An invitation to let your insides spill outside —
what’s emerging from you?
Communal Poem Experiment
The future is with the people who feel!
Maya and Veronica co-facilitate Spilling Saloons — Quaker-style open mics — in Detroit, in their living room.
We do Spilling Saloons to empower each other to reclaim our attention by healing our relationships to creativity. Through balancing silence and expression we experiment with witness and public intimacy to collectively strengthen our capacity to feel, create and connect.
When we say the future is with the people who feel we mean: sensitive, strong ones who chose the pain of truth over numbness; artists who create beauty from decay and imagine new worlds; seep listeners who are leaders, generous with their attention.
“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” - Gilles Deleuze
At one saloon, we experimented with having a typewriter in the center of the room. Throughout the event, we wrote a collective poem together, responding non-verbally to what was happening in the space between us. The collective poem is shared below!