I have absolutely nothing to write about this week. I spent five years pursuing a PhD, determined it wouldn’t affect my poetry life. I submitted the work in May, including a collection of 100 poems, small proof that it actually enhanced my life in poetry. But this week I have nothing poetic to write about: unless you count that I’ve updated my desk calendar with a whole lot of upcoming writing/submitting deadlines, some of which I might even meet. Why this dearth? Because my week has been taken up with planning a holiday. I’m planning to take a notebook, my MacBook; I’m planning to fulfil some of those deadlines from some bummy sunbed in Corfu. Watch this space.
But for this week, nothing to report. Nada. So I’m going to tell you about a poetry project, Places of Poetry, which is aiming to fill the map of the England and Wales with poems. https://www.placesofpoetry.org.uk
It’s the brainchild of poet Paul Farley and academic Andrew McRae and it’s based in the Universities of Exeter and Lancaster. You can find out all about the project on the Poetry Society website:
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/projects/the-places-of-poetry/
There are a variety of poetry residencies with activities and events planned throughout the country. A poet friend, Jo Bell, has a residency at the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Blaenavon later in the summer. She placed this Write Out Loud blog post on her FaceBook page, about the Places of Poetry project. I thought I’d share it:
The project is open to any poet, amateur or professional, who wishes to pin a poem to the map. It’s a great project. I was one of the eager early poem-pinners when I first heard of the project from my Poetry Society newsletter earlier this year. I posted an ‘alternative mother’ poem about the fens, where I grew up. I re-visited the map before I started to write this and it’s filling up with regional poems of all kinds, a fantastic resource. I found one from the new poet Laureate, Simon Armitage; I found a couple from fellow Stanza reps; I found poems from Rod Whitworth and Linda Goulden, members of my own stanza. I found poems from several poetry friends. I visited Wales and Anglesey and found poems in Welsh, poems in Welsh with English translation. Take a look for yourself. Visit your favourite haunts in a poetry binge. It really is a celebration. There are still huge swathes of the map available, so you might even want to pin a poem to the map yourself.
So, it’s a short blog spot this week. Enjoy exploring the map. Right now, I’m off to fling some things in a suitcase. I’ll see you on the other side. Here’s the poem I pinned to the map in Cambridgeshire:
Alternative Mother #5
The Fens
If landscape has mountains, forests,
a river forcing its course to the sea
she is no landscape.
If her horizon is fourteen miles away
your eyes will see for fourteen miles
across her sea-drained bed.
If goddesses reach down to touch her soil
there is nothing between their fingers
and her fecundity.
Her sky though, look at her sky,
high and wide as heaven!
She celebrates all the literature of skies,
their cumulonimbus poetry,
their war and peace.
Rachel Davies
2018
racheld1607 