What is The Renga Project?

Between SITE and W21 in the Railyard Park in Santa Fe, is the Renga Project.  Each week we hang a new stanza.  Renga is an ancient traditional  collaborative form of poetry from Japan.  Poets write short stanzas which respond to what has come before.  Our Renga is being written by 50 New Mexico poets.  Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate Jon Davis will start each of the four seasonal sections.  The other stanzas will be written by 24 poets selected by him and an additional 24 poets selected by them.  There will be 6 stanzas at a time on the sign.  As each new stanza is added, the oldest will be removed.  We experience, over the course of a year, a changing and evolving 52 stanza collaborative poem.

In addition, we’ve invited 52 New Mexico Artists to create a linked drawing which illustrates the poem.  We’ll publish a book at the close of the project with the full poem and the full linked drawing.  There are 3 versions of the book, an affordable paperback, a series of four seasonal miniature japanese-style folded books, and a beautiful limited edition handmade accordion book.

All of this will culminate with a reading of the poem with the poets at the New Mexico Museum of Art and an exhibition of the drawings in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery in the summer of 2014.

The Renga Project is made possible by the generous support of Baglione Custom Woodworks, Santa Fe Jin, New Mexico Literary Arts, Artisan Santa Fe, The Railyard Art Project, The New Mexico Museum of Art, Ellsworth Gallery, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, OpCit, La Montanita Co-Op, THE magazine, David Richard Gallery, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, The New Mexico Humanities Council, and individual donors.