Artist Statement
What Most Vividly (Your Roots, Your Branches: What Flowering Trees) is a community-oriented choral work of a relational text art installation capped off by a poetry performance. Several hundred one-foot square panels are painted and hung from the canopy of trees along a stretch of the BeltLine, exhibiting questions with hanging permanent markers parallel to the panels for people to transcribe their response. I’m looking to you for answers. I’m asking you to take a part, to take apart the part: mine, yours, ours. “What Most Vividly” is a participatory writing project that adapts your answers with my own into collage poems and lyric essays meditating on fundamental questions about our relations to one another and to ourselves, about what makes a life. Please use the pens provided to offer your own responses for use in this project. For more information, links to published pieces, and a gallery of previous responses please visit WhatMostVividly.com. Please attend my reading from the work I will produce with your responses at 2:30pm, Nov 4 on the Reynoldstown stage at 900 Memorial Drive. Thank you for taking part.
Artist Bio
Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Vitreous Hide. His poems have previously appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, New American Writing, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University and a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. He has served as an editorial assistant at The Georgia Review, and is currently an associate editor with Tarpaulin Sky magazine.