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Black British poets Lemn Sissay, and Dorothea Smartt have innovatively contributed to inserting Black heritages in contemporary culture through poetry’s multiple performativity—as public art, social retrieval, and memorial in addition to the printed page. This chapter explores the aesthetic category “Landmark Poetics” which I have developed to distinguish poems inscribed upon material surfaces other than paper—especially those that have a commemorative function. Joseph Priestley (1788) paralleled “visible monuments” and “historical poems” as a means of “perpetuating memory” to prevent the “loss of history,” and as being of crucial importance to civic life. Landmark Poetics hears echoes that reverberate through history to (re)imagine the lives of people culturally devalued or overlooked by national record-keeping, in more respect-worthy terms. It recognises a particular kind of material performativity that opens up new directions for contemplating the meanings and functions of poetry, and extends Walter Ong’s notion of “word-in-space” through consideration of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire in counter-monument discourse. The trajectory of Sissay’s landmark poems is traced from his very first commission, “Hardys Well” (1994) [spelling in original], painted onto the wall of a historic pub in Manchester (demolished in 2023), to pavement poems “Flags” (1997) and “Shipping Good” (Greenwich, 2012); the visual projection “For Work For Love” (Turner Gallery, Margate 2012); “The Gilt of Cain,” set in Michael Visocchi’s sculpture and surrounds in Fen Court, London (2007); and “Lock and Quay” (2016), which is laid into the edging of a pathway of what was once the Surrey Quay canal and now replacing the Grand Surrey Canal’s former towpath. The chapter maps Smartt’s landmark poetry arc from the sequence of “Bilal” poems in her collection shipshape (2008), which extends the elegy commissioned for Lancaster LitFest in 2003, to her latest commission in 2018 by TidewayTideway of nine short poems set in the nine Thames Tideway Tunnel ventilation columns for London’s “super sewer” which have been unveiled from 2023 onwards.

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“A ‘Silence’ that Will Not Quite Stay Put”: The Sites and Sights of Landmark Poetics in the Works of Lemm Sissay and Dorothea Smartt

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Deirdre Osborne

摘要

Black British poets Lemn Sissay, and Dorothea Smartt have innovatively contributed to inserting Black heritages in contemporary culture through poetry’s multiple performativity—as public art, social retrieval, and memorial in addition to the printed page. This chapter explores the aesthetic category “Landmark Poetics” which I have developed to distinguish poems inscribed upon material surfaces other than paper—especially those that have a commemorative function. Joseph Priestley (1788) paralleled “visible monuments” and “historical poems” as a means of “perpetuating memory” to prevent the “loss of history,” and as being of crucial importance to civic life. Landmark Poetics hears echoes that reverberate through history to (re)imagine the lives of people culturally devalued or overlooked by national record-keeping, in more respect-worthy terms. It recognises a particular kind of material performativity that opens up new directions for contemplating the meanings and functions of poetry, and extends Walter Ong’s notion of “word-in-space” through consideration of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire in counter-monument discourse. The trajectory of Sissay’s landmark poems is traced from his very first commission, “Hardys Well” (1994) [spelling in original], painted onto the wall of a historic pub in Manchester (demolished in 2023), to pavement poems “Flags” (1997) and “Shipping Good” (Greenwich, 2012); the visual projection “For Work For Love” (Turner Gallery, Margate 2012); “The Gilt of Cain,” set in Michael Visocchi’s sculpture and surrounds in Fen Court, London (2007); and “Lock and Quay” (2016), which is laid into the edging of a pathway of what was once the Surrey Quay canal and now replacing the Grand Surrey Canal’s former towpath. The chapter maps Smartt’s landmark poetry arc from the sequence of “Bilal” poems in her collection shipshape (2008), which extends the elegy commissioned for Lancaster LitFest in 2003, to her latest commission in 2018 by TidewayTideway of nine short poems set in the nine Thames Tideway Tunnel ventilation columns for London’s “super sewer” which have been unveiled from 2023 onwards.