Humboldt Park Inspires Poetry
West Side
The Chicago 77 is a collage poem made from the 77 community areas of Chicago. The work is comprised of 77 lines of text handwritten on 77 handmade sheets of paper, each page containing object inclusions from the streets of its corresponding neighborhood. Fatimah Asghar, Krista Franklin, Fo Wilson, and Jamila Woods gathered objects and one line of found text from each of Chicago’s 77 community areas. Margaret Mahan and Drew Matott made the paper, encasing the objects in the pulp. Liz Isakson-Dado transcribed the text to paper. The final product, The Chicago 77, is at once a found poem, exquisite corpse, and artist’s book.
The genesis of The Chicago 77 arose from another artist’s book, The World Record, Autograph Edition, created for the Southbank Centre in London on the occasion of its Poetry Parnassus. As indicated by its title, The World Record gathered poems from poets around the globe into a single, unique edition handwritten by the poets on handmade paper containing pulp from the five Olympic continents. A condition of the exhibition at the Poetry Foundation was that a new work be created in extension and response to The World Record. From this simple mandate, The Chicago 77 was born.
The Poetry Foundation explained its mission for the project:
When the project started in 2012, Chicago was dealing with controversial public school and library closures. We wanted this project to showcase the breadth of our city, to encompass the variety of experience within its unique, vast geographic areas. We were conscious of the fact that many of Chicago’s communities were unknown to those who did not reside in them. By focusing on found objects and text from each of the 77 community areas, we hoped to capture and communicate a bit of our city’s sensual realities.
