This poem was created as part of Byron’s My Place or Yours commission and performed at Bristol’s Arnolfini in September. Sorry about the wonky camera-work at the beginning -- it does settle down!

Jay Bernard’s My Place or Yours residency on two allotments -- one in London and one in Oxford -- inspired some wonderful new poems. She performed these for the first time at Apples & Snakes in Soho in June 2009.

This is part one:

This is from Alice Ochocka, Education and Training officer at Apples & Snakes

My first introduction to Shunt was a dark, damp tunnel under London bridge station on Monday 5th October. I felt so sure that I had been transported back to 1940s wartime London that my own modern day denim clothes looked out of place and utterly alien. The first stumbling block was finding the enigmatic doorbell to this secret world. After struggling with this for a shameful amount of time, I was at last ushered inside and found myself in the most extraordinary space I have ever experienced.

A vast maze of arches, tunnels and corridors of aircraft hangar proportions make up the Shunt vaults. The walls ache with the dampness of ghostly happenings and round every corner, more Victorian brickwork stretches forwards into the unknown. Every now and again, our quiet reveries were interrupted by screams and thuds from the London Dungeons, just a brick wall away.

Curator and one of the founders of Shunt, Hannah Ringham, led myself and five fantastic emerging artists – Molly Naylor, Joshua Idehen, Joe Hakim, Helen Mort and Byron Vincent – in an afternoon of creative thinking and writing, responding to the idea of ‘when nobody’s listening’. I loved this brief and while I hung about on the peripheries, contemplating the chairs scattered about like dice, drinking in the thick atmosphere and letting the real performers get down to it, it was a treat to reflect on the spaces in between what is said, for a change. We were encouraged to focus on fleshy pauses and the off beats of conversation, subtly playing with the audience.

Each poet responded differently, with their ideas reflecting their personalities and their individual thoughts about performance, and what it means to be heard (or not heard). Helen Mort wanted to tell stories from a stage above the door, of a tragic mountaineering event when someone realises there’s no-one on the other end of the rope. Byron was taken by an idea to wander about unnoticed, blending with the revelers and dropping comments in the style of an internal monologue.

As the final Friday performance approaches, and the artists literally take to the rafters of Shunt’s bustling bar, I know it is going to be a night to remember.

This is an extract from Rukus’s performance at the Apples & Snakes event Holding Our Ground in May 09.
He debuts new material from his residency on the streets of Derby.

Jay gives us a tour of Barracks Lane Community Garden, Oxford (part 2 of 2). Filmed by Russell Thompson of Apples & Snakes

Jay gives us a tour of Barracks Lane Community Garden, Oxford (part 1 of 2). Filmed by Russell Thompson of Apples & Snakes

Tonight Iain Sinclair, the poet laureate of London’s peripheries, takes a break from pacing the streets and ventures into W1. With a brace of big-selling books behind him – including London Orbital and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire – he is the arch-sniffer-out of the sense of place. Although ‘banned’ by certain borough councils for suggesting that the capital is worth more than whatever fast buck is being wrung out of it this week, he continues to strike a chord with those Londoners who prefer to look beyond the obvious. This evening he reads a selection of his poetry and prose.

Rukus will be previewing some of his My Place or Yours work this Friday at The Albany in Deptford, London as part of Holding Our Ground, “a celebration of poetry and place”.

Also on the line-up is the wild and wonderful Mark Gwynne Jones, who will be presenting Whose Common Now?, a specially commissioned poem-sequence that celebrates London’s parkland whilst pondering the extent to which the public really owns so-called public places.

In addition, we’ve got London Transport Museum’s poet-in-residence Abraham Gibson and sometime BBC playwright Nandita Ghose adding their own sidelong take on what it means to be a Londoner (or not). And finally, there’ll be some placey post-punk chanson from Sussex songthrush Pog.

When: Friday 15 May 8pm
Where: The Albany, Douglas Way, London, SE8 4AG
Tickets: £8 / £5
Booking: 020 8692 4446 / www.thealbany.org.uk
Info: www.applesandsnakes.org

Looking back at the Apples & Snakes archive, I noticed this recording of Emma performing a poem inspired by her work at a homeless hostel, at Apples & Snakes in Soho November 2007: