We’ve just been privy (thanks to a nudge from Christine O’Brien, Marketing Manager AUP and general poetry-hound) to the end result of a fascinating production entitled Fugacity.

It was the brainchild of a bunch of folk from the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre - Brian Flaherty, Bernadette Hall, Claire Hero, Michele Leggott, Graham Lindsay and John Newton. In the mad tradition of the 48-hour Furious Filmmaking competition and the even more recent Urbis 24-hour – deadline theatre in Auckland, poets had two days to submit entries for a 2005 ‘snapshot’ of poetry.

Electronic guidelines were sent out to the global poetic community requesting submissions for an online anthology two weeks beforehand. The poems were collected, edited, prepared for the web and uploaded over the weekend of the 21-23 April, at New Brighton Beach, Christchurch.

All participants were inspired by the f-word in a poem of Ursula Bethell’s:

Lives there still a Japanese artist
Who, with his paint brush, could make us tremble
To see those lines, those tenuous colours
Spring again vibrant as I now see them springing
in their fugacity?

I looked up the word this time, and came up with this: 1. A measure of the tendency of a substance, often a fluid, to move from one phase to another or from one site to another. 2. Passing away quickly; evanescent. 3. Botany. Withering or dropping off early, the lack of enduring qualities.

Hmm. Thus, the glimpse of how everyone involved felt about everything, right then, in Christchurch. Or conversely, how people were feeling anywhere in the world about what was happening in Christchurch right then (the call for work was not NZ-specific). As Michele Leggott said,

We liked the thought of balancing geographical specificity (a festive gathering in a southern hemisphere city) against the post-geographical possibilities of the Internet (distance reconfigured by cyberspace).

Thus also, the magnificent sand text sculpture thingy above, the work of Christchurch artist Katharina Jaeger, Tony Bond and their team. (Maureen Bradshaw took this briliant photo). Tony was the secret ingredient for the fabulously gridded-out text. It's that whole 'art is fragile and temporary' thing, innit, but in a big, solid font… Apparently they whipped it up while the open mike contest was goin’ on – or off, in fact.

And what a result. Over a hundred writers, brought together in body and cyber-spirit for one reason. Fugacity. Nice.