Poet and Editor Ryan Van Winkle has been uploading poems to our GPS project since it started last year. We managed to catch up with him recently to find out a little more about his work.

In the two most recent poems you’ve uploaded, My 100-Year-Old Ghost and Oregon Trail, you imbue the sense of place with a strong sense of history, turning the landscape into a kind of timescape. Would you agree with the sentiment that “The past is a foreign country”?
My friend Dan Meth knows a guy who is completely obsessed with the Romans. Dan once asked him ‘Why are you so into Rome?’ and the fella, he looked around, waved his arms and exclaimed, “We’re living in it!” So, in some sense, I think we are living in that place, that past-place. Which is, at once, foreign but also very much a part of who we are as people and a society. I guess when I do my job correctly, I’m using the past and places and history to get at who I am or, at least, who I’d like to be.

‘My 100-Year-Old Ghost’ is very much about a yearning for the supposed simplicity of the past but also a recognition, I hope, that living was never simple. I’m happiest with the poems I write when I can admit to myself that the past isn’t exactly a golden age. Like many places, it is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Which I need to remind myself of because I think I’m prone to a saccharine kind of nostalgia for times I’ve lived and unlived alike.

You’re an American living in Scotland. As someone who grew up in one country and is now living in another, how does this change the effect that place has on your work?
I think moving to Scotland and the UK has had an unexpected effect on my work. Past and place are intrinsically linked for me. My past is very American and my present is very much European. Some people have wondered why I don’t write more about that duality of being an American living and working abroad. I think I have written about it but not in an immediately obvious way. Specifically, I think my new book is very much me coming to terms with my decision to leave America and the difficulty I’ve had, psychologically, with admitting that, yes, I live here.

The distance between where I live and where I write about allows me the freedom to lie. Well, not lie exactly, but I don’t feel the need to honor the reality so much. If you look at the places in my book, you know, I don’t really pinpoint where these places are, what state or region (with ‘They Tore the Bridge Down’ and the 9/11 poem being big exceptions). I was going to add place names to some of the poems but ultimately decided not to because it felt weird to say, this one takes place in Oklahoma or California or Connecticut because the poems don’t necessarily add up to those places. The place is just a notion.

“Oregon Trail” is about that notion of “West” which, to me, means escape and freedom and all those promises that Steinbeck articulated in Grapes of Wrath. Of course, there is a dark side to those promises, as Steinbeck’s characters learned. We don’t know what will happen when we chase down a dream or how we’ll react when we get it.

One of the pieces you’ve uploaded to GPS shows an extract from Wendell Berry’s poem “How to be a poet”. Why does this poem resonate with you?
Berry reminds himself of the simple things. Like sit down. Like be quiet. And he says, “Live a three-dimensioned life; / stay away from screens. / Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in.” And I feel like I do that a lot, I obscure the place I am in.

The poem resonates with me because I am often busier than I should be and I forget that I love writing poems, I love reading poems and I love working with them, constructing them, tearing them apart, breaking their little noses again and again until they are as strong as I can make them. I hate that I forget that. And I hate that I forget to do all the things that allow me to write poems effectively.

You do a lot of work that’s available online, whether audio or visual media via your own website, the SPL website and the work of The Forest arts collective. What’s the difference between physical and digital space in terms of people being exposed to poetry? Do you think one is more important than the other?
That’s a good question. I think it is great that work is available online. In the course of this interview I looked up Wendell Berry just to reacquaint myself with his work. It is such a wonderful thing to have poems searchable and accessible. To me, the question is how to make people want to search for something like a Wendell Berry poem. And that, I think, takes real interaction either physically or virtually.

Here’s a great digital poetry thing online I’ve come to recently. It’s an amazing reading from Etheridge Knight that I’ve had on cassette since 1998. It was given to me from my professor at Syracuse University, Michael Burkard, but is buried somewhere in the mess which is my life so I was happy to find this digitized. Of course, my relationship is with the physical object and the importance of the person who gave it to me, so the digital merely conjures that person and place back up. I wonder if I would have the same attraction to the work if Burkard had shared it on my Facebook ‘wall’ or, you know, tweeted it?

I’d like to compare it to the way we go to the movies together and feel a little lame if we go on our own. A screen can be part of a shared experience, a communal experience, but it has yet, for me, been able to beat place. I love bootlegs and live recordings and I especially love having a recording of a show I was at, but they are never as good as a gig.

But, you take what you can get. And, obviously, not everyone has the time or inclination to go to a gig or buy a book, so I put some work online in the hopes that it will get seen by someone who appreciates it. Fingers crossed.

You’ve uploaded a variety of things to the GPS project over time, including photographs and lines found on buildings. Would you say that poetry can be found anywhere?
Yes, I do say that and I do think it is true. But, I think it is more true to say that there are poetic “sparks” everywhere. I love the GPS site because there are hundreds of little beginnings to poems. Like the “ain’t wet” sign or “what does happy look like?” post. I’m not sure these are poems on their own, per se, but as a collection, they are poetic. And, certainly, I think the question “what does happy look like?” is an amazingly intriguing question and would be a great launch into a new poem and is a question that poetry, I think, is often trying to answer.

