Origins

The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of a peripatetic teaching career. Google Maps was in its infancy at this time, and people had just begun creating their own maps with details of campsites in Cornwall and the like. I created my own Google Map, dropping pins into places where a poem was composed or set (often one and the same) and then typing the poem into the ‘information box’ which opened and became readable when the cursor hovered above it.

These poems tended to be orphans left over from my first collection, Boxing the Compass (itself arranged by compass point) and they weren’t always complete. By dint of the Google Map format, the poems did not follow any sequence. You moved the mouse and a poem appeared. You would often read the same poem twice. Some poems (and pins) were lost behind others. It was impossible to enter prose poems as there was no right-hand justification. The font was uniform. There was no bold or italic option. However, this map-page became a portable journal in which I could revise and develop these poems. After a while, it held about 45 poems.

There was a counter built into the program, and I was amazed to see that the page clocked up 6,000 hits in no time at all. This far exceeded the readership of most collections. The potential to reach new international audiences by making my poetry available through this channel was clear when I saw that most of the hits came from Canada and China. Some poems were set in Toronto, and I had previously translated poetry by the Taiwanese poet Yao Yun, but apart from these two facts, I cannot explain why those two countries, in particular, took an interest.

An early version of the Poetry Map

So I approached Jon Munson II, a programmer from Maryland. He found a way to link one poem to another, and for the page to refresh rather than opening a new window for each poem. By trial and error, we honed the user experience. To start with, we threw the kitchen sink at the text. There were accompanying videos, occasionally unrelated, such as my performance of a song on guitar at the site of one of the poems. This was evidently both distracting and indulgent, so we pared back to a minimal accompaniment. What was, and is, important for me about the map is the poetry first; the interface is there to augment the experience. Having said that, where relevant I included things culled from other projects. For example, the video accompanying the reading of ‘The Westbury Horse’ was made for Creative Wiltshire in 2014. As we progressed, I decided to incorporate work from two pamphlets-in-progress: a sequence of poems set in Poland and the Czech Republic, with a short diversion to Germany, tentatively entitled Ahoj! (this became the third path, Czech Film); and a sheaf of teaching poems I had compiled over the years (which became path two, A Discipline). Normally, I would not have trusted so much writing to the internet, preferring hard-copy publishing channels, but I came to trust the interface we developed.

Whistles and Bells

In the Poetry Map, digital accompaniments come in the form of clickable ‘Magic Tickets,’ bonuses to be opened as one progresses through the poems. One of the concerns of A Discipline (path two) is the different languages with which we communicate. So the magic ticket in ‘Half Term’ reveals a Polish saying about recovering from the common cold, while ‘Preston’ is written in Phonetic Script (an aid for teaching pronunciation) only to be rendered into conventional English with a click of the magic ticket. However, the photos detailed in ‘Group Portrait’ and ‘Two Photos’ actually detracted from the poems. So they had to go. The only remaining photo is accompanied by a newspaper article whose headline provides the last line of a poem (‘Leanings’).

An example of a Magic Ticket

The poem appears

The ticket is visible

The ticket reveals something linked to the poem

Choice of Content

As we worked on the map, improving sequence and interface and dividing the poems into four distinct paths, the sheer number of times I re-read the poems allowed me to hone them into better shape and create an order strong enough to withstand the leap from place to place. Strangely, once the project had become a ‘publication’ in my mind – and I had decided that these poems would never be published together in hard-copy – I found I could not add newer, perhaps stronger, work to them. There was a specific type of poem which worked on the screen. A poem had to read ‘fast’ – not lay too many roadblocks in the reader’s way requiring re-reading and unpuzzling. Where there was a sequence (‘Entries’), each section is revealed with a click, so the reader only entertains one section at a time, rather than seeing the full poem and perhaps being dissuaded from persevering. Jon and any other programmer I spoke to felt that the interface should display as much white space as possible around the words, but I disagreed. I felt that the frame of the map, often telling in itself, created an atmosphere for the poems.

‘Imagine a Forest’ screenshot

Not just this, but (with three exceptions) no poem was visible as a whole. The text screen is a visor, keeping the reader in the immediate present of the current section of a poem. This makes the experience interactive. The poem hasn’t already happened, it has to be unfurled.

Each path was arranged to be readable in one sitting. If it became over-extended, the tautness was lost and a reader might be tempted to check their mail or see what was happening in the outside world. Jon added flags in the top-right of the screen and a map in the bottom left-hand corner locating each poem’s position in its country.

Weirdly, despite all our best efforts, the map is not a static thing, but subject to changes in Google’s map technology. In this way, the woozy out-of-focus shots of the Czech Republic streets have been sadly lost through an upgrade. No doubt, as cliffs erode and shorelines advance, this will also be recorded on the map. The viewing experience is dependent on device and screen-size, determining whether you see, say, the Westbury Horse appear improbably white against its background before the text window opens over it with a poem of the same name. As David Lynch said about TV – everything is wrong with the medium: adverts interrupt you, you have no control over screen definition, a thousand interruptions incur. But despite everything…

Sequencing

The sequencing of poems required even more scrutiny than in the compilation of a book, where poems can immediately ‘sit right’ on a page beside each other. The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett describes a road trip listening to her new album in ten or fifteen different orders ‘until it felt right.’ This was the approach we took. With online distractions one tap away, the sequence had to be compelling.

