St David’s in Wales, the smallest city in Britain, has a population of less than 2,000 but a massive cathedral. This disparity is due to it having been an important site of pilgrimage for over 1,000 years. In 1123, the Pope even declared that two trips to St David’s were as good as one to Rome. This October, I was one of a number who descended on St David’s, not for a religious pilgrimage but for a gathering of poets.
Exhibition at Oriel y Parc
The reason for our flocking to St David’s was for an exhibition of the Murmuration of Words project. This is a collaborative postal poetry project organised by Bean Sawyer that I’ve been involved in, and I’ve written about previously here.
Inside The Tower gallery hung the framed original handwritten poems on the walls. Around the centre hung curtains of cyanotypes made by Bean being moved by the breeze. These were a combination of extracts from the poems and maps. The maps were stitched with the ‘flight path’ of each poem, showing the location of the poets and the journey the poems took between them as each added their verse.
Our gathering of poets took place at the exhibition’s opening event. I took the opportunity to get my anthology of the first fifty poems signed by as many of the poets as I could. Most of them I hadn’t met in person before, despite the names being familiar from sending on poems and letters as part of the project.
Before taking my book to the event I decided to stamp my name in my copy. I did so ever so carefully, then realised I’d done it upside down.
Pilgrims
As part of the exhibition, Bean had left out a bowl of word prompts for visitors to take. I dipped in and came out with ‘pilgrims’. Choosing that word was my inspiration for this blog post. It seemed apt for the coincidence of visiting an ancient pilgrimage site while pursuing something that gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. Although in my case the motivations were poetry, friendship and community, rather than religion.
Found poetry and cyanotypes workshop
A couple of days later I got to have a play at making some cyanotypes myself with Bean and two other murmuration poets – Debbie and Janet. We deconstructed the mumuration poems, literally cutting them into pieces, extracting words and rearranging them into new found poems. We arranged these on pre-prepared paper and cloth alongside feathers, leaves and seedheads. These were then placed under a UV light for it to do its magic.
While we worked, Bean told us about Anna Atkins, who used cyanotypes to create the first ever book illustrated with photographic images. Her book on algae, with its stunning images, was published in 1843.
The finished images
You can still book onto other upcoming workshops relating to the exhibition here.