Going back to Michael Burkard, he gave me the best advice I’ve gotten as a writer. He said, “read like a writer” which meant, to me, that you could find the beginning of a poem anywhere, even in work you don’t like, in graffiti, and shop windows and I think the GPS system is a kind of extension to that thought.

Ryan’s first full collection “Tomorrow we will live here” is published by Salt and is available here.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Explore the map, choose your own favourites and upload poems here.

In case you missed the launch of the project, Analogue Adventures is a Global Poetry System initiative with a mission to create a series of world poetry chains starting and ending at Southbank Centre. 20 disposable cameras were sent out by post to various locations, with participants capturing an image of poetry on their local landscape and then passing the camera on to a person of their choosing.

From St Pancreas to Swansea and Ealing to Cardiff here are a few favourites from the latest returners or you can browse the site for the best of the rest here

Poetry can be seen in all sorts of places from train stations to underpasses, benches to the human body. It’s everywhere and for everyone so get involved and upload yours now.

Image 1: Art Is The New Religion – Cardiff leads the way

Image 2: Avenge Vulture Attack – Not what you want to see on your local high street in W5

Image 3: Tat’s mine – Dylan Thomas for your birthday.

The Royal Festival Hall is my favourite building in London, because of the open, fluid, democratic way it works. London is my favourite city in the country because of the varied Babel of humanity it represents.  Cities are my favourite form of settlement in the world. The world is my favourite planet in the entire solar system.

It’s appropriate for me that a building I admire so much was the pilot-site for GPS poetry. A place where I have always found the time, space and setting to notice poetry which was hidden in plain view. Not to mention the more straightforward delights of the Saison Poetry Library – a literary gate-head tucked away in a wing of the 5th floor and one of London’s best kept secrets – it should be in every single tourist guide book.

I wanted to come at the GPS project from the perspective of an urbanist. The practices of architecture and writing (whether poetry, prose, or narrative) are important to me, being the vocational substance of my life.  I used to think there were deeper formal echoes in the two practices – the emphasis on technique as well as creativity for example, but in truth these are rare, far between. In reality architecture and writing are mainly, profoundly different – as are the processes of practising them. Of course, this depends on the frame through which the comparison is drawn.

However, in one easy to grasp sense, what can make architecture and writing (poetry in this case) can be what is expected traditionally on the one hand (a shiny new gallery in a cultural quarter / a perfect Petrarchan sonnet delivered by a Poet Laureate on the birth of a royal heir), or contingent, accidental, fleeting or ‘found’ (Snippets of overheard conversation, ‘Cut-up’ literature / cardboard homeless shelters under the IMAX roundabout, the undercroft reclaimed by skateboarders and graffiti artist under the Queen Elizabeth Hall) on the other.

It was this point in the ‘found’ world at which architecture and poetry intersect that I wanted to draw out in the ‘poems’ I have selected. I like what they tell us about the form and typology of built environments and the people who live on the surface and in the deep reaches of them.  For me poetry is a lot about what is implied and the resonances that encourages.

The approach I took to selection was 2 fold. Firstly, I used 4 poems I found insitu on the GPS site and secondly, I uploaded 4. The pieces I uploaded were collaborative, I asked architect friends and colleagues to provide images, which spoke to them through moments of text but loosely encouraged a speculation on architectural space.

From the poems I found already on the GPS poetry map, Ryan Ormonde’s piece ‘Be prepared’ reminded me of all the safety strategies, which can define much of how space is planned in buildings. Especially in cities, every public or institutional building is laid out with a view to statutory regulations. In turn we often (for better or worse) as users absorb a bit of this sense risk analysis – which is probably illusory. For instance am I the only one who’s ever been in a hotel in an earthquake zone trying to figure out what I’d do if the ‘big-one’ that’s due every 100 years or so finally hits?

‘Except after C’ also by Ryan Ormonde is as much a code as a poem. It reminds me of stories such as Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ or Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’, back offices in faceless office blocks, where obsessive clerical taxonomy is undertaken by pale and unhappy denizens, where anything that doesn’t fit neatly into a category is ignored. In a Hitchcock movie this is where the bad guys would meet to agree the plan.

‘Mind the gap’ by Ben Byford is so resonant of cities for me. The flip-side of ‘voluntary’ rules and regulations. Where solicitousness for your personal safety becomes an invitation to conform, which can sound like an instruction to be safe, backed up by the hint of a threat to your safety from the authorities if you do not ensure that you are safe.   The office of ‘Emergency Gap Jumper’ seems both terrible and privileged, able to be held only by fearsome box dwelling golems who intercept the ‘independent-minded’ commuter.

