Zine experiment- Week 1

The story so far

I’ve been writing poems. I don’t know what to do with the poems. I’m doing an experiment.

I’ve been making poetry zines and leaving them in public places. They contain instructions to take the zine with you and leave it somewhere for someone else to find. They also contain my Insta and Bluesky handle (@mrtnsmth) so anyone who finds one and wants to play along can tag me telling me where they left it.

I’m doing this for a few reasons, aside from writing poems and making zines being a nice way to use time. I want to interrupt a few strangers’ days with weird little poems they weren’t looking for. I also like the idea of these poems not existing anywhere digitally. They’re only out in the world on these physical pages, to be read at random by whoever happens to stumble across them.

I started this thing a week ago. So far I’ve left zines next to Dante’s Inferno in a book shop in Bolton, on a table in Starbucks, on the upper deck of a bus to Adlington and in the magazine rack of a cafe in Chorley. Leaving these things around and trying to grab a photo of them has felt a little like being a rubbish spy with the lowest stakes mission imaginable. The one I left in the cafe in Chorley, for example. I slipped that one in the magazine rack as I arrived, but then I spent the whole time I was there worried someone would find it before I left.

Up to now nobody has played along, as far as I know. Nobody has tagged me anywhere telling me they’ve played along anyway, but I assume people must have found them all, so who knows? I think it’s only a matter of time before the right person finds one of these things and they start to travel. That’s why I’m doubling down this week.

I put four out last week. I’m doing ten this week. No two zines have the exact same set of poems in. These things are going everywhere I go, and I’m going to scatter them all over the place.

For anyone interested in the zine-y side of this, most of these are made using a crown bind, which I learned how to do with this video: