In my professional capacity I attended the renewable energy conference which took place alongside the Renewable Energy Marketplace exhibition organised by Regen SW last month. The venue was the Westpoint exhibition centre just outside Exeter. I was delighted to discover that in between the presentations on how to finance and deliver energy efficiency and renewable energy and the panel debate on how all the theory might actually pan out in practice, space had been made for some performance poetry!

Described in the conference programme as “the enemy of all that’s difficult and upsetting” and “Regen’s poet in residence”, Matt Harvey was a revelation, making us all laugh at his poetic explanation of the thoughts that ran through his mind(s) upon his first ever encounter with a large scale solar PV farm in “The Shock of the New“. Not content with that, Matt went on to invite us all to contribute to a crowd sourced poem about wind turbines! Those of us in the room were invited to write a line of the poem on a strip of blank white paper. Those further afield were invited to contribute a line by “Tweeting” using the #REMPoem hashtag. My own line required no thought at all, since it was already on my own mind before Matt’s invitation, and I believe I was the first to hand in my no longer plain white strip of paper to him. Matt assured me that “partial plagiarism” was perfectly acceptable in all the circumstances.

By mid afternoon Matt had assembled all the contributions (some from as far afield as Canada) into the following performance, hastily recorded on his smartphone by yours truly:

See if you can work out which line was mine?  If it’s not immediately obvious to you, here’s a big clue!

I subsequently discovered that another recording had been made of Matt’s performance, so here’s take 2. Amongst other things a not so hasty video recording of me making a hasty video recording of Matt Harvey’s #REMPoem!

Which video do you prefer, and have you worked out by now which line of the poem was mine?