‘Sexy pigeons’ by Alix Silver has captured the exuberant, flamboyant and amusing ownership of that paradigm of public space – the pavement. For me pavements are the life blood of streets, and busy active overlooked streets are what make sense of cities during day time and night time hours. City slickers aspire to ‘café’ cultures where the streets are vibrant and pleasant. We look down on sidewalk-less urban jungles where to be seen outside of a car is a cause for suspicion.

Of the poems forwarded by architects, I find ‘Biting criticism…’ intriguing and amusing. It speaks of the services and business you get situated and organised in surprising places in certain exotic locales. Very specialist medical services, I’m guessing from very specialist practitioners. It reminds me of cities such as Lagos or Rio where low income communities sprout up out of necessity and organise themselves without the boundaries of planning zoning.

‘The Bartlett School of Architecture Exhibition, Unit 6’ was forwarded to me by a student. The image is thematic text on which the unit’s work had been based during the preceding academic year. The rhythm and detail of academic language has a pleasure of its own. However this snippet also refers to scenarios where dramatic physical phenomena become the prompt for and architectural response. For Londoners how we inhabit a global city built largely on a flood-plane is as live an issue as how to emit less carbon.

‘Signage – a hard crucial slog’ is lavatorial and silly, which is why I like it. I leave you to get the pun (or to pretend that you don’t). Choosing signs that function and capture attention without cluttering everywhere up and looking institutional is important for buildings. I often thought I wouldn’t want to be a dazed and confused person in an emergency trying to find the right ward for a loved one in London’s hospitals as the signage is invariably pants. I’ve been to some countries where the signage is so effective, yet unobtrusive that you are not conscious of reading it. You get somewhere almost before realising it’s where you wanted to go.

‘How the Portuguese learn English in cities’ is an image I contributed.  The essence of cities is the people and London in particular is a metropolis that absorbs (and disgorges) people from all over the world. I live in an area where there are many Brazilian, Portuguese and Palop speaking people. I found a wardrobe at the end of a terraced street on which a homemade Portuguese to English dictionary and been touchingly, diligently constructed, complete with pronunciations. It was covered from head to foot in this writing. It was a magical thing in that all no Portuguese speakers including myself kept stopping to see it. When we thought no one was looking we would have a go translating familiar words and from English into Portuguese.

Obrigado. De nada.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Explore the map, choose your own favourites and upload poems here.

One of my favourite things about the Global Poetry System map is how much poetry can make you laugh. Poetry sleuths around the world are turning up funny poetics on the toilet door, in oddly translated signage or curious things children have written and posting it just to amuse – to share the laugh.

In searching the map for funnies, it turns out there are 99 of them in the UK alone, and many more around the world. So I featured them for your amusement on a grey day. There’s satire, sculpture and just plain silly. They don’t need a lot of introduction – they speak for themselves. Why not send one to a friend to make them laugh? And next time you come across words that make you smile, share the joke on the poetry map.

The second of our guest curators this month on Global Poetry System is Melanie Abrahams, an arts entrepreneur who curates literature and runs Tilt and renaissance one.

It’s been a pleasure to dip in and out of the selection of poems on GPS all day. Dipping in head first to Spain I find a delicate delightful poem Golden Wine,  suitable for teetotalers and drunkards alike and no doubt with the recent football, about to make a comeback.

I’m on a high this evening having returned from a enlivening Royal Institution talk between Sir David Attenborough and sound-recordist Chris Watson. Sir D is a deserved national treasure, a dapper picture in the cream suit of the seasoned navigator.  The camaraderie, gentle jostling and the way both speakers warmly responded to audience questions was a joy.  By chance I was sitting next to Bill Oddie.  Another delight (The Goodies was part of the poetry diet I gorged on as a teenager). After making sure I’d recognised him correctly followed by a bit of light conversation I told him that I had grown up watching him (on TV).  ‘You can’t be grown up then’ he jokily retorted.  Playfulness is just as important as the serious stuff I responded.  Which brings me to the witty and very playful Airy Mouse by Rosie Luff.

Sir D A described how female birds are discerning and perspicacious when it came to choosing the right male.  They distinguish minute differences between the song of male birds, can distinguish between a 39 trill composite trill sounds – the super alpha male variety – and the lesser specimen of 35 composite trill sounds.  This level of discernment is suggested in the evocative poem-song by Tamara Parsons-Baker in the An ex lover and a sperm whale video posting by Henry Stead.  Consisting of two pieces, the song performed by Tamara and a poem by Simon Armitage, the posting captures the buzz, rapid drinking, and excitement of a student poetry night, what some in the arts sector would term ‘live literature’.  ‘It’s like an old fashioned poetry reading’ guest poet Simon Armitage quips.  Certainly it’s compelling and shows poetry in its best live element.

Moving from Oxford to Reading, I find an old favourite The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde.  Beautiful phrasing, musical wordplay.  As a youngun thought it was about reading, and directing one’s efforts. One can read much too fast.

