The Places of Poetry: a community arts project

The Places of Poetry will create a distinctive digital map of England and Wales, onto which crowd-sourced poems of place, heritage and identity will be pinned in the course of a public campaign in the late-spring and summer of 2019. The project aims to prompt reflection on national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place. The project thus combines a model from the past - the early seventeenth-century epic of national description, Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion - with a commitment to the value of creative practice in the present day.
Poly-Olbion has been the subject of an editorial and critical project led by the PI on this application, Andrew McRae. That project also involved some public-facing work, supported further by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which helped to demonstrate the power today of both Drayton's work and the distinctive county maps published with the poem, by the engraver William Hole. Meanwhile, the poet Paul Farley (Co-I on this project), has spent a number of years working on a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of Poly-Olbion (due for publication with Faber in 2019). This led to the collaboration at the heart of 'The Places of Poetry'.
The new map of England and Wales will draw heavily upon the iconography of Hole's original works, but will be amended as necessary and lightly updated. Since Drayton and Hole only covered England and Wales, The Places of Poetry will also limit itself to these two British nations. The map will be overlaid upon Ordnance Survey data, with functions enabling users not only to zoom in and out, but also to slide between the two maps. Users will be encouraged to pin poems to particular places. The map will be pre-populated with a selection of historic (out of copyright) pieces; however, the project's central aim is to generate original work.
The project website, with the map as its central and defining image, will aim to introduce users to the poetry of place, heritage and identity, and will provide materials designed to coach them through their own compositions. After a period of preparatory work, The Places of Poetry will be promoted through the course of an intensive campaign in the summer of 2019. This will include: a launch event, BBC radio programmes, a national writing-workshops tour, a short film, and social media activity.
The project involves strategic collaborations with The Poetry Society and The Ordnance Survey. Although the project is technically freestanding, a positive response to the present application will trigger further applications (already in advanced states) to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council, for a parallel package of work that would significantly enhance the reach and value of the project. This will be centred on activities with major regional arts and heritage partners, and involving a programme of poets-in-residence. It will focus on particular user-communities (e.g. age, location, background), and different kinds of heritage (e.g. pre-historic, Roman, agricultural, industrial, religious, natural).
The website will remain open for contributions for ten weeks. Towards the end of this period, the PI will write a reflective article about the project. As a legacy, there may be opportunities for commercial development, while the site will remain in existence after the project closes, as an archive of the poetry of place, heritage and identity in the summer of 2019.

This project casts its net widely, aiming to engage with a national audience and to focus on fundamental questions of place, heritage and identity. But it will also use targeted actions to ensure impact: measured in terms of both the quality and quantity of public engagement.

Who might benefit?

1. Writers and potential writers of poetry. Our partner, The Poetry Society, has 4000 members and strong links with writing groups, schools and cultural organisations across the country. We will work with them not only to connect with potential contributors, but also to develop materials designed to coach people through the process of writing a poem of place, heritage and identity. Some of these materials will be designed for teachers, at both primary and secondary levels. We will use conventional media and social media to expand our reach.

2. Partners. Our partner organisations stand to benefit from this project, in various ways. The Poetry Society will benefit in terms of the project's alignment with its own mission, and further from association with a project which aims to stretch the core demographic range in its membership. The Ordnance Survey is keen to be associated with the project as an example of public engagement with its data, and because of an overlap with some of its current campaigns.

3. Heritage organizations. Our proposed parallel applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council will centre on partnerships with particular regional heritage sites/organizations. We propose that this project presents considerable scope for such organisations to connect in ways that will enhance their profile and public recognition.


How might they benefit?

1. Engagement with poetry
This project unashamedly contends that poetry can have transformative effects on individuals and communities. In this context, as noted above, we aim to engage with as wide a range of writers as possible, giving equal status on the map to skilled professionals and untried amateurs. We also note here our commitment to a consideration of identity. 'The Places of Poetry' aims to engage writers in reflection on their own places in England and Wales. We want to capture the multiplicity of identities, and therefore the rich complexity of nationhood in 2019.

2. Profile
'The Places of Poetry' aims to pool the energies and resources of stakeholders - from those of funding bodies, through those of partners, and on to those of individual writers and readers - to create something with significant public profile. This will be beneficial for all those involved: for individual poets, partner institutions, and those people employed on the project.

3. Alignment of objectives with partners
In our planning, we have identified partners with objectives aligned with our own. Most obviously, the project aligns with the Poetry Society's founding objective, to promote the 'recognition and appreciation of poetry'. The Ordnance Survey, meanwhile, aims to make its unparallelled cartographic data more visible and usable in a digital age.

4. Commercial
While we do not begin this project aiming for commercial returns, we note possibilities in at least two respects. Firstly, we will generate original poetry that may be of value to a commercial publisher. Notably, we will partner in our HLF/Arts Council project with Little Toller Books, a small publisher specializing in poetry and environmental writing, so this would be a likely outlet. Secondly, the map (before it becomes overly cluttered with pins) will be a striking and beautiful object, which might well be worth reproducing in various forms (e.g. posters, T-shirts). Thirdly, it is conceivable that further commercial opportunities may emerge in the wake of the project (e.g. television adaptations of the project, or extensions of its model into new countries).