Science Museum Late/Briefing/Crowd-sourcing Found Poetry

Location: Back of media café/exhibition area next to media café (2nd floor)

Breakdown of activity: Each session should last 30 minutes.

For the first 5 minutes, our MC (Martin Poulter) will explain the activity and assign visitors to tables.

Each table creates a collaborative poem from the fragments available to them.

At 20 minutes, the poems are collected by volunteers and taken to the Science Museum actor. She will spend 5 minutes preparing the poems whilst the MC talks a bit about Wikipedia. She then declaims the created poems to the crowd.

There will then be a 10 minute gap between sessions while we get things ready for the next session.

Visitors can drop in at any point, although there may come a point when the session has filled up and they should wait for the subsequent session.

Volunteers:

• Explain the activity to new people joining the groups
• Ensure everyone is involved
• Make sure materials are all left in some order
• Take photos of people’s poems (tbc)
• Collect name and email addresses of people who want their poem sent to them

Background: The idea of found poetry is not ours – this activity is similar to fridge magnets (see Dave Gorman’s Found Poems online for an example). Here we have printed bizarre or interesting Wikipedia articles and separated the article (or the first page if longer than an A3 page) into little phrases that the participants can then use to create a poem.

The articles:

• Barry Larkin (Prankster)
• Chubby bunny
• The Game (mind game)
• Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
• Toilet paper orientation