In 1353, in the wake of the Black Death, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron. In it, ten fictional people—seven women and three men—hid away in an Italian villa and waited out the plague. They passed the time by telling stories. One-hundred stories, to be exact, over the course of ten long days.
The UNPRECEDENTED Project was a public poetry experiment that circulated pages of The Decameron between strangers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each anonymous participant signed up to receive a few pages in the mail, chose one, and redacted the story’s original text. What was left on the page revealed a poem. Then, participants passed their remaining pages onto someone else to repeat the process.
Like a virus, the project spread by word of mouth. Participants either received pages from someone they knew, or encountered a QR code in a public space. Pages traversed 29 states and 14 countries. From 2020-2023, the majority of Boccaccio’s 800-page book was reconstructed in the form of erasure poetry.
The UNPRECEDENTED Project is now an artifact of the pandemic. The partial collection lives in this gallery. These poems reflect the solitude, travesty, and strange beauty that—for now—has become a thing of the past. Individual poems can be “contact-traced” back to their sender’s location on this map, where one can speculate (but not determine) a poem’s path.
participate.
Click here and sign up to receive physical pages of The Decameron in the mail. Create your poem, then send it back. Pass on the remaining pages to someone you love. All poems will be contributed to UNPRECEDENTED’s ongoing collection.
featured.
Click here to browse the Editor’s Pick,
updated monthly.
