Community Poem Project

1. Opening Prompt (choose one or create your own) 

Invite each person to write a single line responding to a shared prompt. Examples: 

• What truth does this community need right now? 

• What does freedom taste like today? 

• What is the question you carry but rarely speak aloud? 

• What would you want someone a generation from now to know about this moment? 

• What do you refuse to forget? 

Every answer becomes a line. No line is too plain, too personal, or too wild. This part can be anonymous or named, depending on group comfort. 

2. Line Gathering 

All lines are collected in a central place—paper, board, wall, or shared document—so the whole group can see the texture of the voices. 

Encourage participants to read the lines to themselves and to each other. Let patterns, echoes, tensions, and surprises emerge. 

3. Collective Shaping 

The group now becomes an editorial collective. Offer the following steps: 

a. Identify Themes 

As a group, name 3–6 emergent themes, images, or emotional currents running the lines. No theme is imposed from above. The group names what it sees. Examples: 

• survival 

• joy 

• hunger 

• grief 

• cityheat 

• refusal 

• tenderness 

• future 

b. Sort + Sequence 

Participants help group the lines loosely around themes, images, or narrative movement. This is not about perfection. It’s about witnessing how the group wants the poem to breathe. 

c. Decide the Form 

The group chooses a form. Encourage experimentation. Some examples: 

• a long poem with stanzas 

• a braided poem with repeating refrains 

• a chorus-and-solo structure 

• a circular poem (the last line returns to the first) 

• a call-and-response 

d. Make Choices Together 

Facilitator asks: 

• Which lines want to open the poem? 

• Which lines demand the final word? 

• Where do the contradictions belong? 

• Where does breath belong? 

• What tension should remain unresolved? 

Consensus is not required; democratic process is. Majority voting or gentle facilitation can help the group decide. 

4. Title the Poem 

The group proposes titles. Take at least five suggestions; vote or combine. Often, the title emerges from a line in the poem. Let it come from the people. 

5. Read Aloud 

Read the poem together—one voice, or many voices passing lines around the circle. This is the heart of the work. This is where the poem becomes communal breath. 

6. Optional Extensions 

Public Sharing 

Groups may present the poem: 

• on posters 

• in community newsletters 

• projected during events 

• as a performance 

• as a mural 

• as a recorded audio piece 

• in the classroom or community archive 

Reflective Free-write 

Ten-minute optional write: What did collective authorship teach today that solitary writing could not?

Ongoing Installation 

In community spaces, the poem can remain open and participants may add lines over weeks or months, creating a living text. 

Assessment (if used in a classroom) 

Evaluation focuses on: 

• participation and presence 

• engagement in collective process 

• care taken with others’ words 

• contribution to group decision-making 

• reflection on collaborative authorship 

The poem is not graded for polish. The practice is graded for community engagement, rigor, and shared responsibility. 

Facilitator Notes 

This assignment works best when: 

• voices are welcomed in their full complexity 

• the facilitator does not control the poem 

• participants trust the process, not the outcome 

• disagreement is allowed 

• the poem reflects the difficulty and beauty of many voices at once 

This project is not designed to harmonize difference. It is designed to hold it. 

Summary 

The Community Poem Project invites any group—students, neighbors, elders, organizers, teachers, newcomers, writers, non-writers, and the whole messy beauty of the public—to experience poetry as a democratic, living practice. The outcome is not a seamless poem. It is a record of collective presence. 

Collective writing and shared authorship were central to June Jordan’s teaching practice across community settings. 

This re-issue introduces the Community Poem Project as a contemporary extension of those principles—designed to meet the present moment’s technologies, publics, and pedagogical needs. 

LIVING TOOLKIT–LIVING PRACTICE–THIS IS WHAT’S NEEDED: 

How to put into practice the lessons of our lineages … 

Below I provide a practice where students and community members can create a poem for their community and with their community, not as an individual performance, but as a collective act of service and listening.) 

Below, is the (condensed) original form and then a modernized version with a direct, line-by-line echo to showcase how the update transforms the assignment while honoring the blueprint. 

REASON: Distance – imagining an original P4P assignment and how I might work it in the current moment. 

