Poetry To Services - May 2007

The Weston Auditorium at the University of Hertfordshire campus in Hatfield showcased the laconic but articulate poetry foursome Aisle 16 on May 17th 2007 on their ‘services to poetry’. Conceived in the back of an Escort in 2006 and inspired by John Betjemen’s Trebethernick they asked ‘can there poetry at the English motorway service station?’ The hour long gig presented their metered tongue-in-cheek results from 3 days of travelling up and down our motorways, “two chevrons apart” A husky home spun video of motorway monotony led us in to the performance that was somehow sad and mesmerising for its familiarity, lines, lanes, signs and symbols. The paradox of service stations as centres of humanity yet as soulless, replicable, where users find and forget and the rip off burger culture was tasted in “the salt of the cost” was both whimsically and poignantly drawn and fitting for an anthology on the synthetic texture of service stations, where history and human attachments are elusive and where jaded modernity rules.