Abstract Silence is under attack. In a time when digital impulses shine at us from screens with harsh graphics, languages such as poetry fade away. In the language of poetry, silence, or emptiness, is a conversation partner. Poetry breaks the silence, yet the poem works because the words emerge out of a void. The words describe a potentially magical world where life’s possibilities are revitalized. It is like an imaginary journey where anyone can become someone else, or something else, a world where everyone can be transformed.

But we live in a century that puts pressure on the definition of the self. Our thoughts are tied to a constant strain, forced into the smartphone’s rat race. It is a life in exile, entangled in the phone’s labyrinths. The phone is an object of contradictory fascination and desire, with a remarkable power and magical pull. Always fleeing from the obligations of community, it offers space for dreaming within the mobile reality, where everything is available.

We invite you to light hearted conversations about poetry and how this language can be used to comment on the need for downtime, as a counterforce to mobile noise. In a roundtable setting, we offer the opportunity to write draft poems based on the question “How to be free as an artist?” We want people to participate actively in writing poetry and to linger with what is written through shared reflections. Our contribution explores how the poetic form can give language to the unspoken. It can offer resilience in safeguarding threatened and idea based worlds that live within us all.