Ribbons and Ruminations: in Unruly Orchestrations exhibition

Poetry, unruly as it is, consistently challenges the structures and forms that appear to contain it. It is often ribboned with multiple meanings and always tends to escape from the page’s confinements, readily moving into the untethered, performative imagination. Further, from the earliest times it has been found in diverse forms—in song, in speech, in theatre performances, engraved in bronze and stone, or in ephemeral form, on banners and as graffiti. It does not obey market logic; ‘no one’, so the story goes, wants to buy poetry books, but ‘every one’, so the story goes, writes it, and turns to it at times of catastrophe. In Ribbons and Ruminations we celebrate its unruly state, and orchestrate it in particular ways, rendering it as part prayer-flag, part musical score, part the ribbon that links contemporary poetry to the poets of the ancient world. We acknowledge poetry’s sometimes torn and fragmented nature; the way that poetic meaning is tending to disperse and re- collect in new forms; and the ways in which the poetic meaning of overall works is so often an aggregation of smaller, interrelated gestures. Ribbons and Ruminations is a single work that is simultaneously a variety of different ruminations about poetry’s protean and unbounded qualities—and about some of the ways in which poetry may be reconfigured and re-inflected.