Bill Drummond's Make Soup project
at Prima Vista Literature Festival, Tartu
6 May 2005 at 20:00
Tartu University Old Cafe
Bill Drummond visits Tartu for the Prima Vista literature festival and makes soup to people starting at 20.00 on 6 May at the Tartu University old cafe. The evening is part of his crazy Make Soup project that has taken him and John Hirst already to various public places and people's homes in the UK to make soup to anybody who lives by a line drawn across the British Isles. Come and see the former KLF member talk about Make Soup and taste some soup!
More detailed programme of the whole Prima Vista programmi can be found at the festival's website: http://www.kirjandusfestival.tartu.ee/
Exploiting Underground Poetry workshop by Jason Finch
at Vanemuise Culture Street Day, Tartu
20 May 2005 at 15:00
Poems on the Underground exhibition is open from 13:30 to 18:00
In 1986, three people made a proposal to the authorities controlling public transport in London. Their idea was to fill empty advertising spaces on London Underground trains with poems. The people who did this “… were Londoners by birth or adoption, users of public transport, lovers of poetry. [They] shared the conviction that poetry is a popular, living art, and that the pleasure of rhythm and rhyme are part of common life" (Poems on the Underground, tenth edition, edited by Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, xxv). Nearly twenty years later, new poems are still appearing on the Underground, and the idea has been tried in New York, Paris, Dublin, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Athens, Shanghai, Moscow and St. Petersburg, among other cities.
Some of the poems selected were by world-famous authors, others by unknowns. Some were thousands of years old, others brand new. Many were written in London, but some in China, Russia, America, Scandinavia and elsewhere (none in Estonia so far, unfortunately). Some were happy poems, some sad; some about love and some about death. All they had in common was that they could fit onto a fairly small piece of paper and be comprehended during a fairly short, often bumpy, tube journey.
Jason Finch will speak on behalf of the British Council Estonia about the poems and the project as a whole in Tartu on 20th May. He will present readings from selected poems in the series, and poems will be displayed in their original poster format on a bus outside the Tartu University Library.
What could teachers of English do with all this? Jason will talk about how you use the poems in either the literature or the language classroom. The public display of poems and the communicative aspect of the project link it to our understanding of media and advertising communication as well.
Poetry need not be an elite thing. Many of the poets included in this series have proved able to communicate with a large audience, whether because like Dylan Thomas they used the broadcast media; or because their poems were adopted by others, as A.E. Housman’s were by British soldiers serving in the First World War; or simply because their poems have been included in this series and so have now been read by thousands who would never otherwise have seen them.
More info on the whole day can be found at the Tartu Vanemuise Culture Street Day website: http://vkt.tartu.ee/
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