Earlier today after rewatching Howard Hawks film ‘Bringing up Baby’, I browse for poems on a play or journey theme. Find The Journey to le Repentir by fabulous Guyanese author Mark McWatt, posted by publisher Hannah Bannister of Peepal Tree.  The text reminds me of the multi-form architecture of GPS and anything, or anyone, aiming for scale and breadth. Lattices of connections, a textural world wide web of memories and imprints, in a post post colonial new world still fringed with what went before.

Onward to Liverpool, a city of fond memories, I find poem On The Pier by Rosie Frost.  Enjoy the way it conveys a suspension of the stuff of fear and judgement between two people.  And is suggestive of the times when a couple – whether friends or lovers – are present to each other.

For this exercise I dipped into my notebook to check for poems or text I could add to the mix.  Found this phrase ‘to name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass’ by Amiri Baraka.  The simplicity is deceptive, so much said in one line about patience and resilience. Years ago I witnessed Baraka performing to a rapt 2000+ audience, with a backdrop of the ocean, on Treasure Beach, Jamaica.  It was as if he was Loki commanding the winds and sea.  A blustery day and too much rum as it happened. For someone so controversial to many and often written off as belligerent this simple phrase casts a different sheen, showing depth and a restrained presence.

Looking forward in a few hours to a day at Edinburgh Fringe to catch some gigs and yes, some are poetry shows.  Kate Fox, Tim Clare and Ross Sutherland among others are waving the poetry flag!  Let’s celebrate your fortunes.  As the Fortune Teller wording says You’re next.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Explore the map, choose your own favourites and upload poems here.

How to choose 8 poems from so many? I started, maybe predictably, by browsing those around my home town of Manchester, and found Rain honouring the Mancunian’s obsession with rain and reminding me of falling asleep listening to the rain on the skylight of my attic bedroom. I love the poem’s physicality, and how its form mirrors its subject in such a playful way. It seemed fitting to start with a poem written by Lemn Sissay, whose passion for and recognition of poetry as an essential part of our everyday lives was the inspiration behind GPS.

I started browsing, keeping my eye open for references to rain and ended up at the first poem I uploaded to the GPS site, Blue Rain from a Clear Sky. Then onto The Edge of Things, also found in Wellington Harbour on a recent holiday in New Zealand.

From rain to the sea. I was off – searching for poems placed at the edges of countries, referencing water, rain, sea, rivers. I came across anger in Song of City River Blues, a cut-up poem from Twickenham Library; enjoyed John Betjeman’s “huge consoling sea”, remembered that Streams Flow, and pictured myself in a boat on a river.

All the while I was thinking about water and the sea; about boundaries (between sea and land, language and poetry, truth and fiction); about our endless desire to explore the world. So it seemed fitting to end with To Seek, To Find. I have a personal fascination with Antarctica as a kind of unimagined space where anything is possible, and the line “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” perhaps sums up my own approach to life.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Explore the map, choose your own favourites and upload poems here.

Sound the trumpets and raise the flags: the Analogue Adventures cameras have returned!

From Soho to Scarborough, New York to not so new York, our stanza snapping poetry-cams have been gallivanting all over.

In case you missed the launch of the project, Analogue Adventures is a Global Poetry System initiative with a mission to create a series of world poetry chains starting and ending at Southbank Centre. 20 disposable cameras were sent out by post to various locations, with participants capturing an image of poetry on their local landscape and then passing the camera on to a person of their choosing.

The first of the cameras have now made their way home, a bit scruffy round the edges but poetically enlightened. The images have been developed and are now live on the GPS site for your poetic perusal here. There are some stunning finds, capturing the diversity and originality of the poetry on our local landscapes.

As for the rest of the cameras, we eagerly await their return from their literary missions.  If you happen to come across one of them sipping cocktails on a distant shore or backpacking in the mountains, be sure to let it know that the time has come for it to go home with its souvenir stanzas in tow.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Explore the map and upload poems here.

Wednesday saw the second Pop Up Poetry event in Udderbelly’s Thames-side purple cow.  The evening began in a surreal manner, for having entered the upturned inflatable Bovinae, the gathered audience was sporadically given ambiguous updates on Spain and Germany’s World Cup semi final by means of the loud cheering from those watching the game in the Magners Pasture just outside.

Whilst, admittedly, this may not initially sound like the ideal setting for a poetry reading, from the start it was clear that the audience were to be treated to a night of poetry as unusual and entertaining as their surroundings.

Curator Luke Wright was first to take to the stage, looking dapper in a three piece suit complete with gold pocket watch. It was the perfect attire in which to deliver his first poem of rapid-fire wit, “Company of Men”, which explained Luke’s inability to fit in with “blokes”, preferring rather to consciously become “arty” at the age of 16. He followed with another jovial poem about “SKIers”, his own term for retired parents insistent on “Spending the Kids’ Inheritance”.

Byron Vincent then took up the mic, and whilst Luke’s poems had drawn out wit and humour from his own painfully astute observations of the world, Byron Vincent began on a far more surreal footing.  Beginning with a Haiku on Elton John’s salad preferences, concluding, “He’s a rocket man”, Byron then guided the enraptured crowd through his colourful world of playful observations on internet social networking (“a subtle war of self aggrandisement whilst eating coco pops in your Noddy pyjamas”), eBay, football, and advertising. Laced through all of which, his word play delighted and tickled, describing burgers as “awful offal falafels” and chips as “cartoffle waffles”.

