Asbury & Asbury

Teatime dreams

A couple of months ago, the people at Yorkshire Tea were nice enough to send us some free gifts – probably the highlight of our year, decade and lives so far. There's no way you can return a favour like that, but the one thing I can do is write a slightly forced poem. So here's a Corpoetic based on Yorkshire Tea's homepage copy (pictured above).

As usual, the rules were that you can only use the words supplied, you don't have to use all the words and you can use individual words more than once.

Yorkshire Tea

Yorkshire Tea is a major cause
of lovely dreams – teatime dreams.

Dreams of cakes the size of Yorkshire.
Dreams of biscuits big as a planet.

Delicious dreams of cuppa on cuppa
of lovely, simple, natural tea.

To all the people of Yorkshire Tea,
who put the 'tea' in 'quality',

who grow the tea and blend the tea
and treat our teatime properly –

all our love and respectful wishes.
Yorkshire Tea is so delicious.

Corpoetics reviewed, and other things

Corpoetics (our collection of found corporate poetry) has recently been reviewed in Sphinx, a magazine and website for independent poetry publishers and poets, run by HappenStance Press. You can read the whole thing here.

Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to familiarise myself with the ins and outs of the UK poetry scene – the magazines, the publishers, the events, the writers to watch, the writers you should be embarrassed not to have heard of, the conflicting fashions and schools – all that kind of thing. It's a long journey that leads you up numerous cul-de-sacs. But one of the great highlights has been discovering HappenStance Press.

Like so much of the poetry scene, it's fired less by economics and more by love of the art form and sheer generosity of spirit. Helena Nelson runs the entire operation, fielding countless submissions, publishing several titles every year, maintaining a lively blog and website, and editing and producing Sphinx. In a right and proper world, these would be the people getting six-figure bonuses every year.

If you're at all interested in getting poetry published, buy this:
How (not) to get your poetry published

And if you're interested in reading it, buy this:
Unsuitable Poems

And just about anything else from the HappenStance shop.

Poetry and Music

Manchester design company Music are smart people with great work. The type who get asked to do covers for Creative Review.

They got in touch over the summer asking if I'd like to write a Corpoetics-style poem to fill a guest slot on the home page of their website.

The only text I had to work with was their client list, which at the time looked something like this:

Allermuir Furniture Manufacturers
Bolton Council Carbon Footprint
Chester Performs
Chester Summer Music Festival
Ctrl.Alt.Shift
D&AD
Flip Flops
Flowerburger Records
Fruit Tree Books
Joly Good TV
Kevin Boniface
Matthew Beardsell Limited
MCFC CSR Report
MCFC Press
MCFC Stadium
Manchester Independent Economic Review
Place Space & Identity
Tamewater Developments
Where Are You? A Postman's Diary
Woodward-Kelly

The resulting verse isn't strictly a 'Corpoetic' as I've taken the liberty of adding some words and generally being looser with the whole thing. For some reason, I imagine it being read aloud by Ian McMillan.

15 wishes

I'd like to eat a flowerburger back to front
in a land where flip-flops leave no footprint.
I'd like to head woodward to water a fruit tree.
I'd like to review an identity
for MCFC, appear tame on TV,
and do joly well at D&AD.
I'd like to sell beards to a man named Matthew
and manage an independent economic review
of a girl called Kelly from Bolton Council.
I'd like to press for a postman's festival
to take place in Chester every summer.
I'd like to become part of the furniture
and have a front seat when Kevin performs
a stadium version of his CSR Report.
I'd like to have my own place and space,
change my name to Allermuir Boniface,
and live in Bolton – but then I'd like to shift
Bolton to nearer where Manchester is.
Given one last wish, I'd probably use it
to turn myself into a piece of Music.

Thanks to Craig and Anthony at Music for the invitation.

Copies of Corpoetics are available for £5 plus p&p, with all proceeds going to the National Literacy Trust.

You wish to submit a concern?

The day that Goldman Sachs announces a $3.19 billion profit (with $5bn set aside for bonuses this quarter) seems a good time to dust down this poem from Corpoetics.

Goldman Sachs

You wish to submit a concern?
A concern regarding the firm?
Who are you? Are you new?
You will learn who is who.
You will learn to submit to the firm.

(Poem based on this text, which used to be on the Goldman Sachs 'about us' page – since updated.)

Copies of Corpoetics are available for £5 plus p&p with all proceeds going to the National Literacy Trust.

Q&A with A&A

 
The Casual Optimist, aka Dan Wagstaff of Raincoast Books in Toronto, has just published a Q&A about our Corpoetics project. You can read the whole thing here and have a dig around the rest of the blog while you’re at it. It's a good mix of literary and creative musings and observations, as well as the odd interview with obscure copywriters.

Two pencils and a poem

D&AD

The year appears.
Ideas take place.

Exceptional ideas
are showcased.

Exceptional ideas –
as well as yours.

All the best,
The D&AD Awards.

http://awards.dandad.org/2009/html/about.html

Corpoetics in D&AD
Order a copy
Pictures of the night

D&AD&A&A

 
An appropriately self-satisfied poem to mark the fact that we have been nominated in this year’s D&AD for our Corpoetics project. The nomination comes in the Writing For Design category, alongside the Christopher Doyle identity guidelines. It appears to have been a good year for writing for design, with plenty of entries and in-books, including the likes of Mike Reed and The Chase.

Thanks to Jim Davies, one of the judges, for writing about the project over here (along with some interesting observations on the category as a whole).

Woolworths RIP

Today is the big closing down sale for Woolworths – a sad end for a once-great brand. I included a poem about them in Corpoetics, which now has a slightly poignant air. I always thought it should be set to music – not sure which tune though. For some reason, I’m thinking The Proclaimers. Or maybe Keane.

Woolworths plc
In towns and cities throughout the UK
a retailer offers its customers a
range of products for family and home,
and value for money (for which it is known).

Woolworths, Woolworths plc.
Built on value for money.
Woolworths, Woolworths plc.
Shop for all the family.

http://www.woolworthsgroupplc.com/aboutus/group_overview.cfm

(Image taken from Telegraph website. It's the first ever UK Woolworths store, opened in Church Street, Liverpool in 1909.)

Found in translation

Corpoetics has been picked up on a few blogs around the world, but the one we like best is this Dutch one called Fackeldey Finds, written by Jacqueline Fackeldey. We had to run it through the Babel Fish translation tool to work out what it meant. The result forms a strange kind of poetry in its own right. Here’s the introduction to her article (with some added line breaks):

You come them everywhere against,
the splendid sentences and slogans
with which commit themselves recommend.

You a book are able write and that is also exact
what the stylist has done Nick Asbury.

There, as it happens, recently a collection
of poems of its hand with in this poems
appeared based on those sentences.

Hence that Asbury this dichtvorm
and its collection of poems
very appropriate ‘Corpoetics’ have called.

Not sure what a dichtvorm is, but let’s face it, it doesn’t sound good.

Jacqueline goes on to include a few poems of her own, which look great, although Babel Fish continues to have its weird way with them. Here’s one example:

An open door is called at us `entrance solution'.
And we clean tillen at the level of precise cleaning'
but sometimes us the doubt comes over
in the form of the grindstone for the spirit
because simplicity is' nevertheless `design your own life'?

Sounds like a Steve McClaren press conference.

Anyway, thanks very much for the post Jacqueline. And thanks to Babel Fish for clearing everything up.

Corpoetics in Creative Review

Our Corpoetics project gets some coverage in this month's Creative Review

Download a pdf (604 kb)