2 Poetry in place
Fereshteh Toosi
Introduction
Reading a text aloud is one of the various ways that poetry can live in the world. This resource guides educators who want to introduce their students to the act of listening to the oral recitation of poems in public places.
The basic concept for this activity is that students write a poem, record it with their own voice or ask someone else to recite it, and choose where to situate those recordings in an outdoor location. The activity may also be adapted so that students can work with poetry by professional writers. Each student chooses a specific location, authors or curates a text, and creates an audio recording of the reading of that text.
Choosing a Location
You and your students can design a poetic sound experience for any outdoor place. Your university campus is a good place to start, but you can also choose to do this in any rural or urban area that has cellular reception. That’s because the audience will use their phones to listen to recordings that are triggered by their GPS location. This process is called geolocation, which refers to the tracking of one’s location with electronic devices. In this activity, geolocation happens through a free app called Echoes.xyz, which runs on the audience’s phone.
Consider using ordinary places where many people pass by every day, but also other, lesser-known places. Perhaps the class project responds to public art sculptures on campus, a nature preserve, or a parking lot. Because Poetry in Place uses GPS to guide the audience, you are limited to outdoor locations. The listening experience will be unpredictable as changing environmental and weather conditions will offer dynamic conditions for the audience’s listening experience.
Guiding Questions
This resource has been created to foreground the sense of hearing and creating a geographically specific sonic
- How will your contribution connect listeners to a complex weaving of the histories and ecologies of place?
- How will your contribution respond to specific objects, land, and architecture?
Collaboration
There are many ways this process could be collaborative and/or complicate conventions of recitation, voice, and phonetic and/or poetic forms. Here are a few things for you and your students to think about:
- How will the already existing ambient sound of the place interact with the recordings? How does the sound of that place change and shift at different times of day?
- How would the inclusion of music or field recordings influence the audience’s reception of the poem?
- Will students contribute to a single group project, or will each student create a project that has multiple locations and recordings? The group could choose to work co-operatively to create a conceptual or formal connection between the location, or each student could work in isolation, relying on chance and serendipity to make meaning of the juxtapositions.
- Many sound walks guide the audience through a linear experience from point A