GPS is Global Poetry System, a new website from Southbank Centre that creates a user generated world map of poetry – find out more at www.southbankcentre.co.uk/gps.
Litfest, one of the country’s oldest literature festivals, has been mapping poetry everywhere – from war memorials to tattoos, from children’s nursery rhymes to public art.
Oral historian Marie-Claire Balaam has been travelling around Lancashire gathering all things poetic. She was surprised how people took to the idea – after she got past the first reaction of ‘Poetry? I don’t know any poetry’, there were fragments of it in everyone’s life. I spent Friday afternoon with Morecambe Bay Writers’ Group, as they reminisced about poems they remembered from childhood. It was great how many lines and rhymes and whole long poems were stored in their memories, emerging to comfort, or entertain, or call back a moment in time. What poems have stayed with you from childhood? What happens when you say them out loud? Global Poetry System welcomes any forgotten fragments or whole poems off by heart – upload them to our world map of poetry.
Filed under: Global Poetry System Tagged: | Global Poetry System, GPS, lancashire, Literature, Litfest, Southbank Centre
