swag from the dig treasure trove of a bustling life Neolithic pottery\/Wick barrow\/flint dagger\/buried flint tools\/for hunting fishing skinning & cutting\/pottery shards\/burned grain\/jewellery\/hobnails\/ cheese press\/mortaria\/fragment of an amphora\/black burnished ware\/spindle whorl\/boundary ditches\/pits & postholes\/bone pin\/quern grinding stone\/brooches\/coins\/at least a hundred skeletons<\/p>\n
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Although I found the title inauspicious, this project attracted me because it encapsulated ephemeral, invisible, contrast, landscape, archaeology, time, walking, boundary etc.; all themes lurking in my practice. It was also collaborative and originated by someone who had succeeded in drawing down funding; a skill I can only admire because of the drudgery and ability to circumvent tangles of red tape which this requires; an antithesis to poetry.<\/p>\n
On reflection, the \u2018Pin\u2019 word is appropriate because the app which holds the work is pin-pointed on a map and only accessible at the spot on the landscape; an ephemeral quality; otherwise invisible writing.<\/p>\n
The boundary is between the windswept, exposed, sparsely populated landscape of coastal farms and the energy of swarming human activity in the (reputedly) largest construction site in the UK. It is between wild\u00ad\u00ad\/tame, inactive\/active, calm\/noise, traditional\/modern, freedom\/restriction, conservation\/destruction. In physical form it is a double high fence topped with barbed wire.<\/p>\n
The landscape is relatively flat, facing north to Bridgwater Bay and the Bristol Channel edged by shelved rocks which wave along this stretch of coast.<\/p>\n
Due north of Nether Stowey, walking his thread towards Lyrical Ballads, this is the site inspiring Coleridge\u2019s Lines Written at Shurton Bars (September 1795)<\/em><\/p>\n Layered beneath are the strata through two hundred million years.<\/p>\n The project was created by Christopher Jelley (his Facebook profile says \u2018Artist\u2019) as one of several app-incorporating writing projects, (another is Storywalks). The projects involve the community (adults or children), often walking to locate the writing in the landscape; poetry may not be his main medium but he has facilitated others to experience and write. The Poetry Pin project consisted of Christopher leading the same walk of about a mile and back on the second Saturday of each month for a year for who ever turned up. I only managed to turn up once, in January 2015; the penultimate walk.<\/p>\n So far, so thought-provoking, perhaps. For me, however, the lure compounding the idea was that the walk followed the new boundary fence between the pastoral, agricultural plough and the voracious devouring and potentially explosive development of Hinkley C Reactor.<\/p>\n I envisage that, in performance, my written contribution will be against a video background of construction traffic activity and its noise or, maybe, the EDF \u2018 Combwich Wharf and Freight Laydown\u2019 video or similar with a soundtrack of roaring and grinding engines.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n http:\/\/poetrypin.info\/reveal.php<\/a><\/p>\n