Get Me Out of Here

Why is it often so difficult to stay present in the moment? Poet Sachiko Murakami asked this question in an open call on the Internet, and in airports across the globe, from YVR (Vancouver) to RKV (Reykjavik), people in transit stopped to note in only one sentence their impressions of things, events, people, and feelings. The poems that result from this experiment in crowd-sourcing content search departures and arrivals for a handhold on the fleeting present. Working within and wriggling out of the formal constraint of fourteen lines, Get Me Out of Here explores what poems need to do to stay when the mind is begging to leave.

Get Me Out of Here furthers Murakami’s investigations into collaboration that began with ProjectRebuild, the companion website to her 2011 poetry collection Rebuild, and that continued with her online projects HENKO: A Powell Street Manyway Renga and WHITBOAM. Working with the idea that poems arise out of conversation and are built by communities, Murakami continues to invite the public into her poems to rebuild them, to help write them, and in the case ofGet Me Out of Here, to provide the inspiration that is supposed to come to a poet without effort. Murakami also invited observers into the editorial process.

A companion website works with the theme of exchanging experience and inspiration.

Sachiko Murakami is the author of two previous poetry collections with Talonbooks,The Invisibility Exhibit (2008), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, andRebuild (2011). She is the creator of the online poetry projects Project Rebuild (projectrebuild.ca), HENKO (powellstreethenko.ca), WIHTBOAM (whenihavethebodyofaman.com), and co-creator of FIGURE (figureoracle.com), an online poetry oracle, with Angela Rawlings. She holds an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University (2006) and is currently pursuing an MFA in the Digital Futures program at OCADU. She has been a literary worker for various Canadian presses, journals, and organizations, and sits on the poetry board at Talonbooks. Her website is sachikomurakami.com.