Poet’s work is read through the medium of dog poo bags

Laura Heron gave out two poems along with free poo bags to dog walkers in Victoria Park and Jephson Gardens on Sunday.

It may have helped that the poems were about subjects dear to most dog walkers’ hearts - Laura’s elderly rescue greyhound Johnny, and the plastic bags without which nobody with a canine companion should leave the house - but most people were grateful - at least for the bags.

Laura said: “I only had two people who had anything other than a positive reaction. One was an older man who asked what poo bags had to do with poetry, the other was a family with a very large Weimeraner which was trying to escape.

“All in all, people were really quite friendly and quite happy to be given poetry. People were definitely reading them as they went off.”

As an exercise in guerilla poetry, dog-poo poetry may sound non-threatening, but the poems have a weightier side. For Laura, who is studying a Masters degree in writing at Warwick University, the intent was to make poetry less intimidating and show it can be relevant to even the grubby, throwaway aspects of everyday life.

The 31-year-old Ashorne woman believes poetry need not be the preserve of “beret-wearing” snobs, and is all for new ways of getting it out into the world.

She said: “Poetry has a terrible reputation, in a way because we only learn about it in school and it’s normally read out by your teacher and poems you don’t choose yourself.

“If you look at the popularity of rap or a lot of songwriters, you can look at that as poetry.

“Some people like them and think ‘that’s a really beautiful phrase’ or ‘that’s a good way of expressing an emotion’.

“A lot of people don’t get into poetry because it sounds very elitist, very difficult and like something that other people would do, but we all use language and lots of people have poetry inside them.”

Interview with a plastic bag (one of the poems given out with the bag)

I was sinew and bone and blood.

I was life and mind.

I was predator and prey.

I died and we rotted together.

It was dark, under the earth.

It was dark and heavy.

We became unctuous, viscous, black.

Melted together, mixed and blended.

We rested in that oppressive cellar.

I was raised from my coffin with steel and iron.

I was pushed through pipes with invisible hands

Finally forged and frozen and congealed.

A crackling clean cradle for other’s filth.

Harried by crow with sharp knives for beaks.

Now, I lie sightless and stinking on a pile of my brothers.