Artist’s Corner: Leo Mercer - Blogpost 1

Follow Leo Mercer's journey into the 50 Jewish Objects, through his own words.

As a poet, the first thing that stands out while checking out the 50 Jewish Objects project is the geographic and linguistic journey it illustrates - a two thousand year journey spanning Egypt to Italy to India to England.

In my poetry, I think of spelling as the flavour of written language. In poetry, you can be cheeky with language in ways that you can’t when you're writing an essay or a script (or a blog). You can playfully (mis-)use standardised spelling to evoke different time periods, different places, different personalities.

This love of spelling comes from all sorts of places. In part, it’s just from looking around at the world at the variety of the written word in the modern world. But it’s also interesting to connect it with a long tradition in Jewish theology which emphasises that every single letter (not just words) in the bible is there for a reason. Plenty of talmudic debates begin in an oddity or ambiguity in the spelling of a word.

So here is my challenge in this residency: can I capture, in 12 playful poems, the linguistic story that the 50 Jewish Objects project tells?