The night concluded with Chris Addison’s first public reading of his poetry (with the exception of his practice on the train on the way to the gig, he informed us). He wrote his Hilaire Belloc influenced collection “Cautionary Tales For Grown Ups” four years ago, and was so reluctant to have his first readings recorded that he physically commandeered the mobile phone of a woman in the front row who was attempting to video the proceedings. But there weren’t any nerves in sight, and Chris’ words painted a world as frightening as it was funny, where little is tolerated, and the punishments are cruelly severe. He attacked those who throw away cigarette butts in the street (a crime which ended in a bloody exploding rat and death by collapsing chimney), vulgar tattoo bearers, ignorant cyclists, gaudy Christmas decoration hangers, pathetically apathetic non-voters, pompous wine snobs, and ridiculous tanners. As Chris himself admitted, “Once you’ve decided you can attack people you don’t know in rhyme, the floodgates open.”

For more poetic boundary breaking visit Southbank Centre’s user-generated world map of poetry, Global Poetry System. Explore the map and upload your own poem here.

This month, as part of Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil, Global Poetry System will be focusing on this vibrant South American country. The GPS team have been busy gathering some of our favourite examples of Brazilian poetry, and we’ll be showcasing these alongside your own uploads on the poetry map. From songs about isolation by Arnaldo Antunes, to Elizabeth Bishop’s translations of Sambas, there’s already plenty of great poetry to explore and experience.

It’s a unique way to gain an insight into this fantastic country’s culture, and whilst some of the poems you’ll discover offer glimpses into a distinctively Brazilian way of life, others offer a striking and heart warming demonstration of the universality of many poetic themes.

So if you’ve got a poem that you think could feature, be it a holiday snap of Brazilian street art, odes to Pelé, or poems laced with the rhythms of samba, we invite you to upload them to the map for others to explore.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

Global Poetry System continues its quest to map the poetry found on the landscapes of the world. Recently we’ve also been getting in touch with some of the long-term ‘Global Poets’ who have made GPS the far reaching and fascinating forum for poetry that it has become. Those of you who are frequent visitors to the site will be familiar with the growing collection of stones and their scribblings that are punctuating the sands down at South Sea.  Over 200 poetic pebbles like these exist as part of an inspiring project pioneered by visual artist and teacher David G Kirby. But what is David’s motivation behind the project, and does he consider himself a poet? We asked David for a short interview to find out.

How do you decide what to write on the stones? Where do you get your inspiration?

One of my tutors once described me as a magpie for ideas.  I like that.  Words and phrases pop into my head any time. They come from topical events, things I’ve done, or read, general knowledge, requests, dialogues, overheard conversations, lyrics – pretty much anything is fair game.  I love to find a thread and pursue it to see what I can get out of it.  My subjects broadly encompass themes of duality, community, continuity and change.

What reaction would you hope to get from people who discover a stone? Is this one of the motivations behind the project?

I hope the range of writing is broad enough that everyone who finds a stone or looks at the archive will find a favourite.  (In addition the ones on the GPS site, there are over 200 photos currently online here.) I enjoy the fact that readers will bring their own associations to the project and find resonances of all kinds.  And the same is true of other work I have seen on the GPS site, which is one of the reasons why I love the whole idea of ‘street’ poetry.  The motivation is simply the urge to write and be creative rather than anything else.  It is immensely satisfying; a real bonus that people are enjoying the project and that it’s successful on that level as well. 

Do you class this as a poetry project, or something else? Do you consider yourself a poet?

There has always been an element of writing or text in my art practice and a focus on producing work independently of traditional institutional access to resources.  I really enjoy the freedom of being part of the ‘Street Art’ culture that has grown in recent years.  For me, the stones come more from an urge to write creatively rather than poetry per se.  I prefer to think of myself as a visual artist who writes.

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Born in North London, David studied Illustration at the University of Portsmouth and made artist’s books for a number of years.  He started teaching Art at Secondary level in 2003 and continues to make and present artwork in various forms in the UK and abroad. 

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poems. You can explore David’s colelction and upload your own poems here.

For those of you who don’t know, bandstand busking is made up of what they temselves describe as “a cooperative of music likers”. Having mournfully realised the lamentable state of many of London’s dilapidated and strikingly empty bandstands, they set out on their mission to reinvigorate the life of park music. Picking out the best of up and coming and established musical talent, the bandstand busking team would lead their chosen band to a bandstand, and film the results. All of which can be viewed here.

The project caught the eye of Richard Thompson, and Bandstand Busking were asked to recreate their mission inside the Royal Festival Hall for two nights as part of this year’s Meltdown Festival.

