Playing on the Edge with Dialogue Poetry

Something I am conscious of in my work designing, hosting and harvesting participatory meetings, gatherings and conferences is ensuring that I am always playing at my edge somewhere in that work experience. It is how I am constantly learning and improving, terrifiying though it can be. And certainly not without it’s failures (more on a recently failure coming soon in another post).

So with the Western Cities Conference and my role as Master Theme Weaver (a term I shamelessly lifted from Tenneson Woolf) I decided to take a crack at creating a dialogue poem to harvest and weave the threads from the the two and a half day conference. I had a lovely team of theme catchers working with me and their worksheets were immensely helpful for me in that prep work. And I was really dancing on the edge when I wove in our final two speakers just minutes before I delivered the dialogue poem this morning in our conference closing.

We’ll be providing a copy of it in the post-conference Memory Book, and I also recorded an audio version tonight. Although not as poetic as some of my colleagues who rock this art form I’m really excited I gave it a go and will definitely play with this more in the future.

While dialogue poems mostly only make sense to those who were part of the experience the dialogue came from, you still might enjoy it:

Weaving the Narrative Thread Western Cities 2012 (mp3)

Weaving the Narrative Thread (PDF)

Randen Pederson via Compfight