Manchester Poetry Library exhibition - 'This is not a guide'

The new exhibition, ‘This is not a guide’,  is a poetic work-in-progress on “guidance” in all its forms, created by Anita Slater. The exhibition is available to visit for free at Manchester Poetry Library until Tuesday 28 May.

Anita Slater is a researcher, poet, and interdisciplinary writer. She is a recipient of the Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future doctoral scholarship at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her writing has appeared in various online publications such as The New Statesman, The Independent, Polyester Zine, and Cringe Mag. Anita has presented her work at the Livable Cities conference in New York, and the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research conference. Her work explores the concept of “guidance” in relation to contemporary poetry, writing her own poetry and thinking about how poems and hybrid forms operate in cities, as both guides and disruptions to conventional guidance. Anita was a Comino-poet-in-residence in 2023, carrying out a poetry project with a secondary school in Bolton and Whitworth Art Gallery on the theme of “walls”.

Anita Slater: “Contemporarily, guidance has become both something so specific and yet ultimately intangible. “Guidebook” culture in relation to the prevalence of guidebooks or manuals to cover topics ranging from politics to the “the patriarchy” to illness can flatten unusual or critical ways of thinking, opting for a homogenous, two-dimensional approach where feelings like anger and outrage are replaced with instruction.

These issues extend far beyond classic guidebooks themselves, into a kind of “guided thinking” whereby all sorts of forms or places adopt a linear approach. For example, looking at how cities are shaped, one can see discrepancies between how the topics of mental illness and disability are approached in planning or design stages, versus how accessibility is actually implemented, see “disabled toilet out of order”.

Poetry or creative writing at large offers a way of looking at “guidance” differently, how might a poem or an experimental prose piece flip guidance around? Various writers have subverted existing forms to trouble ideas of ordered thinking, e.g. Christina Sharpes Ordinary Notes (2023), Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024), Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), or Fillippo Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932). In Susan Sontag’s short story turned film Unguided Tour (1977), the couple have conversations on the edge of guidance, the protagonist saying “I read the guidebooks after. At home”.

Our bodies subvert guidance as well. Struggling with the worst eczema of my life in the past six months, my skin has become an anti-tour guide, telling me where I can go, what places to avoid, where I will find happiness or luxury in my body. Can we truly subvert or play with guidance? Do “guided forms” help our lives or what risks do they pose? These are questions you can ask yourself when looking around my work-in-progress poems.”