buns huns

Self-Publishing Poem

Posted on June 7, 2015 by kyang2124

A Feeling

It pulls no less than gravity

Insuppressible, lawless

Altering perception of reality

Like a beast to oppress

Able to make all equal, blind

Pray that it shall never part

For it does not dwell in the mind

It breathes soul into the heart

To self-publish my poem, I wanted to do something different that I haven’t seen done before. I decided to let people “find” my poem, as if it were a treasure. To do this, I wrote out my poem to be placed in “treasure chests” hidden around Richmond. This is all part of a global game called GeoCaching.

GeoCaching is: “…a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.” Anyone can make/hide caches and as of right now, there are 2,642,822 caches around the world. Each cache is unique, and inside there can be an assortment of trinkets and notes to be found. As a general rule of thumb, you should put something back the same or more value as the object you took.

For me, I only put my poem in because I couldn’t really say it’s worth more than a toy figurine (although I hope it could be). This entire process of finding caches took my friend and I a full days of work. Sunscreen and sunglasses were absolutely vital since that day was beautiful and warm. We drove around Richmond and found 15 caches in total, however 1 of them was too small to put anything in. Instead, we ended up writing my poem into the logbook. Some of the caches were also very well hidden so sometimes we didn’t even find them!

I think this self-publishing idea will be very successful. In the summer, GeoCaching is extremely popular with caches being found at least twice a week. I’m excited to revisit the same caches we found to look for possible responses in the log book to my poem. Finding 15 caches was very satisfying and it’s something I wanted to do for a long time. Being able to add my personal work for others to see was an added bonus.