ORIGINAL (condensed from the 1994–95 materials) 

(This is not reproduced verbatim from the copyrighted text. It is a faithful paraphrase of assignments we all remember using and revising.) 

Community Poem Assignment (1994) 

1. Go into your chosen community and talk to people. Listen carefully. 

2. Ask them what issues matter to them, what concerns affect their daily lives. 

3. Collect their words, phrases, and language. 

4. Use their voices, with credit and care, to write a collective poem. 

5. Bring copies of the poem back to the community. Share it. 

6. In class, reflect on what you learned from the process. 

Modernized, Line-by-Line (2025) 

Community Poem Assignment: Real-Time, Multi-Modal, Ethically Networked 

(each modernization follows the same numbered structure) 

1. ORIGINAL: “Go into your chosen community and talk to people. Listen carefully.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Identify a community you are accountable to—online, offline, or both—and enter it with humility. Show up as a listener first, not as a collector. 

• “Community” may be physical (a neighborhood, campus org, workplace frontline, mutual aidgroup) or digital (a Discord server, a diaspora group chat, a fandom space, a language-learning collective, an abolitionist stream). 

• Your task is not extraction; it is being present. 

• Document only with consent. 

2. ORIGINAL: “Ask them what issues matter to them, what concerns affect their daily lives.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Open with grounding and personal introductions. Ask spacious questions about what matters now. What is burning? What is blooming? What keeps them up at night? What carries them through the day? 

• Honor that people may speak about grief, joy, memes, rent, Gaza,gender,police, prayer, drag, climate fear, student debt, caregiving, art, or silence. 

• Accept whatever shape truth arrives in. 

• Do not press for trauma. 

• Do not assume what “issues” mean for someone else. 

3. ORIGINAL: “Collect their words, phrases, and language.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Ethical documentation of language: voice notes, screenshots (with permission), observations, text threads, overheard rhythms, multimodal arts practices, and more — always with explicit consent and transparent purpose. 

• Digital language (DMs, posts, comments, emojis, vernacular hashtags) counts. 

• Protect anonymity unless someone wants to benamed. 

• If someone says don’t write that—don’t write that. 

4. ORIGINAL: “Use their voices, with credit and care, to write a collective poem.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Compose a poem that embodies the polyphony you witnessed and/or shared. Your poem should be collective in form, not merely insource. 

• You may incorporate multimodal elements (audio clips, QR codes, collage, typographic layering). 

• Avoid mimicry; build resonance. 

• This is not ventriloquism; this is organizing through language. 

• Credit contributors the way they want to be credited:name, initials, alias, handle, or “anonymous community member.” 

5. ORIGINAL: “Bring copies of the poem back to the community. Share it.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Return the poem to the community in a form that is accessible, meaningful, and mutually beneficial not extractive. The return is not optional. The return is the assignment. 

Possible forms: 

• printed broadsides 

• projection on a building 

• WhatsApp or Signal share 

• TikTok / Bluesky / IG post 

• audio version for visually impaired community members 

• translated versions if the community speaks multiple languages 

• a live reading in the space that generated the poem 

6. ORIGINAL: “In class, reflect on what you learned from the process.” 

2025 UPDATE: 

Submit a reflection that addresses: 

• what changed in your understanding of community 

• what ethical challenges arose and how you resolved them 

• what power dynamics emerged 

• what surprised you 

• what responsibilities you feel now 

• how the poem lives beyond the assignment 

• what this project teaches you about poetry as a social technology 

Reflection may take the form of: 

• written analysis 

• recorded audio 

• hybrid multimedia (with accessibility notes) 

• or a short critical essay that names your positionally and your process. 

Equity clause: 

Students should not be required to “go into” communities to which they do not belong. This assignment centers responsibility, not voyeurism. 

Accessibility clause: 

Students with mobility, health, or caregiving constraints can conduct community engagement through digital or remote means. 

Data ethics clause: 

• No AI tools may be used to generate community voices. 

• No scraping. 

• No copying from posts without permission. 

• You may use AI (ChatGPT, etc.) only to help edit your own writing after the community poem is drafted. 

Safety clause: 

• Do not endanger yourself or others. 

• Community care includes physical, emotional, and political safety.