 When I was appointed as Birmingham Poet Laureate in 2002 I was interviewed by reporters who asked me to sum up my love of writing poetry and asked to tell them what I hoped to achieve in my post as Laureate that year. I answered: "I would like people to discover their own creativity. I would like Brummie wanderers, like Aborigines on walkabout, to sing back the songs of their city. I would like to put something back; to set up competitions and awards that encourage people to write their own city into words." As founder of Oasis Café Theatre, as a director of Poetry Central and now also as Poet in Residence at Symphony Hall I have tried my best since then to make this happen. Today we are launching Poetry of Place in SelectLiving to enable readers of the magazine and of the website to sing back their own songs to the city. If you are an avid people watcher, enjoy the rhythm and beauty of words and have an affection for the landscape, then this is a challenge set for you. Those of you who have read Stephen Fry's book, An Ode Less Travelled may have been triggered into debating with friends about the nature of poetry. Should verse be free or constrained to a form? Is it form that gives it the wings that make it fly? I do not have any easy answers but I love it when form and content work in support of each other, when there is craft and inspiration and art. Today and in future issues I hope that we will rediscover the places that we live and that we will find the appropriate form to help our words to fly. The poem I have chosen to begin this series with is the title poem of my second collection Cut on the Bias. This poem was first conceived when I visited the Halcyon gallery at the International Convention Centre. I was drawn to some small statues by Lorenzo Quinn, son of the actor Anthony Quinn, and after spending some considerable time wandering around the gallery and thinking about them I asked for more details. I was told that some of the large statues could be seen at King Edward's Wharf and so I went along to see them with my notebook, as usual, in my hand. I arrived at King Edward's Wharf on that sunny afternoon to discover that the statues were set in the courtyard of an executive housing site that had been recently erected in this area of regeneration. Workmen hammered and chatted and stopped for their lunch break as I wondered and wandered for a while. I suppose I was, as usual, paying attention to small details and writing them down but I was also transported by the beauty and the size and these statues. I felt as if I had discovered a secret garden. The beat of the workmen's tool set a rhythm to keep me grounded but the statue inspired by Michelangelo sent my heart flying out to the Sistine Chapel, my mind to those metaphysical questions of reality and the existence of God. The rhythm wrote itself to the hammering of the workmen and the rhyme felt as if it needed to hold onto the dream.
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