Panacea

You can, optionally, add your email address if you want to be contacted when the project has completed.

Submitted!

Your line has been submitted and if approved it will appear as part of the poem in up to 3 days.

Guide

Panacea is a branching participatory poem that lets you add a line from 7 to 49 characters to a line that already exists in the poem.

How to add a line

If a line can have another line added to it, the line will turn red when you hover over it and it will allow you to click on it. Clicking on the line will bring up the line submission form. Lines will allow additional lines added until it has 7 published lines branching from it.

How to read the poem

As a branching poem, you can read the whole poem by zooming in and out (by scrolling) and by dragging. You can drag the poem by clicking down on one of the cities and moving the pointer.

Alternatively, by selecting ‘read’ you can read a section of the poem that ends at any one of the lines. This randomly selects a line and shows you a section of the poem that goes back to the first line. As the poem grows longer so will these selections.

Now it
is home we can spend
some
time together.

As the world is re-shaped by COVID-19, we look for new was to connect and create poetry with our communities.

This participatory poetry experiment – created in collaboration with Benjamin Laird – does not attempt to transmute metal into gold. Panacea is a canape/a paen/a pecan/a cape/a nape/a nap/a pen. Through the alchemy of coding and your collective responses - spreading seven words and up to seven lines at a time – Panacea is a branching out into the possibility of connectivity in a world increasingly at odds with itself.

Building on the WHITBOAM chain poetry project by Canadian poet Sachiko Murakami and Benjamin’s body of work, we invite everyone to add their own seven word poetic salve responding to a previous line, all originating from the source prompt Now it is home we can …