The 100-Foot Poem

T&W recently partnered with the New York City Poetry Festival, Poetry Out Loud, and Urban Word NYC to host the 12th Annual Youth Poetry Festival! The Youth Festival is an NYC Poetry Festival highlight each year, catering to toddlers, teens, and everyone in-between. T&W provided writing activities and workshops for youth, and we produced an exciting, collaborative poem—“The 100-Foot Poem”—with festival attendees of all ages! 

The 100-Foot Poem is an activity from Dave Morice’s book The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet. Beginning with the prompt “Poetry is . . .”, attendees were invited to take a strip of paper and contribute a line. Before we knew it, the poem was growing both vertically and horizontally, forming a contrapuntal of over 100 feet (poetic feet if not exactly 12 inches each . . .). You can read the poem in its entirety below. In an attempt to simulate the poem’s original, hand-crafted form, lines that were added horizontally are left justified, whereas lines that were added vertically are indented in the order they were added to the above lines. 

Read the complete 100-Foot Poem here

This was a beautiful project to see come together, and we want to thank everyone who stopped by to contribute a line! For more information about the NYC Poetry Festival, visit newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com.