Reading it now, I can draw a link between each poem and explain it logically, though I doubt these reasons were explicit when I ordered them. For example, the first path begins with a poem about finding a dead deer. This is followed by a poem about the delivery of dead lambs from a dead sheep, which is then followed by a poem in which umbilical cords and afterbirth are visible in the grass. The next two poems deal with depictions of life – one of the Wiltshire white horses carved into the chalk hillside, and a life-drawing class. There follows the burial of a pet cat, before a number of poems featuring a life-line of some kind – a safety harness hung from a helicopter lifting people from a flash flood in Boscastle, a Rayburn at the heart of a house, a pilot light leading the cyclist safely home along a canal path in darkness, and a statue of a harvest maiden in Warminster. Continuing the theme of life, ‘lungs of water’ crossed by cattle lead to a swimming pool, which leads to poems considering ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, claims and possessions and finally letting go of a relationship.

I thought carefully about the beginning and end of each path. The second path is concerned with teaching, and the poems occupy the liminal spaces familiar to many teachers – a college hallway after dark, squash courts serving as classrooms – not to mention encounters with students of different nationalities. It opens with a non-teaching poem in which a drunk teenager stumbles behind a car and relieves herself. I had in mind a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which this physical action serves to draw a line between past and present, so it seemed apt to use it as a sequence-opener. It also touches upon the teacher’s vantage into private lives. Some of the poems are quite ‘minor’ (‘An Acquaintance’) – things scribbled on buses – but together they add up to a sense of glimpsed faces. The poems jump from Bath to Greenwich to Wandsworth before ending up in Exeter where I was a student myself.

Developing a Teaching Resource

When I received e-mails from teachers telling me that the map had been used on World Poetry Day in California and Taunton, I immediately became gravely concerned. It seemed so naked. Not just that, the poems mentioned labia, condoms, and dead lambs. So I developed a downloadable teacher’s guide (including a recommended age-range) and downloadable student worksheets, while Jon made improvements to the navigation (including a drop-down menu of poems on completion of each path). In the worksheets, I used the classic pedagogic trick of creating an information gap and putting students in the position of detectives on a trail. Some responded to the fact that the resource was online, and so in a sense were encouraged to read poetry by stealth. I saw immersion in the map as a way for students to learn to navigate ‘negative capability’, a skill required by the GCSE English Literature ‘Unseen Poem’ section. To my mind, one of the strengths of the sequences is that since the poems weren’t written with teenagers in mind, they don’t pander or patronize. The downside of this is that the poems can’t be used as an introduction to specific forms (such as sonnets and sestinas) as they are generally in free verse.

I imagine the site as something to be stumbled upon, like a map in an old desk. As long as people are drawn to the promise of a way to navigate, and rise to the challenge of cracking a code, then the Poetry Map will be relevant and the poems will mean something to someone somewhere. At least, that’s my hope.

During the summer of 2009 I spent a week reading and writing in residence at the Elizabeth Bishop House, in the tiny and thus somewhat incongruously named village of Great Village, Nova Scotia. Readers may know Great Village as the setting of Bishop’s haunting story In the Village, first published in the New Yorker in 1953. One day I went for a walk to the village store. I was on the hunt for postcards, intrigued by Bishop’s observation: “The grey postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating… one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full-size, and in colour”.

caption Postcards for sale in the village store, Great Village, Nova Scotia. Photo by J. R. Carpenter, 2009.

In the back of the store, which is now an antique shop, I happened upon a well-preserved copy of a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s. Nova Scotia being New Scotland, an old map of Old Scotland seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to find. Why I felt the need to buy an out-of-date-map to a city I’d never been to was not at all clear.

Questions of place have long-pervaded my fiction writing and maps have figured prominently in many of my web-based works. An outline of a map of Nova Scotia served as the interface for one of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996). In The Cape (2005), I used an assortment of maps, charts, and diagrams borrowed from an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979 as stand-ins for family photographs. In In Absentia (2008) I used the Google Maps API to haunt the satellite view of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with stories of former tenants forced out by gentrification. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008) included an impossible map of ancient Rome. I’d never set out to map a place I’d never been before, but then sometimes maps seem to call places into being.

City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s.

In 2011 I was commissioned to create a new work for an exhibition called Remediating the Social, at Inspace gallery in Edinburgh. Handily I already had a map of the city. In May 2012 I travelled to Edinburgh to begin research for what would eventually become a massive hybrid print and digital project called The Broadside of a Yarn (2012). More information on that project can be found in an article called The Print Map as a ‘literary platform’ published on The Literary Platform in May 2013.

