Poetry installed in public space is not a new phenomenon – from the broadside ballad (see The Poetry Toolkit print edition) pasted up on the wall of a tavern or in a market place through to the inscription of poems on memorials, such as Moshe Shulstein’s poem, ‘I saw a Mountain’ at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C., poems have been used to communicate in public on their own (without their author in attendance) in predictable and unpredictable ways. The public that views them is also multifarious and changeable – a person might ‘visit’ the poem deliberately, or else come across it incidentally. Especially if it becomes literally inscribed on the architecture of a place though, the poem stays steady, anticipating its many readings. Sometimes a poem might not have been written for public view in this way, but is chosen and thus brought into this new readerly context – lines from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, for example, are displayed above the players’ entrance to the Centre Court at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, thereby alluding to a very specific notion of ‘sportsmanship’ that reads quite differently from if you were to encounter the poem in full within a discussion of Kipling’s broader legacy. In the sense that it will be variously encountered by ‘readers’ alone or in groups, regularly or once, in a rush or over time, all at once or in glimpses, the publically-sited poem is generically open to changeability: it is a dynamic presence.

Given the complex legality surrounding public space and ownership (‘public space’ is increasingly, in fact, privately owned), if a poem is to stay in public view it usually will need ‘permission’ and this often comes from commissioning: it has become quite common for an organisation to commission a poem to be installed at an opening of a new space or to commemorate a particular event. Organisations might also choose a poem written for another occasion be ‘relocated’ to mark a new public space. This gesture of relocation is perhaps most obviously provocative – such a shift in context commands us to consider the poem and the space in new ways, prompted by the dialogue that the work provokes with its new setting (we might think of Skoulding’s sense of a poem being ‘unfixe[d]’ by being brought ‘into conjunction with lived spaces’ (p. 247)). But poems commissioned specifically can be disruptive too, especially through the relationship between the public space’s politics and that of the chosen poet. Commissioned poems are often written with a particular space and surface in mind (the side of a building, a plaque in the floor, carved into rock) and Sue Hubbard writes of how such work ‘needs to have a visual and conceptual dynamic, a spatial rhythm to echo its poetic musicality. It needs to grow out of and engage with the space in which it is to be situated rather than be imposed upon it’ (quoted in Osborne, p. 200). The type of space that houses a poem will necessarily contribute to the meanings that might be derived from that poem – at a basic level, whether the poem appears inside a building or outside in changing weather will determine the kinds of visibility it might enjoy. Beyond this, the functional nature of the space it occupies will be significant too – this is a space for leisure, commerce, or commemoration? Is it encountered deliberately for a particular purpose (a common meeting place, say, or a park) or ‘on the way’ to somewhere else (a pathway that people use to walk to work, for example, might not even be noticed as ‘a place’ until it is marked by a public poem). What is the history of this space? Has it always been used for one activity, or has that changed? A poem might key into a space’s historical or present purposes, or both together in provocative ways. 

These considerations are compellingly brought into play whenever a poem becomes public, and even if a poem has been commissioned, it doesn’t mean to say that it is quiescent, that it happily ‘fits in’ with a particular place. One of Britain’s most well-known ‘landmark poets’ (to use his term), Lemn Sissay, for example, has produced work that has ‘created space’ in itself (his poem ‘Rain’, which appears on the side of a takeaway restaurant in Dilworth Street, Manchester, has become important to that city’s sense of identity, inflected especially for black British poets, as Corinne Fowler explores, pp. 230-233), but his other works cause significant disruption to historicised space. The visibility afforded to public poetry positions it compellingly in terms of public memory and Sissay drew on this especially, for example, in his poem ‘The Gilt of Cain’ (2008), which was commissioned by the City of London and created collaboratively with Gareth Howat and Michael Vissocchi. The piece is inscribed onto Vissocchi’s sculpted columns that are grouped at Fen Court, a walkway through the financial district of London, near St Mary Woolnoth Church, a building associated with William Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaigns. The poem complicates this potent space by using language associated with contemporary commodity trading (which takes place all around the columns) layered into the history of the slave trade, and the Biblical story of Cain and Abel (such pulsating figurative language was complicated yet again when Sissay performed it in situ, vocalizing its puns and metaphors). As Deirdre Osborne writes, ‘the poem visually and aurally challenges public sculpture’s traditional role in glorifying and commemorating military acts or conquests, to replace this with subject-matter that has been ignored historically, in processes of national archiving and remembrance’ (p. 205). For another poet native to Manchester, SuAndi, this opportunity to infiltrate public memory through public space is especially compelling for how it replicates the complex, fractured and dislocating processes of history itself. In 2011, SuAndi created a series of metal discs, each inscribed with words from various of her poems, to be cemented into the Manchester Ship Canal Walkway and so visible in dislocated sequence by those walking through this space. As such, ‘the poem hands over its textuality and deliberate segmentation to the reader’s own haphazard choreography, conscious or unconscious, and the version of the whole poem they will create. … Each disc can be autonomous and is self-sufficient in its evocations, images and information – albeit only a fragment of a series. This testifies to the partial perspectives that have been handed down as history, while at the same time offering discrete pockets of knowledge’ (Osborne, p. 207). 

