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text walking (on Main Street)

On April 7th, 2014 I decided to head over to Main Street (in Vancouver) to do some text walking. For a few hours I slowly walked along Main, from Broadway towards 28th Street, up the west side of the street and then back down along the east side of the street, gathering words and pieces of text by photographing them with my phone. I didn’t really head out with the intention of creating a video or of even writing a poem. But while I was walking I could hear and feel lines and phrases taking shape. This led me to wondering if I might be able to write a poem with some of the words that I was gathering.

Once back home, I decided to try seeing if I could build a video piece that might convey a sense of my walking and path. I worked with the words in the order in which they appeared on my route. As I started writing I also wanted to see if I could write a piece using only the words that I found and photographed. In the end though, for this writing experiment, I allowed myself a few minor tweaks (a ‘d’ here, an ‘s’ there and an additional ‘the’, ‘with’, and ‘my’) but only because they seemed necessary for this poem.

(April 2014)

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