All things come to an end – good, bad or indifferent! For example, summer … and Instagram accounts!
While the FEELed Lab usually takes a break for the summer, we ended this season off with another Craft-a-strophe! session [ from craft: making, doing + strophe: part of a poem – in other words, where crafting, poetry, and climate change come together.] The theme of this edition of Craft-a-strophe was crowd-sourcing community.
As always, the session was grounded in collective and spontaneous readings from poems we had gathered that describe different kinds of community we are committed to, and how we sustain it:
Eunice Andrada’s poem “Echolocation” reminds us that these communities are diverse:
New arrivals stumble into the field / human and non human tones mingling –
and so Ada Limon asks in “Dead Stars”:
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
As the entirety of June Jordan’s “Calling on All Silent Minorities” implores us:
HEY
C’MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET
After all, as Erin Robinsong notes in Feral Prayer:
The trash of civilization is what I love.
We disassembled the poems to create new versions – tiny poems, to fit on the surfaces of buttons and postcards:
Screenprinting was also on the agenda, but as we got carried away with button-poetry, those tasks were reassigned to a sunny backyard afternoon:
This craft-a-strophe also had a distinct purpose! The FEELed Lab is leaving Instragram and will be cultivating our newsletter space as our primary form of communication. To say thank you to current and future subscribers, we would like to send you some Craft-a-strophe merch as a small thank you!
More info here:
[Or copy the URL link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdcQ_dF1jn233DJnX87BGQjYINMaBjxw4umBMTiS6Vf-ROaew/viewform?usp=header ]
The FEELed lab 