Thanks to my good friend Mary in London, I’m taking part in an arts project organised by the South Bank Centre in London called Global Poetry System. Global Poetry System, or GPS, aims “to explore and map the poetry of the world”. On the project’s website you can upload poetry, and tag the location where you found it on a world map. This month, the project launched a new initiative called Analogue Adventures. The project organisers have sent out digital cameras to all corners of the world, asking recipients to snap a picture of whatever inspires them as “poetry” – graffiti, art, signs – and pass the camera on to another volunteer within 48 hours. By the 23rd of June, the camera should make their ways back to London, where the pictures can be developed, uploaded and mapped.
So the little camera made it across the Channel to the Netherlands.
In fact, taking part in this project from Leiden is almost too easy. From 1992 to 2005, a literary foundation called Tegen-Beeld (Counter-Image) carried out a big project in Leiden to paint poems from around the world onto Leiden’s buildings. There are poems in all languages by a huge variety of poets – and the images have inspired many more Leiden residents and shopkeepers to decorate their indfoor & outdoor walls with poetry. There’s even a website (text in Dutch) showing all the poems, with translations into other languages, so I could even shop around for the one I liked best (although I already had my favourites). I picked this beautiful poem by Yeats, who is one of my favourite poets, straddling two residential houses on the Lange Mare in the heart of Leiden. I like that it’s painted over two colours, the dark brick and the painted red, and the font is really nice.
All of these poems are worth hopping off your bike for for a minute - they’re beautiful poems in themselves, but even if you don’t understand the language they’re written in, many are visually stunning. Here’s a few more. If you click on the images, you can see the text of the poem with translations at the project’s site (as well as all the other poems around town).
Treno in Corsa, by Cesare Simonetti
Charles Parker, by William Waring Cuney (1906-1976)
De dichter is een gedicht (The poet is a poem) by Jotie 't Hooft (1956-19767
Chanson d'Automne by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)
De Val, by Hendrik Marsman
The Rough Sea, by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)
Interesting article. Re. the wall poems in Leuven, I see that they even allow some in French! Must make the Flemish nationalists mad… (I used to live in Belgium.)