My place or yours?

Apples & Snakes is England’s national organisation for performance poetry. As well as putting on poetry events and workshops in communities and venues across the country, we also focus on working with emerging poets through artist development programmes. We are always seeking to reach new audiences through our live performances. The idea for ‘My Place or Yours’ came from a desire to harness the power of digital technology to allow people to connect with our work in new ways.
We began by talking to poets and the communities they work in. We asked people why they would want us to work with digital technology. The feedback we got was that audiences were excited by the idea of being actively involved in the creative development of work. They didn’t just want to be presented with a finished product. They wanted to participate in the organic growth of a site that asked questions and listened to responses. We realised that we needed to find poets who were up for taking part in an experiment – one that very much put them on the line as well as online. We are asking them to share work in progress and to respond to comments and feedback as the project progresses. This requires flexibility, openness and a lack of preciousness that can be challenging. To support them in this, we decided that each poet should be given their own professional mentor.

As a national organisation we want to engage with diverse audiences. We commissioned five writers from some of the regions we work in to take part in a residency of their choosing which engages with place. Hip-hop poet Rukus in Derby is investigating youth, territory and identity, while London poet Jay Bernard is on allotments in London and Oxford. In Bristol, Byron Vincent is writing about the contrasting environments of the ethnically diverse area of St Pauls and the wealth on display at the new shopping centre Cabot Circus. Emma McGordon is writing about the experience of homelessness on the Cumbrian coast. Charlie Jordan is at West Bromwich football club. On our website you can follow how each poet has responded to their residency. You can leave your own thoughts, comments, and questions on the work written and the issues raised. As a result, each poet has built up their own following. We’ve also invited guest bloggers to provoke further debate.
We’ve adapted the site as we’ve gone along based on feedback from users. We’ve also promoted it to networks that we’re engaging with for the first time. I was part of the UK delegation to ‘SXSWi’, an international interactive festival in Austin, Texas. We also presented the project at Shift Happens, an arts and digital conference run by Pilot Theatre. The strength of My Place or Yours is that it exists both online and in the real world. Recently Vincent, whose residency looks at urban regeneration, performed his commission at the Port Eliot Festival alongside young people from Carefree, an organisation for young people in care in Cornwall. At the Big Chill, each of the commissioned poets performed to a large festival audience. Their online experiences have inspired and informed their live performances in ways that allow us to engage far more people with poetry than ever before.