Ledbury Poetry Festival 2021
Poetry Pin is really excited to be part of the Ledbury Poetry Festival this July, and preparations have already begun. In a year of cancellations, zoom conferences and just straight up dissappointments, the festival will be a blend of both physical and digital events.
There will still be a locus of Ledbury poetry readings and performances, but these will be embellished with digital events which can be accessed by greater numbers from all around the world.
But there really is nothing quite like live, the jostle of seats, the people watching, the hum in the air, obviously some of this you can still have in the zoom presentations but it really is a poor cousin to a live performance.
It must be said, though that we are far from the end of the ‘Covid inconvenience’ and truly thankful to get any form of creative culture into our silo’s.
So where and how does Poetry Pin fit in with these new circumstances and how can festival goers get excited about Ledbury.poetrypin.info. Well firstly I should explain that Poetry Pin requires both viewer and author to visit Ledbury, there is not an armchair option although snippets of new poems with be posted out through Twitter ‘as they happen’ so to speak.
Poetry Pin is a digital system (basically a web page) but it cleverly uses your location to post your poem to the exact spot on which you are stood. This will add pin a new poem and digital pin to the town, and if anyone else comes over to that same location with the webpage open, they will be able to read your words. It is as a kind of a poetry treasure hunt where the poems are written and tagged to place and the audience has to walk the town to search them out.
Poetry Pin is more physical than digital,
So Poetry Pin is designed for those who will be treading the pavements of the town, enabling locals and festival attendees to write their fabulous words and poems anywhere across Ledbury.
Previous locations of Poetry Pins have seen writers drop poems along trails like a string of pearls, they have written conversation poems in two places which exist singularly but become greater still when read in their dual contexts. We wonder how playful and creative poets will be in Ledbury this year, what they will post and what journeys the poet hunters will experience.
Ledbury is the first major festival to commission poetry pin and the poems published will be live for a year at the very least. If all goes to plan then year after year the trails will become richer and more diverse, responses to poems, poems about place, reflections, memories, snapshots of words and places caught in time.
The trail is due to go live 1st June 2021 where anyone will be able to visit the town, open the ledbury.poetrypin.info site on their phone to begin pinning.
free Poetry Pin walking and writing workshop
For me the Poetry Pin is more physical than digital, to read a poem you have to stand in the same spot as the author. You will see what they saw, be in the same foot print and soundscape as the author, this enables a whole host of new writing possibilities for the author and reader to embrace.
Here’s looking forward to new words, tagged across the town, new poems, new journeys, and new experiences.
ledbury.poetrypin.info will be open for all to add poems across the town from 1st June 2021. Poems will be available for a year and there is no charge to add or hunt out poems. Keep an eye out for the Ledbury Festival brochure with more details, including free Poetry Pin walking and writing workshops to happen during the festival.
