Notes on How to Live Forever
Notes on How to Live Forever is a poetry anthology made up of the words we throw away. With more than 50 contributors and 300 scans of notebook pages, scraps of paper, doodles & mindless scribbles, this project seeks to prove the magic in the mundane, the extraordinary nestled within the ordinary. Simply, the profundity of people. But above that, and perhaps most important of all, it explores the life we give our words and its relevance to our lives, long after we let it leave our minds through our fingers. This project was an exercise in curation, a balancing act between shaping a narrative from the words, and stepping back to let the words tell their own story.
From the contributions, themes were extracted, narratives synthesised and condensed. What came out of it was 16 fully-formed pieces of poetry and prose, packaged in a square, children’s book-inspired publication, chosen for its nostalgic, sentimental quality. I adopted an anecdotal and diaristic style and tone for this project and by the end, what came out of it was something unreasoning and visceral, intuitive and vulnerable – an outcome that couldn’t have been better. Since there isn’t much curation involved to preserve the essence of the words written in its original form, I had to create rules for myself. In each piece, I made it a point to include at least 2 contributors, the most having 7.
