On the 20th of March, we held the first Poetry/Project is broken: a platform for performance poetry and video projection where people could read/play their compositions and/or explore the parameters of their performance in an open and friendly setting.
Upstairs at The Station House, some of Durham's finest voices and artists treated us to a new view: a breadth of narratives that could hold together the fractures of our existences. Interspersed with their words, Alexandra Carr's projections strafed the corner of the room bringing moments of contemplation - space to digest the words heard as our thoughts were directed to fractured landscapes of water, forest and magnetism - of literally seeking things differently:
In terms of spoken word, we were first embraced by the languorous glory of the Russian language; its speaker, Polina Timina admitting the beguiling beauty of its sound belied the poem's fractured nature: a hymn that is never to be be heard at a wedding that is never to occur.
Eden Szymura followed and reminded us of the ghosts that walk our streets: the personalities unseen and the histories unheard. These were recorded in three precise vignettes; they were bold, full and comforting and her meters breathed life and sloshed colour onto those liminal spaces in which ghosts wander.
David Evans brought clarity to proceedings by returning the musings of Tim Minchin. His wit, rhythm and timing produced the perfect, cosy trifecta to smash, into pieces, the straw men of our making.
Eric Hu produced a concerto of catharsis. Accompanied by the crescendo of the industrial diggers outside, conventions and roads were torn up and re-routed. To which of these tidal forces we attribute the rattling walls is still unclear.
Midge Ryall un-spun the reel of her mother's hand-me-downs in a spool of internal rhyme and trickling cadence. The biological, the venerable, the unfathomable, all passed onto her - the next generation - by her parents: well, we all know what Philip Larkin would say...
Reflecting on childhood and church, Elano painted such thickly-rich and tangible worlds that we could walk around in his thoughts. We were lead - mesmerised - around the questions he posed of a younger self and the projections we wear. His words scalded and soothed in a process similar to the resurrection of timber: we need to be sanded down before we are varnished.
With social media and self-reflection squarely in his sights, Kieran Richards chose to read 'To a Louse...' by Robert Burns. Recited in Scots and English, Burn's words, written over two hundred years ago, rang out across a room of sassenachs. Note: no phones, no mirrors - just one person speaking and other people listening. A stark reminder of simpler needs to prick our burgeoning egos.
Patrick Campbell used audience participation to dismiss the absurd notion that his stammer renders his voice 'broken'. He encouraged members of the audience to stammer as they read the King's Speech (of film fame) and showed the possible permutations of spoken sounds and language. He followed this with a poem demanding his voice be heard. It was.
Finally, Colin Rennie offered us a fitting conclusion to the evening's spoken words: a poem written by his grandmother - a lady who passed at 106 years old. Having lived through a century broken by modernism, bloated with post-modernism, her image of a simple pigeon in the midst of the riches of the Ottoman Empire spoke wonderfully to the beauty of the simple things we often overlook.
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