Poetry & Sound: Open House Chicago

The Poetry Foundation celebrates Open House Chicago, an annual festival weekend that provides an opportunity to explore Chicago’s rich architecture, culture, and history by visiting featured sites and neighborhoods in an open-ended format that encourages self-guided exploration.

The sound installation “WE” was inspired by the sound exhibition “The World is Sound” at New York’s Rubin Museum where new site-specific commissions and works by prominent contemporary sound artists are juxtaposed with historical objects in the collection to encourage reflection on how we listen and to challenge entrenched ways of thinking. In the same way that those works challenged historical objects, the Poetry Foundation worked with sound engineer, Ed Herrmann, to create a sonic installation based on the iconic poem "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks.  Almost 75 people from across the country and the world gave their voices to create this soundscape that will have the audience listening in a new way and to reflect upon Brooks’s 1959 poem.