-19, we looked for new ways to connect and create poetry with our communities.
Panacea is a participatory poetry experiment created in collaboration with Benjamin Laird. Panacea is a canape/a paen/a pecan/a cape/a nape/a nap/a pen. It does not attempt to transmute metal into gold.
Through the alchemy of coding and 218 collective responses, Panacea branched out into the possibility of connectivity in a world increasingly at odds with itself, during 2020. Poets, accountants, scaffolders, students, tailors and teachers (everyone, really!) were invited to add their seven-word poems, all originating from the source prompt: Now it is home, we can…
Footnote: Panacea builds on the WHITBOAM chain poetry project by Canadian poet, Sachiko Murakami and Benjamin’s body of work.