During my research I used the 1940s edition of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map purchased in Great Village, Nova Scotia, to undertake a series of experimental walks, or dérives, in and around the modern city of Edinburgh. Dérive is a practice first explored by the Letterist International in Paris in the early 1950s and later taken up by the Situationist International. The concept of dérive was introduced by Ivan Chtcheglov in his Formulary for a New Urbanism (published under the pseudonym Gilles Ivan). Chtcheglov proposes a future city, in which “the main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING” (1953). In The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International  (2011), McKenzie Wark suggests that Chtcheglov “sought not the rational city but the playful city, not the city of work but the city of adventure. Not the city that conquers nature, but the city that opens toward the flux of the universe” (2011: 20). The advertising copy on the back of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map hovers between these states — on one hand promoting such solid stolid institutions as the Bank of Scotland, North British Rubber Footwear, and Scougal’s Oatcakes, “Scotland’s National Food in its Most Palatable and Convenient Form” — and on the other hand issuing imperatives toward the exploration of a playful city, a city of adventure, and, read from a contemporary vantage point, a city safely adrift in simpler past:

Follow the Star of Health.
Encompass the City.
Map it Out For Yourself.
Do Not Allow Your Holiday to be Spoiled by Rain.

However many times I set out toward the flux of the universe in search of the points of interest advertised on the map — The Largest Stock of Hand-Knitted Woollies in Britain, Radiator and Mudwing Repairs and Other Sheet Metal Work, Vertical Filing Systems and Visible Card Index, and Carpenter Joiner Jobbing Specialists, orders in any part of the city or elsewhere in towns or country promptly attended to — dérive led me instead into Edinburgh’s wealth of museums, libraries, and used and antiquarian print, map, and book shops.

In the Old Town Bookshop I found an A5-sized staple-bound booklet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s. This booklet contains twenty-two narrative descriptions of walks, each beginning and ending within easy reach of bus routes, and each illustrated by a small black and white line drawing. The preface states: “this book is designed for the visitor or the resident who wishes to have a change from the more usual places of tourist interest and to combine a little mild exercise with exploration of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs.” The unnamed author adds that her one wish “is that those who follow these trails derive as much pleasure from them as she has done over the years.”

Many of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs the author urges us to explore are no longer know-able. Many of the green spaces on the City of Edinburgh Transport Map have long since filled in. Time has rendered these two immutable print documents nearly nonsensical. I decided to further this process.

I created a computer-generated narrative called Walks from City Bus Routes which uses JavaScript to randomly and endlessly recombine illustrations and portions of text from the Edinburgh City Transport booklet and bus and tram route icons from the City of Edinburgh Transport Map. The term “computer-generated” is something of a misnomer here. The computer does not generate these new texts. It selects phrases from the booklet which I have typed into preset lists (variable strings) and slots them into templates (sentences). Take, for example, the following sentence:

Take the #{take} and continue #{continue}.

I went through the print booklet looking for phrases which follow the words “take” and “continue”. Let’s say the phrases which follow #{take} are as follows (there are in fact many more than these):

Take the [‘path leading down the hillside just before the monument’, ‘path that leads off to the left’, ‘broad and easy descent down the grassy slope’, ‘towpath along the side of the park’, ‘dirt road that runs uphill under the wall’, ‘road behind the Inn’]

And the phrases which follow #{continue} are:

continue [‘upstream’, ‘to follow the river’, ‘in the same direction’, ‘through the fields’, ‘as far as the roundabout’,’along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard’, ‘in a roughly southerly direction’, ‘to follow the wall’]

Here are but a few of the possible sentence results:

Take the path leading down the hillside just before the monument and continue along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard.

Take the towpath along the side of the park and continue in the same direction.

Take the broad and easy descent down the grassy slope and continue through the fields.

Though many of the paths, towpaths, grassy slopes, fields, and roundabouts referenced in the Edinburgh City Transport pamphlet no longer exist, as variables within JavaScript strings these past places are ascribed new locations in computer memory. Called as statements into this new narrative structure, these past places become potential (albeit imaginary) destinations once again (albeit for readers rather than walkers).

The result is a new guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes an infinite number of plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh, and and its book shops, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, reading and writing, fact and fiction.

Detail from The Broadside of a Yarn, J. R. Carpenter, 2012.

In the gallery installation of The Broadside of a Yarn exhibited in Edinburgh during Remediating the Social in November 2012, this new digital variable iteration of the Walks from City Bus Routes pamphlet was accessed by scanning a QR code embedded in a cartographic collage which remediated elements of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map and a drawing borrowed from the Edinburgh Streetscape Manual, published by the Lothian Regional Council in 1995. These visual links to the work were also reproduced in an A3-sized print map handout iteration of The Broadside of a Yarn, which was handed out freely during the exhibition and continues to circulate through gift exchange economies and postal networks.

Earlier this year I created a stand-alone web-based version of Walks from City Bus Routes, which appears in the Spring 2015 issue of The New River – a journal of digital writing & art.

Walks from City Bus Routes, J. R. Carpenter 2015.

Readers keen on bookish-drifting-wander-walking may also be interested in Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts a web-based collection of hyperlinked quotations from a wide range of writing on walking, accompanied by a bibliography. Wanderkammer was included in Walk poems: A series of reviews of walking projects edited by Louis Bury Corey Frost published on Jacket2 in 2011.