The 19th Annual Bourne Poetry Reading (Remembering Dr. Darcy Mullen) #ATLFoodLit

On Twitter @FarmsWatson was the handle for Dr. Darcy Mullen, who died last week. Darcy's Twitter bio describes her as: Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow she/her/they/them #GeorgiaTech Rhetoric/food/graphic medicine/soil/poetry/food justice/#BLM. I had met Darcy at a Graphic Medicine conference, and had been Facebook friends for a few years. We share a LOT of interests! And she's terribly funny, bold, and bright. I wanted to follow her on Twitter, but Twitter and I fight over my being allowed to follow more people. When I heard we lost Darcy, I went back to her Twitter stream and noticed that most of her recent tweets were actually retweets from this hashtag. As I explored the tag, what I thought was happening was that this was an assignment with her students, exploring and analyzing poetry and poetry performance as a collaborative virtual performance. I could distill out threads and common elements from which I intuited what I imagined Darcy had given her students as prompts for how to approach the poetry (words and images that speak to you, overt and covert uses of language and meaning, are the characters and actors in the poem like anyone you know, how does the poem connect to you in your life, how does the poet use language to achieve these impacts, how does what is inside you respond/react to what is inside the poem or poet, how does the poem engage your senses, at what point does language become magic or miss the point, how does the poet's performance change how you hear the words), and guidelines for how to tweet about poetry responsibly (brief excerpts in the context of meaningful commentary). I was a bit enchanted by all these wonderful tweets, and reading them as I read poetry, reading between the lines of these tweets to try to hear Darcy's voice implied. This became an iterative listening exercise for me. Me, listening to Darcy's students, who were listening to the poets, and hearing the students listening to Darcy as well as the poets, and through that hearing Darcy. I wanted to preserve these to come back to them later. While these aren't Darcy's own words, there are worse ways to remember her than through her influence on others, and their actions and words.