Before my gig at the Soho Theatre on June 24th I worked with director Thierry Lawson at the Albany in London. Now. My ’style’, which is another way of saying ‘comfort zone’, is to stand in front of the microphone and read from the page. I haven’t learned one of my own poems since 2005. When I first started out I believed I had to write something new for every gig and learn it by heart. Needless to say I was a disaster – disorganised, under-rehearsed and lacking confidence – because I did not (and still do not) understand how to achieve things PRIOR to the night before they’re due. So I turned up and read my poems one after the other in front of Thierry who shook his head and proceeded to show me how I might make my reading more engaging. He was careful to point out that if I depended on the page then I couldn’t fill the space with my body and would have to do it using my voice. So I read things loudly, in monotone, to get used to spitting words as far across the room as possible; wandered around sighing to get used to making noises freer than the ones I make with words; I pretended to be submerged in a tank; I stood and read on a chair; jumped down… And whilst none of the physical exercises were transferable to the Soho Theatre, two things happened.

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