About

This website is a project that took shape in the summer of 2020, with the city of Baltimore and the rest of the world in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. What you read here resemble poems but the words that make them so are entirely drawn from the discussion forums of the mobile app Citizen. Once you’ve installed it, created an account, and allowed location permissions, Citizen begins chiming day and night with events in the vicinity that other users report in real time. In a beleaguered city like Baltimore, it can feel like a steady stream of crime, social dysfunction, accidents, and disturbances being channeled through the Citizen app to your phone. Many of these happenings tend to fall into quickly recognizable genres. House fire. Missing Person. Street Fight. Hit-and-Run Collision. Police Activity. Assault. Gunshots Heard. Other times, it’s something extraordinary or unexpected. Gas explosion. Popular protest. Teens Steal Golf Cart.

When an event is reported, the app offers users to contribute photos, video, or post a brief message in a discussion board under the heading of the incident. Baltimoreans, and evidently many folks from its suburbs and beyond, fill these sections with commentary. Citizen Poetry takes up those conversations among anonymous strangers, a polyvocal cacophony of concern, conjecture, pontification, and eyewitnessing punctuated most often by prayer-hands emojis. The collective text of these posts, stripped of their individual authors, is what makes up the poems of Citizen Poetry. The comments reveal as much, or more, about the users who compose them than they disclose about the event that attracted their busy fingers to their touchscreens. And in this sense they produce a composite, if partial, portrait of Baltimorean sensibilities about danger, crime, politics, policing, gender, race, and class. We also get glimpses of the absurdist and often dark humor that Baltimore elicits from these commentators.

The entries on Citizen Poetry bear the title and date of the events as they appeared in the app. Most reported events receive zero comments. Many attract a few remarks. And sometimes chatter erupts around a happening. The individual pieces on this website are selections that represent a broad range of commentary, from brief and mundane exchanges to drawn-out and dynamic dramas. The usernames on individual messages are removed, producing the effect of a collective yet conflicted poetic voice. Imagine a Greek chorus at odds with itself.

Citizen Poetry has no affiliation with the Citizen app. This website neither receives any compensation for this work nor promotes the app commercially in any way. As Citizen Poetry constitutes a literary project based on virtual ethnography, the author of Citizen Poetry does not endorse the views expressed in the pieces.

Literary inspirations for this project include:

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014)

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007)