In May 2019, Faber & Faber published Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, a ‘selected portfolio’ of poetry written by Simon Armitage for various commissions and collaborations over the past three decades. The work includes pieces for TV, theatre and film, as well as site-specific poetry intended as a component of public art. As such, many of the poems were not written with the intention of appearing in a conventional print format. One interesting example of this is the set of six poems from Poems in the Air, a project that Armitage undertook in 2016 in partnership with Northumberland National Park.
The poems were commissioned to respond to specific locations in the park and were then presented to visitors via a specially-designed mobile app, which uses the device’s GPS capabilities to allow users to listen to Armitage’s audio recording of a given poem only when actually at that specific location. No written text of the poems is accessible to the listener, and once they leave the location, the audio recording is no longer available. In his notes to the poems in SLVA, Armitage describes the recordings as experienced via the app as ‘poetry readings, of sorts, and in the very places where the poems are set.’ Instead of existing in a dual nature as both text and audio, these poems were instead ‘conceived as invisible entities, made only of digital coding, electromagnetic energy and breath’.1
Taking the six Poems in the Air pieces in their original context – as mono-medium, single-site texts – it is possible to read not only a close and integral relationship between the content and the location, but also between these elements and the process of getting to the site. Poems in the Air uses a device that by design gives users access to all kinds of content regardless of location, either as a storage device for that content or as means of connecting to networks that will supply it. In an interesting reversal, the device in this instance is used to restrict the experience of the poems to specific conditions. Had the poems been released as an ebook, or as a podcast or other audio download format, then the link between location and text would have been only nominal, and the physical experience of the setting would be in reality just a suggestion for a fuller appreciation of the poem. However, because the mode of delivery – the mobile app – necessitates the listener being at the location, the experience of the location, and of the journey to it, become an integral part of the ‘reading’ of the poem. For example: if I were to decide to read another poem that is ‘about’, or written in response to, a particular place; William Wordworth’s ‘Tinturn Abbey’. Assuming that I already own a copy of Lyrical Ballads, or a collected edition of Wordsworth, I look for the poem’s title on the contents page and flick to it. This is the extent of effort required for reading a traditionally published poem, and the process is not particularly memorable or impactful on my experience of the text. Similarly, if I wanted to listen to an audio recording of a poem that was available online or as an audiobook, using my smartphone I could do this at any time and location using sequence of highly routinised procedures and gestures through my method and platform of choice. In both cases, the period between the decision/desire to access the text and the actual encounter with it is short and automatic enough that it is effectively collapsed and goes unnoticed.
However, the decision to listen to one of the Poems in the Air is (or was, until very recently) a much bigger undertaking in terms of time and effort. To read this poem, I will need, among other things, a few spare hours, a car, some decent walking shoes, the ability to walk over rough terrain, even after acquiring the means through which the poem was ‘published’. In order to read some of these poems, it is advisable to pack a lunch, check the local weather, bring a waterproof coat, and make sure you leave enough time before nightfall. Of course, any poem written about a particular location could be turned into a kind of pilgrimage to read or hear the poem in situ, but the Poem in the Air poems, in their original app form, enforce this encounter as the only possible way of engaging with the text, and in doing so make all of the activity around the actual listening experience a significant and informative part of the encounter. One way to read this extra attention to the work involved in accessing the poem is to think of the app – the entire electronic text – in terms of ‘ergodic literature’. This term was coined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 to refer to texts that are constructed to require ‘non-trivial effort’ from their readers in order to be read.2
Examples given by Aarseth include books such as Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred thousand million poems) or B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, both of which use the physical format of the book to allow (or necessitate) the reader’s active decision making in the construction of the text.
In Armitage’s app, the effort involved is not the mental work of deciding the order or specific combination fo textual elements, but rather the exertion and planning required to make a physical journey. The effect, however, is arguably very similar. An awareness of the conditions for the text’s existence, and all of the processes not normally associated with reading but which still support the encounter with the text, are created by the mode of presentation. Armitage’s writing reflects an awareness of this situation: one poem, ‘Homesteads’, written for Old Middleton, near Wooler, opens with the words:3
‘Somewhere after the last dumb phone box, somewhere the pylons won’t go, they’ve plotted a simpler contour and stepped aside. The road insolvent beyond here, the cart track petering out; you’ve had to park up and walk.’
Here, the direct address to the listener, plus the references to the journey that is still fresh in their mind, uses the specific mode of delivery to create an intimate link between the text and the landscape. The walking through the landscape is a near-guaranteed shared experience between the narrator and listener of the poem, and so the experience of the listener is drawn into the reading of the poem itself. Similarly, the necessity for the reader to experience the place referenced in the poem encourages a feeling of affinity with the speaker. Anecdotally, while listening to ‘Homesteads’, I happened to hear the final phrase of the poem – ‘Even to fix that in words is to write on the air with a fallen crow feather dipped in rain’4 – as my eyes fell upon a small black feather laying on the wet ground.
Many similar serendipitous convergences of poem and landscape occurred throughout my trips to hear the poems, and Armitage’s writing seems not only to invite these comparisons between what we are hearing from the poem and what our senses are taking from the world around us, but to make us aware of this kind of comparison as a conscious and on-going process. Throughout the walk/poems presented by Poems in the Air, the poem is conceptualised as the goal and end-point of a task or journey. At this point, the the act of listening to the audio recording of the poem becomes an invitation to stop and reflect, but, through its mode of presentation, the poem has also orchestrated the event that it reflects upon.