Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

As part of the centenary celebrations of the Poetry Society, more than 800 people in the UK are knitting and crocheting individual letters to create the word’s first giant knitted poem. The poem itself, selected by Poetry Society director Judith Palmer, will be kept top secret, until being revealed to all in the Clore Ballroom at Southbank Centre , on National Poetry Day, 8 October 2009.

The knitters are currently sending their individual 12 inch square letters to the Poetry Society post room, with their favourite poems attached to the back. Hopefully, we’ll see some of these poems on GPS, the pins marking the diverse places on the map that have helped create the final woolen masterpiece.

Poetry displayed by something as innocuous as ink on a page, can produce impressions in the reader that are as large as life itself, feelings that are ethereal and profound. Now’s your chance to see what happens when poetry is displayed a little differently: on a huge, collaborative, handmade tapestry, which, if you think about it, symbolises the population of people that poetry touches. I’m inclined to think the physical scale of the creation will do justice to the scale of what it is that poetry can achieve. And besides, painters employ devices such as size, texture, and colour to effect their art, so why shouldn’t poetry make use of the same?

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Seeing the work of The Wooster Collective has made me think about how G.P.S. can be a great way to map ephemeral outdoor art. The Wooster Collective showcases all kinds of street/surrounding art, but some of their posts have shown that work like this sometimes uses language in a poetic way. Great examples of work I saw on their site include this fridge magnet billboard in Seattle.

This pedestrian poem reminded me of something related I found and posted on G.P.S.

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