Every day, streams of changes: networks in time, place, process in the ‘snapshots project’

Abstract

This essay examines an email poetry project, the Snapshots Project, as an example of poetries that work with dailiness as a form of serial associative writing. Using responses to a survey of some of the participants and some examples of poems written for the project, I explore the various ways poets can experiment with dailiness in their writing and the ways they interpret ‘the moment’ variously, from the report, the description and the anecdote, through a range of more formal linguistic preferences. Time and location markers attached to the email posts provided a kind of mapping or network for these poems. Many respondents noted the project created both a sense of communality, of network, by providing a long view of how a day unfolded across longitudes and latitudes, and a venue for responsiveness.