In August 2021, Lapidus Scotland co-hosted a ‘Walking With Words’ event with Culture Perth & Kinross as part of their ‘Pop-Out Perth’ Festival. An open event, the public were invited to sign up for a place on an informal team of writers and observers. The event began with poet and facilitator Andy Jackson outlining the concept to attendees, with the team then invited to walk the streets of Perth (known as ‘The Fair City’), looking for poetry in the everyday.
For one hour on Sunday 14th August, this small group of individuals roamed urban Perth, scanning billboards, shopfronts, municipal buildings, signs and notices for ‘poetic’ lines – anything that took language beyond the mundane and into the creative. The team were directed to spend at least ten minutes of the hour ‘overhearing’ conversations among ordinary people, once again in order to record the natural creativity in people’s everyday interactions. Finally, the attendees were also invited to make their own creative observations about what they saw and heard.
These observations and overhearings were then worked into a ‘patchwork poem’ – a snapshot of people and place for one hour in the summer of 2021. The event allowed ordinary people – some writers, some not – to participate in the creation of an inventive artistic response to the urban environment.
The patchwork poem has now been published by Culture Perth & Kinross on their website.
Here are a few lines, to give you as taste of it:
Abandoned shoes and a windscreen wiper.
Boarded shops serve a bevy of ghosts.
See if meh card’s declined eh’m goin mental.
Lapidus Scotland intends to run another event of this kind at the Paisley Book Festival on 20th February – details here – with hopefully many more events using the same format to follow.
