asking to take (a)part to take
Such participatory, relational and investigative literary and art works as Kate Schapira’s Town, C. D. Wright and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self, the work of Krzystof Wodiczko, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bhanu Kapil got me thinking about including other voices in my own literary "voice." When founding director Lizzie Zucker Saltz told me about the upcoming “Taking Part” exhibit at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Arts (ATHICA) in Athens, GA, where I lived at the time, it got me acting. Taking my cue from Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, from which I took the idea of a questionnaire, I wrote a set of questions. The first two questions were suggested to me by Michael Lease's and Brian Hitselberger's pieces in the "Taking Part" show and the rest followed by association from those first two.
I emailed these questions to friends, colleagues and acquaintances; I placed a binder of them in the gallery space at ATHICA for people to fill out; I started this website to cull further responses; I waited and wait for answers. I hope you’ll offer me your own on the (questions) page of this site.
To all those who have and will entrust me with their responses, thank you for your generosity.
My plan is to use your answers in part or whole, as they come or as I adapt, collage, and transform them, and my writing in response to the questions and others' answers. My plan, as always, is to see what happens as the writing unfolds.
Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of the poetry collection Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink 2013). His poems have been published in Boston Review, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, EOAGH, Five Fingers Review, Marco Polo Arts Mag, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Sonora Review, Word For/Word and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown University, is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Georgia, and serves as an associate editor for Tarpaulin Sky magazine. He flits about Twitter as @TodEdge, and his general website is MichaelTodEdgerton.blogspot.com.