A link to a BBC Radio programme, The Verb, which is described as ‘Radio 3’s cabaret of the word, featuring the best poetry, new writing and performance.’ This week it featured Margaret Atwood and Alice Oswald talking about how we write poetry, and their own process, the natural world, time, and the possibilities of myth.
At around 35 minutes there is an interesting account of how writing poetry changes the poet. This reinforces the idea that it is an act of experiential learning, and it is recursive, the poet makes the poem which makes itself and also makes the maker. The header image reflects this as a self-making pattern of continuity and discontinuity.
About being blind in blackness digging in my garden
So instead I embody things in
The intelligence of materials
Paper, or ink, or words on a page
And speech
To make the air vibrate
In your ear.
About Gestate
This was written for performance. It was a thing that fell out of me and was very personal and was quite an important trail marker on my art as an adventure and research trail. Often artform preempts material emerging into consciousness. It kind of acts like an alchemical process and distils down lots of raw material then allows the product to float up to the surface. In art making this is sometimes called percolation. I call it incubation. But different words for the same thing. Regards this website, it says a lot about what art as research feels like. Regards me, it revealed some personal stuff that was emerging for me.
It is also about poetry and art making and what art therapist Pat B Allen here and here calls, spiritual technology, the latter descriptor being consciously and deliberately and accurately oxymoronic.
As performance, the poem was designed to be heard and not read. So below is the poem as spoken word.
Nine years after I first walked as an act of art making, I have returned to Walton Moss to circumnavigate the same grid square as before. The first time I forgot my compass and despite my best intentions the outcome was, aesthetically, a bit rubbish. This time I intend to cheat like spotted feline to make a pure form.
This article introduces the return and reflects on why the experience was both different and the same.
It is at once hard work and relaxing, at least at the end, where Ren does relax. It ‘mak mi wep’ as they say.
Posting regularly evades me ‘cos I feel like I have to put some thing up that ticks boxes for hits or likes or comments, but, it induces angst, and like Ren at the end learns to relax, go with the flow and see where we go, I’ll be more relaxed about posting and just put up stuff and see what happens.
This tho’. Man, it’s a work of art, and angst, and so even as I write and find myself with Ren again, the ocean from whence we came makes me wet.
This tho’. Man it works at so many levels. It is black comedy, virtuoso performance, pain and perforative, in it’s sonics and it’s lyrics, switching from the bible to Brecht to Shakespearic street talk to confessional to rap at it’s best and British, the kind of multicultural mixed race mixed gender mixed ability thing we do so well, like all the other places that do that well likewise.
Moving Space 