Each month the GPS team will help sharpen your poetic eye by suggesting themes for your GPS posts. This month’s theme is inspired by Ed Ruscha and the 50-year retrospective of his work that is now on show in the Hayward Gallery.
Ed Ruscha: OOF, 1962 (reworked 1963)
Ed Ruscha’s paintings explore the range of associations that come with how a word looks or sounds, and the ambiguous responses that everyday words can evoke. Just as Ed Ruscha began to see common typography as art, so you can begin to see found words as poetry. Familiar or seemingly innocuous words can sometimes appear abstract, with some unintended or mystical meaning. These are the words that form this month’s GPS theme. So find them, map them, and share them!
Here are some GPS posts to help get you in the mood…
Lost: Poster or Poem found by The Scottish Poetry Library’s Ryan Van Winkle
Please Play found by GPS’s Lucy
Abandon Ship found by Tom Chivers
Survival Cache found by Kathleen M. Heideman
The GPS team hope to feature content that catches their eye, so think eye-catching! Often it is the context of the word that is striking or strangely associative. Words in a text sit in context with other words, but a cluster of isolated words can be a ’text’ in itself, and the environment it inhabits becomes its context.
GPS connects these isolated incidents on an online map, and allows photographs of poetry to be uploaded, creating a new kind of virtual text exhibition. Look out for the exhibits!
Global Poetry System is a user generated world map of poetry in partnership with these orgainsations.
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