Walt Whitman, in the preface to Leaves of Grass, wrote, “This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”
What might ‘a great poem’ like Whitman’s look like? To respond to this question, I thought about the work of poets in the concrete poetry movement of the mid-20th century, and the screenprints of Corita Kent. But I also thought about the ‘great poem’ that is our ‘very flesh’ as a poem that happens in public. This made me think of placards carried in demonstrations, posters made by French students in 1968, and the work of artists like Glenn Ligon and Dread Scott.
A ‘great poem’, I decided, would be something that would transform us—as lookers, thinkers, makers, people being together in public and private spaces. Made of language, but also made to be seen, teaching us to read newly. Most of all, it would have to be something we could make together, which would have no single author.
In 2024 I began working with groups of people in Dublin (IE) and throughout the US to produce multi-layer screenprints for public installation. The prints were produced through a workshop that combined concrete poetry, work by Corita Kent and other artists, and paper stencil screenprinting. Participants gathered or suggested language from their everyday lives and, when applicable, their specialist fields. This language was used to make stencils for printing with. Prints that were produced by each group traveled to other groups, who added new layers.
Some of the prints produced in 2024 and the first half of 2025 were installed in Blackpitts, Dublin 8, in June 2025 in a performance (with Jeanne Tiehen) called “You Are Not Alone”.
