Well what can I say about this year’s glasto, it started with me getting my Tipi nicked and went down hill from there, and I missed The Specials. In fact I missed pretty much everything. I don’t think I have the requisite fortitude for that festival anymore. It’s like Ong Thanh meets Blackpool during a dysentery pandemic. (”Hey maaan, you weren’t there Maaaan”)

Four quid for a tepid brew with a dead wasp in it, pfft. Maybe I’m just getting old.

If it wasn’t for Apples and Snakes very own Pete Hunter lending me a spare tent I’d have had to fashion a shelter out of spent glow sticks and discarded K wraps. Cheers Pete, you’re a gent.

The first thing I encountered as I entered the main site was a bar selling over priced, urophagic lager to a bunch of sludge sodden wreck-heads who probably thought ANC was a clothes shop for dyslexics. It was a massive red, gold and green marquee hilariously named the Nelson Mandela bar. Did someone really think that this would be a fitting accolade? Maybe it’s just me, but taking the name of one of greatest political icons of the last century and using it to extort money out of crapulent punters in a cynical commercial enterprise seems somewhat incongruent with the festival’s original ethos?

I’ve just arrived back from Texas physically exhausted but utterly energised.  One of the reasons for this mental upbeatness is this photo  – it’s a scene from my notebook written in one of the many seminars I went to at the SXSW Interactive Festival.  It’s made me even more excited by the aims and potential of My Place Or Yours and creating online places to share to understand our work together.

It’s been a great week for digital innovation and literature at SXSWi.  The company Six to Start won best in show for their online project with Penguin – http://wetellstories.co.uk/ – Six writers commissioned to write digital fiction that could only be told online.

In the panel session Six to Start were hosting, I said how pleased I was that literature had been championed on this platform and that I would take this achievement back to the community I work with and celebrate.  So in writing this post I am keeping my promise.

It’s about connecting and collaboration.  During my time at SXSWi, I’ve learned more about the possibilities and potential of interactivity for performance poetry and also working with other interactive genres and specialisms who are asking themselves similar questions regarding audiences, infrastructure development and creative opportunities.

The delegation I was part of were asked to blog our experiences of the festival, and they certainly did.  The huge amount of blogging from the group was fantastic to read.  The posts included so many different approaches to style, opinion and analysis.  I won’t deny that blogging is a relatively new thing for me and it was great to be around people who were very comfortable with this way of working. It gave me more confidence to blog my thoughts and comment on others in a more immediate way – to think of the conversation and not the statement.

In light of this, I thought I’d share with you some of the conversations that have happened this week, here is a link -  http://www.ished.net/projects/sxsw/?page_id=2

I’d be interested to see what you think and how it might connect to you.

I’ve been thinking about our memories of places and how we ascribe emotions and relationships to place which may not be accurate and often conceal truths we’d rather forget.

I was born in Halifax and my Grandparents lived there until fairly recently.  I was excited to hear about Channel  Four’s new drama Red Riding.  I hadn’t read the books and frankly can’t have read much of the pre-publicity.  Oh a drama about my homeland, rolling hills, heather, a pint of good bitter, the Bronte sisters and Winifred Holtby, think I.  http://www.librarything.com/author/holtbywinifred

Oh but no, Yorkshire in the 1970’s was tough and Red Riding didn’t hide this.  It was really well written but extremely dark and disturbing.  My parents left Halifax for the South Yorkshire countryside for a reason, and they didn’t stay there long!

http://redriding.channel4.com/

I wonder, what is the history of the places that you know?  How is that represented now and what do you think about that representation.  Cornwall and the Lake District have similarly sugar coated images that conceal poverty and deprivation – Anna and Emma what do you think?  What was in the places that you are in residence and what will be there in the future?  Who occupied these places before us?

Geraldine

How do you put a city into words? Synthesising the vastness, the complexity and the contradictory; conveying the multiplicity of voices as if they could ever be perceived as a single sound; showing one moment in the life of a place that stretches back into many histories…

I’ve been looking and listening out for words that capture a sense of place, and in particular cities.  Halfway through Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s brilliant and powerful novel set in Belfast after the ceasefire, he pauses in his alternating character narratives to spend a chapter showing the reader his Belfast.  it is a place where ‘the streets smell stale and tired [...] Time seems passing and passed.  The city feels how it feels to grow old’ but where there is magic in the ghosts of whispered stories.  It is a city that can ’stick to your fingers like Sellotape’.  It becomes a living, breathing entity.  Over six pages McLiam Wilson manages to capture something of the life of this city, and perhaps something of the truth of all cities.  I wanted to share this:

Cities are simple things.  they are conglomerations of people.  Cities are complex things.  They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations.  What makes a place a city has little to do with its size.  It has to do wth the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts.

But most of all cities are the meeting places of stories.  The men and women there are narratives, endlessley complex and intruiging.  The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous [...] And in the end after generations and generations of the thousands and hundreds of thousands, the city itself begins to absorb narrative like a sponge, like paper absorbs ink.  The past and the present is written there.  The citizenry cannot fail to write there.  Their testimony is involuntary and complete.

I love the idea that a city expresses itself in the millions of stories that comprise it.  The vulgar, the violent, the moments of unexpected beauty.  I want to find this where I live.

Please suggest similarly brilliant evocations of city-ness!

A last word:

“In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense, and all the streets are Poetry Streets.”

Since My Place or Yours is also exploring virtual place, (and it reminded me of the Rukus video diary young people) I found this article interesting by Oliver Burkeman.

