The instant museum piece
Last year Bernardine Evaristo was poet-in-residence at the Museum of London. This is an unpublished poem, Routes.
Time has frozen this midwinter night. Outside
the pavement coated with a transparent skin,
I retreat into down, sensing the vibration
of polar sheets creeping south, burying
us a thousand feet under blue ice, diverting
the river out of the Vale of St Albans
into the London Basin. Welcome home. Welcome
first citizen, chasing reindeer over the hip joint
with France, tropical and glacier cycles, waves
of migrators - your long trek north, from below
the Sahara, circling a camp fire by the Thames
the hair of wolves over tight backs; dread-
locked beards, un-polished eyes, your slow,
heavy mouths chewing fresh rhinoceros, roasted,
no spices; unaware that you are dislocating
from France as you eat, that the Channel is rising,
that my heated body floats above a London of birch
and pine forest, of open grassland where gangs
of straight-tusked elephants gather in Trafalgar
Square, hippopotami wallow in the brown marshes
of Pall Mall and from Marble Arch I gaze longingly
on sheets of marigold, meadowsweet, mint.
Unless some wealthy philanthropist surfaces with a craving for couplets at checkouts and quatrains on bin bags, the most successful and popular campaign in the history of British poetry is about to come to a full stop.
Over the past two years, Poetry Places, a scheme organised by the Poetry Society to get poets out of their ivory towers and into the workplace, has brought poems to the public in the most unlikely places: poems on greaseproof wrappers in Wigan chip shops, poems printed on refuse sacks in Norfolk, poems on spikes among the plants in a botanical garden, and poems on walls, bus shelters and beaches.
The two-year programme, the brainchild of outgoing Poetry Society director Chris Meade, attracted the highest ever arts lottery grant for literature: £450,000. But now the time is up and the money is gone; the final grants have been allocated, and the last poets-in-residence are taking their places. They include: Benjamin Zephaniah, who will shadow Michael Mansfield QC through his court appearances, and, if the clients agree, through his private consultations; James Crowden, who will work at Wheal Jane tin mine in Cornwall; Christine Hemp, who will be in Lambeth, south London, trying to hold a poetic line between police officers and young people judged at risk of becoming offenders; and Antrim-born poet Brendan Cleary, who will take up a post in one of the oldest working cinemas in the country, the 1910 Duke of York's in Brighton, where they hope to put poems on screen between films.
The project has generated unprecedented publicity for British poetry: when Peter Sansom became Marks & Spencer's poet-in-residence, the news went round the world. Sub-editors vied in atrocious, punning headlines: "Shall I compare thee to a summer sale?" wrote one, while the Star composed an entire verse: "I wandered lonely through the crowd/At my local M&S/When all at once I saw a bard/Among the pants and vests." The Wall Street Journal carried a story on the chip shop poets, Peter Street and Steven Waling, while the media in Canada, India, Japan and Korea reported on Anglo-Czech poet Andrew Fusek Peters being helicoptered to the gas platform off Great Yarmouth where he worked 12-hour shifts like the crew. And the scheme's millennium poet, Simon Armitage, got more admiring reviews for his 1,000-line new year poem, Killing Time, than the Dome itself, where he has been in residence. Indeed, he got rather more sympathetic reviews than the millennium poem by poet laureate Andrew Motion.
Morag McRae has run the scheme with fellow poet Christina Patterson from an attic in Covent Garden, and calculates that at least 10,000 people have come into direct contact with a living, published poet, who has turned up in their doctor's waiting room, supermarket, or mobile library. Ian McMillan, who was already club mascot at Barnsley FC, became an online poet in Yorkshire, reading, writing and talking poetry in a specially designated poet's train carriage, and Roger McGough took up his post as internet poet-in-residence at BT before Christmas.
Altogether, 124 poets have worked at 146 centres - including a prison and the crypt of Worcester cathedral - for periods lasting between a few days and six months. In a north London tattoo parlour, poet Patience Aghabi and the tattooist gave one client an entire Shakespeare sonnet wrapped around his upper arm. "It's been wonderful. The public reaction has been astonishing and terribly touching, and the poets themselves feel they have benefited enormously," says McRae.
All the poets who took up the full residencies, from those with only the slenderest of published volumes to superstars such as McGough and Zephaniah, were paid the same: £5,000 for six months, part-time. That's peanuts to many of the firms' employees but, for many poets, it was the best-paid work they'd ever had. Uniquely, Kevin McCann had one of the toughest of all the residencies extended for three months because all sides agreed there was more work to be done. Liverpool-based McCann had already worked in Birmingham prison, and for Poetry Places went into the vulnerable prisoners' section in Wymott jail. He has previously worked with murderers and men convicted of crimes of extreme violence; now he is working mainly with sex offenders, including men who have raped children, who are themselves in grave danger from fellow prisoners.
"There is a powerful, 'There but for the grace of God' factor," he says. "Men have told me the most tragic, awful stories you could imagine about their own early years - stories you can hardly believe - and later the probation officers or prison officers say, 'Yes, that's right - that's what happened'. At one point I became really quite depressed - terribly aware of the roots of violence. I'd be walking through a shopping centre and hear somebody shouting at a child, and the hairs would stand up on the back of my neck."
The men McCann works with are sweeping the boards in the annual Koestler awards for prison writing: one man, brought back to the ability to read, write and even speak after a brain haemorrhage by learning a verse of Blake's Tiger Tiger each week with McCann, has written three prize-winning poems. "Most of them are now writing things as good as you'll read in any small press poetry publication," he says.
Instead of heaping praise on everything they write, McCann demands the inmates learn about formal structure and style, metaphor and simile. "I have found a sharp, savage contrast in working with these men. I have taught at Liverpool University, offered some tentative delicate criticism to a student, and provoked outrage that I have completely misunderstood their genius," he says. "Whereas I've said to these men, 'Apart from the first verse, everything else you've done has got to be binned', and they've thought about it and said, 'OK, mate', and come back the next week with the whole thing redone. Their approach is inspiring - and on the weeks when I go in and hear six really good poems, it's just a brilliant place to be."
McCann's prison residency will come to an end, along with the rest, but McRae sees no reason why companies can't continue to sponsor in-house poets themselves. "We did rather hope that might happen - but it hasn't," she says. "We think it's been a great success. It has certainly reached, and touched an enormous number of people, and maybe given them some new ideas about poetry and even life. But it's not going to change the world. It's only poetry, after all."
In the chorus of approval for the scheme, there was bound to be a sour note, though. One of the earliest, most successful residencies was that of poet Lavinia Greenlaw at one of the country's most successful law firms, Mishcon de Reya, where she emailed a daily poem to employees. Greenlaw became enthralled by the baroque legal language that has appeared in some of her new work, and also tapped an unsuspected lyric vein among the lawyers.
Almost everyone agreed that the experiment had been a triumph - except one, unnamed, senior partner, who gave his own assessment of the project in the journal Commercial Lawyer: "I am pretty sure no new work came in as a result of it," he wrote.
