The very lovely people at Nice Cuts have published a blog post in which Stephen Emmerson and James Davies reflect on Poetry Wholes. Here’s a snippet –
I often perform using the Poetry Wholes. I ask members of the audience for a book. I need five in total. I ask for prose books (not poetry), and I get novels, textbooks, newspapers, instruction manuals and other interesting textual artefacts. I then place each of the Poetry Wholes over a page in each of the books and improvise a poetic reading. By that, I mean I use rhythm. I love doing it. I’ve done it scores of times since they were first published in 2014. I never know what I’m going to get.
The Poetry Wholes act as windows into a poetry that surrounds us. It’s everywhere, but we can’t always see it. Often a poem is about what’s not visible, what’s not tangible, and I hope that the Wholes create tiny portals into those murky spaces where art exists in the boundaries of the everyday.
