The Signal on Poetry Jukebox

Poetry jukebox: amplifying quiet voices and beautiful words

Words have power. In print and broadcast news in the North, in this past week alone, came reports of graffiti on walls that read "N ----rs out"; families fleeing sectarian threats; swastikas daubed on walls; a pig's head left outside a community centre used by Muslims; anti-Muslim slogans sprayed across the doors.

Belfast's newest resident, the Poetry Jukebox, was installed at Crescent Arts Centre a few months ago with a deceptively simple mission: #changingthemessage

What Else... @poetryjukebox celebrating 20 years of the #GoodFridayAgreement. #GFA20 Preparing for #peaceandbeyond conference. @BCouncil_NI @evagrosman @ACNIWriting. #ChangingTheMessage. #PeaceMatters pic.twitter.com/RJgprZH4RW

— Maria McManus (@LabelLit) 25 March 2018

​A new curation arrives at the beginning of April marking twenty years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and asking the question.. "What else?" And this is the type of question McGibbon O'Lynn's post-human narrative likes to interrogate and explore in The Xenophon Project. So I am vey delighted that one of my Xeno poetry fragments, 'The Signal' from our Almanac of Tomorrow piece has been selected to be part of this new curation.  Words have power, language carries a resonance far beyond ourselves.

​A consensus could not be achieved on whether this was an explosion or an implosion.

​The poems in the #GFA20 curation will also become a LabeLLit intervention, part of the arts hub of the Peace & Beyond Conference which is being organised by the Centre for Peace & Democracy, Ulster University & Queen's University Belfast (10-12 April). Our poetry will be an installation of literature designed for conference delegates to take away with them - little thoughts on where the future will take us all.