The concluding night saw a fantastic line up, featuring Crystal Palace Brass Band, Appalachian Storm, Kate Tempest, John Smith, Johnny Flynn, Broadcast 2000, and the raucously fun headliners Slow Club.  The crowds gathered on deck chairs and grass (well…pretend grass…it was indoors after all), and enjoyed a cocktail of poetry, folk, indie pop and wardrobe malfunctions.

It was also interesting to see how poetry and music could be brought together on one billing. Fittingly, the bandstand was erected inside the Royal Festival Hall close by the Global Poetry System whispering window display, which has been playing out specially collected folk verse recordings over the duration of the festival. On one such recording, the song Salley Gardens, Judith Owen comments “It makes total sense to me that this poem started off as something that was sung and I cannot separate it from music”. And with poetry and music meshing so neatly on the Bandstand, it was easy to hear how the two can merge and become inseparable.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

Of course, drawing on real life stories from newspapers or friends for inspiration isn’t a method Los Tigres have invented. From the broadside ballads of the 19th Century to the protest singers of the 60s, news and every day events have provided ample material for artists to work with, manipulating it wildly to their own ends, or attempting to re-tell the story as faithfully as possible.

But as far as we’re aware, this method of drawing from real life stories to create art has never been carried out quite on the scale that the “Bugged” project of “creative eavesdropping” is planning. On the first of July, writers across the UK will be eavesdropping on the conversations around them in order to use what they hear as the basis for a piece of writing. Examples collected so far include ‘Nobody’s inflammable, Mr Michael!’ and ‘I think it was the turtles that did for her in the end.’ Check it out at http://www.bugged.org.uk, and why not have a go yourself? Or, if not, be sure to watch what you say on the first of July!

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

E4’s big purple cow got all literary last week as Pop Up Poetry took over the Udderbelly stage. But in keeping with the quirky goings on in there this wasn’t your average poetry event.  Hosted & curated by pioneering poet Luke Wright, the audience was instantly transported into a world of word wizardry with a generous topping of wit. Luke’s perceptive poetry weaves worlds from day-to-day observations such as an altered chip shop sign, and takes the audience through a thoughtful soundscape of poetic story-telling. 

The night continued with award winning comedian Tim Key.  His series of poems read from playing-cards covered such topics as the perils of eating too many Magnums due to heart break and advice on baking disastrous pies. The ambience created by his easy listening background music and ‘aloof poet’ persona set up a cunning canvas on which his social hyperbole and banal monologue become cleverly executed satirical stand-up. 

Laura Dockrill was next on the stage, a fiery furnace of freestyle, foot stomping poetry with fluorescent orange boots to match. Laura’s animated narratives are refreshingly fantastical, combining the sinister and the whimsical with a dramatic deliverance that simply cannot be ignored. Poetic morals such as ‘don’t trust turnips’ disguise deeper and darker meanings which run beneath the surface of her poetry. 

The night ended with Kate Tempest who prefers not to be described as an urban poet, but doesn’t mind sharing the title with John Keats. Her passionate performance had all the rhymes and rhythm of rap, making it unsurprising that Kate also fronts a band, The Sound of Rum. Her uncensored commentary on life in South London is both bleak and hopeful, and is combined with a commanding stage presence that makes Kate an unstoppable force.  It’s easy to see why Kate is causing such a commotion on the London spoken word scene, and indeed that of the whole country. 

The next Pop Up Poetry event will be on the 7^th of July, featuring slam champion Bryon Vincent and the hilarious Chris Addison (The Thick of It, In The Loop, Skins) in his first-ever live poetry gig. 

For more poetic boundary breaking visit Southbank Centre’s user-generated world map of poetry, Global Poetry System. Explore the map and upload your own poems here.   

 You can also watch Laura Dockrill performing her favourite poem from childhood for Global Poetry System here.

We’ve also prepared a treat for all those who venture past Southbank Centre during June. One of the Royal Festival Hall windows will be set up with invisible speakers to play out Global Poetry System recordings whenever somebody walks by. From short poems and snippets of lullabies, to unique recordings from internationally acclaimed artists, poetry and folk verse from across the world will float over the London soundscape.

Inside the Hall we’re also making a lounge area where you can explore the songs and poems in greater detail and read stories about their origins and connections to particular places. If you’re in the area, come and visit from 11–21 June, or check out the full collection online. Look for the red pins in the GPS map to pick out our special collection.

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry. Explore the map and upload poems here.

Sea shanties or graffiti, haikus or tattoos: whatever kinds of poems you’re interested in it’s now simple to find them on the GPS website. The sparkly new search function allows you to locate exactly what you’re looking for, or discover a poem about something completely random, like unicorns or mashed potato.

You’ll now also find a commenting box next to every GPS poem, so you can let the world know what you think about it. Which are your favourite poems, and why? Connect with other GPS users and give them feedback, as well as adding any inside info you might have about the uploads in your area.

In other news, participants ‘rewrote’ history in a Global Poetry System workshop last week. The local history section was raided at Twickenham Library, and text was transformed from the factual and formal into poetic flights of fancy, simply by rearranging the words.

