Reading books, and in particularly poetry, can be a solitary experience, and sometimes you need a concentrated silence to be able to parse the words on a line-by-line basis, particularly if the work is dense and laden with layered symbolism.
Yet poetry can also benefit from a communal experience. Taking the poems off the page to see how they fly in the public arena can bring a new audience, those who wouldn’t normally pick up a collection of poetry in a bookshop or library.
As well as (slam) poetry readings, there has been poetry published on billboards and buses, deliberately left behind on public transport for accidental discovery and even printed on selected wine labels. A few years ago, a street-led festival called Raining Poetry in Adelaide stencilled short lines of poems on pavement with invisible ink – the words would appear magically when wet.
ArtsHub spoke to two poets who’ve experimented with more immersive and interactive modes of communication.
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Phone-a-Poem
This year’s Daylesford’s Around the Town program in their Words in Winter Festival in late August, invites visitors to pick up retro handsets dotted across the town and listen to recorded poems by featured poets, including Alex Creece and Barry Gilson.
Izzy Roberts-Orr is the instigator behind Phone-a-Poem, and tells ArtsHub, ‘I’ve always loved the intimacy of the audio medium – and phone calls (especially rotary dial landline phones!) are an anachronism in our era that conjure nostalgia for many, and curiosity for youngsters.
‘There’s often a barrier for audiences to engaging with poetry in my experience – I think in part because people may associate it with particularly dry lessons, or because they feel like there’s a certain amount of knowledge they need to hold in order to find the key that unlocks the work.
‘Poetry can ask its audience to work sometimes – which there can be great joy in, but it’s also understandably an impediment to folks getting into the art form if they feel they’re being charged admission at entry.
‘Both grownups and kids love the novelty of the old school handset and that playfulness opens them up to listen to poetry differently and engage with curiosity I find!’
The Poetry Dispensary
The Words in Winter Festival also features a collaboration with local herbalist Caroline Parker, that blends poetry with herbal remedies – think poetic ‘prescriptions’ paired with teas, offering a whimsical twist on public engagement. You get a personalised poem and herbal tisane as well as reading recommendations and writing prompts.
Parker is a degree-qualified herbalist and maker of award-winning herbal teas, and author of The Medicinal Garden.
As Roberts-Orr points out, ‘We both have long running arts practices that engage with installation and small-scale or one-on-one experiences, so it made sense to us to bring our expertise and our passions together and offer a metaphysical balm.’
Words Rising
Then there’s Words Rising, an event that sees the festival partner with local Daylesford bakery Twofold Bakehouse. This initiative sees every loaf of bread sold at the regional farmers market wrapped in a poem, story or recipe (with golden tickets for a festival double pass hidden in two of them.)
Guerilla Poetry
Produced by artist Jean-Marc Dupré, Guerilla Poetry runs throughout the festival weekend and introduces pairs of local volunteers who will surprise café-goers and pedestrians with spontaneous multilingual poetry readings.
Each poem will be delivered first in its original language – whether German, French, Middle English, Kabylian, Serbian, or others –followed by an English translation. These pop-up performances will be unannounced and are a strategic way to bring poetry into everyday spaces, celebrating both language and community.
Chainsaw Poetics
Don’t be put off by the oddly violent title, this event is actually a poetry workshop for anybody who is curious about the power of writing poetry in dark times.
‘The crux of the workshop is to create a safe yet open space for expressing rage and taboo in writing and then crafting these into order and resonance using some simple approaches to poetic form. We will be taking poetry off the page by creating it as a communal group in a public space at Radius Art, trusting ourselves with dark ideas and gaining some solidarity from the shared experience of making a skilled artefact that others can appreciate’ says Bonny Cassidy who’s running Chainsaw Poetics.
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‘As writers of any level, it’s important to take poetry off the page in order to experience sharing of creative skills and knowledge. As readers and audiences, public experiences of poetry can break through and disrupt social norms and niceties’ she points out.
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