Photograph: Metrical feet ... which poems really get you going? Photograph: Eric Albrecht/AP
As every subeditor knows, one occasionally comes across a pun so rare and treasurable that it's worth hoarding it until the right story comes along - or even, if one wields that sort of influence, persuading a journalist to write the feature that will fit the pun, in order to allow society at large to appreciate its greatness.
My suspicions were therefore aroused when I received a press release from Insite, the Essex Cultural Tourism Programme, in which they announced the launch of a series of cycle rides and walks through the north Essex countryside punctuated by poetry readings from local poet Martin Newell. The name of the project? Spoke'n'word.
There's no doubt that from the moment this pun was conceived, a union of the apparently disparate activities of cycling and reading was essential in order that it might be unleashed on the world. But in fact the more I thought about it, the more I came round to it anyway: not so much the idea of a walk with breaks for recitals, but the concept of uniting poetry with travel. Poetry in motion, indeed.
Anyone who likes poetry knows that its rhythms lend themselves to walking. The poet Ruth Fainlight told me once that she spent much of her early 20s walking round London in time to Yeats. My own internal library proved invaluable on a trekking holiday in India last year, when I countered high altitude shortness of breath and cramping calf muscles by muttering my way through Shakespeare, TS Eliot and Don Patterson. Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening was a particularly effective palliative; the rhythm was slow and strong enough to carry me forward, and the picture of the dark and deep snowy woods provided a mind's eye respite from the Himalayas' blazing sun.As with songs, poetry's beat fits with your footsteps, and bears you along with it.
I do it when I'm cycling home from work, too. The thumping iambic quatrameter of William Blake's London is especially useful as an aid to tackling a hill: if you ever see a red-faced woman crawling up Amwell St in Islington, panting "I WANDered THROUGH each CHARTered STReet/ NEAR where the CHARTered THAMES does FLOW", do say hi. So my Wednesday afternoon question to you is, do you do this too? And if you do, what's your favourite motion poem?
