Opening Space, Poeticizing Community

Abstract

In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1964) writes, “We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’” (1964, p. 4). This short essay, like poetry, pays attention to the particulars1 of our community, in our small Midwest college town, and the socially engaged poetry and performance space that we are creating there, called The Open Space.