Poet’s Path – Slide into the Beyond

Faber Academy and Urban Brew installed a Poet’s Path in Russel Square Gardens as part of the Bloomsbury Festival.  Words taken from three poems were printed on strips of white poster board and displayed in sheets of plastic pockets, which were hung on the side of the pathway.  The public was invited to choose words and put them together to make a poem and then hang it in the pathway.

I was there and made a poem.

Come, let us pluck the settling fruit from the evening…

…and slide into the beyond.

Mine was too long to hang vertically, so I hung it horizontally. While I was struggling to hang it, a fellow wearing a Faber Academy T-shirt (or was it a tag?) walked by. I asked him how it was supposed to be hung. “We do it like this,” he said, as he showed me the blank strips fixed to the top of the arbor, ready to have the new poems attached for hanging. Then he said:

“But carry on as you are.”

How beautiful is that?  “Carry on as you are.”  Absolute acceptance of me breaking free from the established structure/form to hang my poem as I chose.  If only everybody in the world thought that way!

The poems hanging vertically created an amazing pathway.

This morning I woke up with the poems fluttering in my head and made these notes for a poem:

Faber and Faber’s Poet’s Path

   
An Extra-Sensory Experience
Lines of poetry
   flutter, dance, sway
words craftily concealed
                    revealed
like the poet's voice
heard through
strands of hair
draping the face.

Take a walk through the poet's path
let the tactile words touch your skin
breathe in their sense
                    ...uality

Live the poet's extrasensory life
    for just a moment.

Personal Postscript:
As I lay in bed, I also wondered why I had hung mine as I had.  Why had I hung it on the outside?  Why had I not hung it in the stream with all the others? There was another poem already hanging horizontally when I hung mine, and yes, it prompted me to do the same.  Why did we do that?  Set our poems apart? Do we feel apart from the poetry mainstream?

I wrote a long passage here, discussing the whys of that then decided not to publish it.  Rather I decided to slide into the beyond. 🙂

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