Public poetry – especially ‘landmark poetry’ – thus engages critically with often-violently contested histories of land use and present-day struggles between civic space, collective space and privatised, commercial space. In this sense, the location of the poem is crucial to its cultural meanings and significance, making the space it occupies a key poetic collaborator –such ‘sited poetry’ is available to critical consideration from a range of sociocultural and theoretical positions (postcolonial, ecocritical, spatial/urban and others). This kind of poetry also begins to overlap with other ‘sited textualities’ too, such as the work of conceptual artists Jenny Holzer or Robert Montgomery. Holzer began her practice of situating words, phrases and textual extracts in public space in the late 1970s in New York; these words were derived from various settings, such as the reading lists she was given whilst a student, but in her handling they become poem-like, textual prompts that disarm and enliven the ‘poetics’ of space they infiltrate. Montgomery’s comparable practice stages poems on billboards, in neon or – escalating the potent ephemerality of the performance through material setting – in fire. While Montgomery’s work has been recognised and commissioned in latter years, his earlier practice often constituted a form of ‘civil disobedience’ undertaken undercover at night (protest poems installed on billboards during the 2003 Iraq war; being questioned by police for his ‘Poem for William Blake’ on a billboard in Bethnal Green), itself manifesting another iteration of the public poem’s relationship with civic identity and behaviour. 

Yet, these instances of textual provocation might also emerge in less formalised, even institutionalised settings (in the sense that both Holzer and Montgomery are trained artists). Perhaps the most democratic form of public poem is what Maria Damon calls the ‘micropoem’ – small, short scraps of words you might encounter on the side of a wall or a truck that form mini ‘poems’. ‘Micropoetry’ can appear in multiple settings, including in private, but they are importantly and intensely ‘context-specific’, and therefore related to site-specific poetry. Damon speaks of how ‘micropoetry’ ‘refers positively to the rawness of fragmentary, ephemeral, non-literary, unintentional or otherwise “unviable” poetry’ (p. 5), including graffiti, slogans and word arrangements encountered by happenstance (one might think of John Hollander’s maxim ‘anyone may “find” a text; the poet is he who names it, “Text”’ (p. 215). A micropoem meant then be any serendipitous discovery of word arrangements that present themselves as poetic to the eagle-eyed (see images). Of course, part of these poems’ energy is their precariousness: they may disappear at any moment, either by designed erasure or simply by dint of street architecture being rearranged or tidied up: they are present, yet fleetingly. Finally, to address intangibility directly, and to draw together what I have discussed here about site-specific poetry with the ‘Performance Poetry’ think-piece, we might end with the work of artists such as Suzanne Phillipsz or Hanna Tuulikki. Phillipsz is a Turner Prize-winning artist who works in the medium of sound installation: she plays recordings of her (untrained) singing through sound systems that are placed in specific spots (the most well-known being ‘Lowlands’, played under three bridges in Glasgow) in a simultaneously eerie and comforting sound/landscape. Tuulikki – an artist who works especially with human/non-human relations, informed by various kinds of eco- and post-human theories – seeks the ‘sounding’ of place itself. Tidesongs (2017) uses performance poetry techniques to explore the sounds of place names and ‘tidal languages’ around the British coast; air falbh leis na h-eòin – away with the birds (2010-2015) ‘reinterprets archive, weaving together fragments of songs and poems that are imitative of birdsong, into an extended soundscape, emerging from and responding to landscape’ (Tuulikki). In such pieces the collaborative potential of site specificity is compellingly brought to the ear, subtly recalibrating the assumed human-centredness of poetry for a new ecological moment.