Look!

Umbrella Arts hosted the official launch of John Morse’s newest visual poem, Look, on October 23, 2014. Disguised as a 1960s style photo news magazine, the poem examines issues of voyeurism, celebrity and the modern surveillance state in an astonishingly brief snippet of verse, 17 words across eight glossy pages.  Published in a numbered edition of 5,000, the magazine has been secretly placed in laundromats, airport lounges, nail salons, waiting rooms and other such spaces across America by a small cadre of volunteers who distributed them from Vermont to Florida, Seattle to Ohio, and around the world.  The Twitter hashtag #LookPoem has documented many of the placements by various volunteers.  In January 2014 an artist-signed copy of the poem was accepted into the Poetry Foundation’s library archives in Chicago.