A national community arts project, where poems are matched to precise locations, is reinventing a 17th-century classic for the digital agePinned just west of Marsden, Yorkshire on a 17th-century map of the UK, is a poem by the UK´s new poet laureate, Simon Armitage. `The sky has delivered / its blank missive. / The moor in coma.` Move west, to the Isle of Man, and the poet is a little less well known - she´s dubbed herself Mrs Yorkshire the Baking Bard - but the sense of place is just as strong (and the rhymes are better, too): `I climbed Maughold Head as the morning sun rose / And the darkness surrendered to light / Where the buttery bloom of the golden gorse grows / And adventurous seabirds take flight.`The poems - two of almost 2,000, and growing - are part of the Places of Poetry project, a community arts initiative where members of the public are invited to write poems and `pin` them on a digital map to the locations in England and Wales that inspired them. Inspired by Michael Drayton´s 17th-century poem Poly-Olbion, a 15,000-word poem on the topography of England and Wales, the project is being run by poet Paul Farley and Andrew McRae from the University of Exeter. Continue reading...
|