Hi! Last year, I worked studying place naming and is significance in the American landscape with a research project at MIT. I started using visual poetry to teach workshops about these issues several months ago, and am now formalizing that work into this little project.
The Spatial Poetry Project hopes to provide workshops, teaching material, research and other resources for those who want to learn more about naming and language in the landscape. It is my hope to use poetry to introduce people to issues of place naming, and to use poetry to allow people to imagine new language for their geographies. The names of the places around us hold legacies, and to reimagine a new name for the place we live in is to reimagine our relationship to territory and belonging.
I believe in the right of local residents to decide what the places they live in are called and what they themselves are called. Renaming may not always be the solution, but hopefully these workshops help us better understand the ways this landscape and this country have been constructed.
We plan to have few events each year. To stay updated on workshops, sign up for email updates below. I hope poets, writers, artists, librarians, mapmakers and others will consider taking part!
-Hua Xi
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