“Should we hang out with people we don’t like?”

I’ve now created quite a few of these and am becoming addicted to all the pretty words.

Read Big Willie’s poem as it’s supposed to be.

There are some good tips here from Simon Armitage on what to look for when reading poetry.

http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/PBS/pbs_new_to_poetry.asp

Geraldine

When we started thinking about this project I realised that I love the idea of place.  I can recall memories by where I was rather than who I was with or when it was and one of my favourite things to do is to explore new places or to discover unknown things about familiar places.  I have spent many happy hours reading poetry about place, from Wordsworth to Linton Kwesi Johnson, it’s a familiar and successful theme.  One of my favourite contemporary writers is Alice Oswald whose poetry is so rooted in place.  I’ve posted some links to work by these writers and a few other good resources on my delicious page – http://delicious.com/tomandgerry

Much performance poetry is about the individual and their response to situations, feelings or politics.  The work that Apples & Snakes has commissioned over the past few years has often involved a personal story such as in Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark, or has dealt with responses to personal emotions such as in Exposed or Things that can’t be said.  I am really excited about work that now looks at place and how our poets relate to that in their work.  I recently commissioned new work from four UK based writers and five writers from South East Asia and commissioned them to write on the theme of freedom of expression.  The work is all posted on the blog http://speechlesstour.wordpress.com/ if you want to read it, or more about the discoveries of a group of poets on the road.   One of the most interesting things of that commission was how the different poets brought in their sense of place and how that shaped their personal idea of freedom of expression.  By poets being in residence in different places I think that the writing they produce will be different and the very inspiration of the place itself will bring new influences.  I see it as an opportunity to stretch the writers involved to create their very best work and to set a challenge for the future of performance poetry.  This isn’t about creating work with participants in places but about a residency and a chance for poets to have time to write in a new setting.  It jumps off from the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places project but has an entirely different dimension, the online one.

The residencies will all be shared online through the My Place or Yours site which will track the experiences of the poets and others involved in the project and will then host the work created by the poets as we do it.  One of the things that I like most about performance poetry is its democratic nature, the sense of ‘I can do that’ that you get from shows and the fact that you can go to a local open mic and participate for free.  To me this is the same online (I concede you need to get online which isn’t yet universal) and I think performance poetry has an opportunity to explore this shared democratic space. 

We want our audiences to be part of this process.  To read, comment and add to the work as it is posted, to share your experiences of place and what it means to you.  If you had a residency where might you go?

I realise we are asking poets to do something daunting to share their work as they develop it and I don’t under-estimate that.  Neither do I underestimate where that sharing of work might take us and what possibilities it opens up.

Geraldine Collinge

The allotment in Hampstead is completely outdoors. On one side there’s a shed with solar panels, but that can barely power the lightbulb, let alone heat the place up. So I regularly freeze. And the last fortnight has been scuppered by rain. Today there was a low, bright sun. I got to the allotment to meet Scarlett and the ground was covered in frost. She was very surprised because it’s the first time she’s been out when the sun has been too low to touch any of the frost on her patch. It was intact when I arrived – shards of it glittering on the pea shoots and the beautiful manure piles – and it was still there when we left. I did my first job – digging along the bank, to get rid of some particularly long, slimy roots that would shoot up again unless weeded. Apparently I have good technique and avoided digging holes. I understand the term ‘back breaking’ now, as well; though we were only working for an hour or so, I could feel the strain and wondered how on earth people did this every day, for several hours a day, for their entire lives. A scene in Tess of the D’Urbevilles comes to mind, when she begins to understand the meaning of being ‘wet through’:

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

The more I go, the more I realise how ignorant I am about vegetables, and this is coming from a vegetarian. Every now and then Scarlett would get excited and point to a tiny shoot, far, far away and name it, explain it, tell me when it was likely to bloom properly, how many seasons she’s been growing it, what variety it was… It’s astonishing and humbling. We’re standing in one of the poshest areas in London, where, less than twenty metres away is a giant house with several beautiful cars parked outside. Down the hill is a long street which has Starbuck’s and Carluccio’s, and down an alley a very twee christmas market with the requisite fairy lights and appropriately dressed children. The allotment, on the other hand, is unlit, freezing and beginning to look quite bare. Scarlett pointed out where the onions would be planted (in blocks, not rows) and where the potatoes would go, all in the rapidly fading light. Contrary to the commercial season we’re in, the ground is soft and dark. Things are dying. Plants that should have been harvested are perishing in the frost. Abundance & Merriment versus Black Soil & Silence. .

I just stumbled upon ‘Place’ by Tim Cresswell. You can preview a generous amount of the book here.

Description

This text introduces students of human geography to the fundamental concept of place, marrying everyday uses of the term with the complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.

• A short introduction to one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography.
• Marries everyday uses of the term “place” with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.
• Makes the debates intelligible to students, using familiar stories as a way into more abstract ideas.
• Excerpts and discusses key papers on place by Doreen Massey and David Harvey.
• Considers empirical examples of ways in which the concept of place has been used in research.
• Teaching and learning aids include an annotated bibliography, lists of key readings and texts, a survey of web resources, suggested pedagogical resources and possible student projects.

About the author

Tim Cresswell is Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of In Place / Out of Place (1996) and The Tramp in America (2001). He is also the co-editor of Mobilizing Place. Placing Mobility (2003) and Engaging Film (2002).