The result was a range of unique hybrid poems inspired by the local area. You can view the poems on the GPS website.

Why not try the workshop yourself, and share your creations with the rest of the world? Here is a step by step guide on how it’s done:

1. Select a local history book that interests you

2.Open it at a random page

3.Photocopy the page, enlarging it to A3 size

4. Cut out the individual words or phrases

5. Rearrange and play around with the words or phrases, using as much or as little of the whole text as you wish

6. When you are happy with your poetic creation, stick the words down onto paper, writing in any extra words that you would like to include

7. Enjoy and share your poem

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry. Explore the map and upload poems here.

Tabish Khair

In our recent interviews with Tabish Khair and Jeet Thayil, we were treated to two fascinating conversations about the relationship between place and poetry. Central to both discussions was the premise that, for both writers, place was clearly more than a physical location on a map. Four walls and a roof may be described as both a “house” and a “home”, but in the latter description those four walls and roof take on many extra levels of meaning. Equally, India is a country bordering Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma; but “India” also represents an ideology, a culture, and, perhaps most importantly, a home.

Jeet Thayil also discusses “The city that you live in in your head”, implying place can be thought about as a set of ideas, rather than just a geographical location. And this isn’t a school of thought unique to poetry. Who after all, can watch the landscapes of America portrayed in the 1969 film Easy Rider, without connecting them to the idealised freedoms of the “American Dream”? Or more recently, in her 2010 album Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom sees place as inseparable from emotion, and indeed, inseparable from herself: ‘but if you come and see me, in California,/ you cross the border of my heart.’

In fact, the more you think about it, the more places become emotions and ideas, and less geographical locations marked by maps.

As Tabish indicates, place can inspire poetry, but on Global Poetry System, we’ve also found plenty of examples of poetry inspiring place. It’s even turning up on neurotic rocks:

Keep your eyes peeled and see what poetry you can find on the places near you. Or perhaps try writing your own poem about a place that means something to you. Whatever you do, remember to upload it to the Global Poetry System website afterwards so the world can enjoy it.

Joanna Newsom is performing at Southbank Centre on the 11^th and 12th of May, and works by both Tabish Khair and Jeet Thayil  can be found in the Poetry Library here at Southbank Centre.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

During Alchemy’s Contemporary Indian Poetry event the audience were taken on a journey through countryside and concrete, contemplation and comedy. We took scenic paths through the realms of traditional form with Karthika Nair, and dived into dramatic performance with Tabish Khair. We encountered unexpected animals with Jeet Thayil, before ending up on the surprising seas of an explicit rap.

Jeet, poet and editor of the Contemporary Indian Poetry Anthology which was central to the event, described how the collection is void of many of the stereotypes associated with India, and is truly an international collection drawing on a myriad of themes and diverse experiences. Throughout the readings the originality and individuality of each poet was clear. Highlights included the delicate power of Tishani Doshi’s extracts from her collection Countries of the Body, and  Jeet’s series of instructional poems including such literary quirks as ‘How to be a Horse’.

Global Poetry System caught up with Karthika for an insightful interview, in which she explained how the poems in her collection Meridians are shaped by their international title locations, and by her Indian upbringing.   

Karthika has travelled and lived in India, China, France and the USA.   But how, if at all, do these countries inhabit her poetry, and in what ways does she construct their distinct landscapes with her choices of form and language?

You can find the Contemporary Indian Poetry Anthology in the Poetry Library here at Southbank Centre, along with collections by all of the poets who performed in the event.

Take us on your own poetic journey by uploading to our user-generated world map of poetry, Global Poetry System.  Explore the map here.

In other news: Thanks to feedback and suggestions by visitors to the GPS website it is now possible to comment on poems. Which images do you find particularly inspiring, or do you know a little bit more about? Now you can let people know by using the commenting function.

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

This week Global Poetry System launches an exciting new project with hopes of instigating its own analogue ‘revolution’ across the world. Twenty disposable cameras have been sent to various locations to begin what will be a series of unique and eventful journeys. The recipients range from Global Poetry System partner organisations like The Scottish Poetry Library and The Verbal Arts Centre to poets and members of the public. They have each been asked to adopt their camera for 48 hours, with a mission to spontaneously snap a poem on their local landscape in whatever form and framing they discover it. The first in the chain will then send the camera on to a person of their choosing, who will seek out a poem in their own locality, and so on until the films are full. The cameras will eventually return back home to Southbank Centre, well travelled and poetically enlightened. We can’t wait to develop the images and share them with you in June, along with the people and places that the cameras encountered along the way. Who knows where they might spend their summer, and just how far they will travel?  For updates on their whereabouts, you can visit the discussion board on our Facebook fan page.

If you would like to be one of the chosen few to recieve a GPS camera and launch it on its analogue adventure then contact us at gps@southbankcentre.co.uk with your postal address.

Global Poetry System is a user-generated world map of poetry. Upload poems and explore the map here.

And if Zena’s insightful views on spoken word’s interaction with music have ‘struck a chord’, why not check out her performances with singer songerwriter Jamie Woon on the Apples and Snakes album Twofive, or her recent publication “Security”, both of which are available in the Poetry Library here at Southbank.

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry.
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/gps

Could you do one thing each day to get you that  little bit closer?

As part of the London Word Festival more than 1000 participants made daily self improvements in the 100 days to make me a better person project captained by comedienne Josie Long. Adventurous artist and inventor Twentington wrote a sixteen line poem everyday, whilst poet Chrissie Williams embarked on a quest to learn 100 new words, discovering such dictionary quirks as porraceous (leek-green?!) and endeavouring to use them in conversation. Other participants learnt French, spoke to strangers and mastered the art of knitting.  

  In the spirit of trying something new, Southbank Centre Members claimed the mic at the recent Members’ Poetry event, with artist in residence Lemn Sissay bringing the laughs and his distinctive poetic dynamics to the mix .

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry.  In keeping with our exploration of poetry and place, this week we recommend Tom Chivers’ How to Build a City for a poetic tour of London from all sorts of alternative angles. You can find his book in the Poetry Library here at Southbank Centre.

Collaborations and fusions like these seem to be growing in popularity. More and more artists are stepping out of their boxes as poets or musicians and meeting in the colourful spaces in-between.

A recent upload to the Global Poetry System website shows the words of the Romantic writer Jean Paul Richter, which were discovered on the wall of a pub. He eloquently describes music as ‘the poetry of the air’, reminding us that this mingling of genres has a long standing tradition. The relationship between poetry and music has always been a symbiotic one, with ballads and their musical poetics adopted by storytellers and news bearers as early as the thirteenth century.  Can modern day lyrics be described as poetry? Perhaps it depends on the song, or what it means to the listener.

Blue, Joni Mitchell

This month, Global Poetry System will be exploring this connection. Everyone has songs that could contribute to the mixtape of their life; maybe the lyrics that define a first festival, a wedding, or a childhood memory.  Music can conjure old sights and sounds, car rides and summers. It can remind us of something, or help us to forget. Personally, for better or worse, The Seekers Train Whistle Blowing will always remind me of setting out for early morning camping trips in my parents orange Lada, half the contents of our household strapped to the roof-rack. Which are the tracks that can take you back to a different place at a different time? Scribble your favourite lyrics where you will: on your feet, in the street, or get creative and record them as audio. If ‘songs are like tattoos’, then why not give your skin some temporary decoration? Take inspiration from this weeks featured poets, who have all captured their favourite lyrics in unusual places, or visit the Poetry Library here at Southbank Centre. The collection includes an interesting array of books by musicians from Bob Dylan to composer John Cage, find out more on their website.

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry. Put your musical memory on the Global Poetry System map.

 If poetry is all around us, then the odds are we stumble across it every day. It can be found everywhere from on gravestones to graffiti, and we can either laugh at it, cry at it, or simply wander away from it a little perplexed. But when we capture it on film, we set in place a most curious process.

Poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings […] recollected in tranquillity”, and what is photography if not just that? A photograph can call to mind past emotions at any time, and so the photo functions as a poem itself.

Wordsworth was clearly calling to mind a powerful impression left upon him by the River Thames when he wrote the following lines:
“Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames! that other bards may see
As lovely visions by thy side
As now, fair river! come to me.
O glide, fair stream! for ever so,
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
Till all our minds for ever flow
As thy deep waters now are flowing”

And nearly 210 years later, I captured those very lines on my camera:

Now, when I look on these photos, I call to mind not only Wordsworth’s initial overflow of emotion recollected in tranquillity, but I can recollect in tranquillity my own spontaneous encounter with the poem. A photo of a written poem, therefore, necessarily contains many layers of spontaneity and tranquillity which mingle and inform each other. How do these photos change the poem for you?

And when it comes to spontaneity on film, no one does it better than Lomography.  More than just an analogue camera company, Lomography describe themselves as “an international socio-cultural movement using photography as a creative approach to communicating, absorb and capturing the world.” Here on Global Poetry System we’ve been wowed by some of the fantastic photos uploaded from Lomography users. And when you check out the Lomography “10 golden rules”, it’s easy to see why Lomography is so well suited for poetry hunting:

• Take your camera everywhere you go
• Use it any time – day and night
• Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it
• Try the shot from the hip
• Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible
• Don’t think (william firebrace)
• Be fast
• You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
• Afterwards either
• Don’t worry about any rules

And in celebration of some of the wonderful Lomography photos we’ve received, this week’s featured poems on GPS were all taken on Lomography cameras. You can check them out here.

So, even if you don’t have a Lomography camera yourself, try living by some of their “golden rules”. And remember, photos don’t have to add layers of meaning to inherently poetic text; they can actually create poetry in text where there was none before. So get creative and get snapping, see what you can find, and share it on the Global Poetry System.

Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry found at www.southbankcentre.co.uk/gps