
For my “Out of the box experience” I went to the Chicago Poetry Foundation.
The Chicago Poetry Foundation is located at 61 W. Superior St. at the corner of Superior and Dearborn in the North River area. To get there I drove. I went to the museum with my family. At the time I went to the museum, it was free. This was because of an event known as Open House Chicago, which spans from October 19–20. I found out about this event while searching Google museums in Chicago. The museum is very modern and minimalistic. I was at the museum at around 10:30 am, so the crowd really hadn’t built up yet, but the majority of the people at the museum at that time were there because of the Chicago Open House and were most likely exploring other museums or places that were also free due to this event.
At the Chicago Poetry Foundation, one of the exhibits that I viewed was a collection of documents from poets that used to go to poetry readings in a tower in the UK called Morden Tower.

(Morden Tower, Newcastle, UK)
This tower is located in Newcastle in the UK.

There were first hand documents from Tom Pickard, the one who had leased Morden Tower for these poetry readings, and others who took place in these poetry readings. These poetry readings took place from the 1960s to the early 1980s. The museum also had posters that were used to publicise the poetry readings. Another thing I learned about the museum was about the trees in the courtyard. In the courtyard of the museum, every tree corresponds to a tree in different poems.
The museum also had an exciting audio exhibit that I listened to and enjoyed.
This audio exhibit was a group of augmented/distorted sounds that you would hear in the city. This audio reminded me of a sci-fi movie, like Star Wars or Star Trek. The audio exhibit made me think of as if you were just dropped into a city without any understanding of what a big city was or is. It made me imagine a person that was living in the countryside their whole life going to a big city for their first time ever. The audio exhibit also consisted of a bunch of chairs where no 2 chairs were facing each other. The disconnection of these chairs is showing that city life disconnected and that alienation is present in city life. These chairs share the idea of disconnection and sporadicness, which connects to the audio perfectly. I wasn’t particularly emotionally engaged with the audio exhibit. This experience was out of the box for me because I’m not a big fan of poetry. It is also out of the box because the audio exhibit is unique and I really don’t hear a lot of sounds like the ones that were present in that audio exhibit.