Posts

A Digital Haunting of the Analogue World: Hideo Nakata's Ring

Image
This text is available to read in full in  Dreamt by Ghosts:  Notes on Dreams, Coincidence, & Weird Culture  available from Tenement Press  here .  Hideo Nakata’s Ring is haunted by the future of digital technology. Behind the conscious horror of the story there is a larger, unsurfaced fear, lingering in the subconscious of the film: that the world of analogue is being replaced by the world of digital. Most of us had sent an email by 1998, the year the film was released, and had experienced the threat of a computer virus at a time when we were still watching video tapes. In Ring , the digital applies its logic to the analogue realm, which then begins to enact a future technology. The plot of the film is focussed on a videotape that kills anyone who watches it within a week; they’re stamped with their own deadline for obsolescence. The film gluts on images relating to analogue devices: a fax-machine, an instant camera, VHS recorders, cube monitors. There is...
Post a Comment
Read more

talk to that & other poems

Image
  This is my first poetry publication for two years, a series of poems exploring cities: Liverpool, New York, Munich and  Brasília.   The central poem imagines Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane meeting in New York. This limited edition chapbook is restricted to 53 copies and is published in Tangerine Press's latest 'Walking Wounded' series, alongside new publications by David Keenan and Wendy Erskine.  Order Talk to That & Other Poems from Tangerine Press for £12, inclusive of p&p. 
2 comments
Read more

john furnival (1933 - 2020)

Image
A few years ago I co-edited a new anthology of visual poetry and the first name on the list for inclusion was John Furnival. Not only had John defined the landscape for British concrete poetry, he had continued to produce so much exciting work well into the 2000s. I spent a wonderful afternoon with John and Astrid, selecting from the artworks which were all over the house, on the walls, in books, in drawers. John's art and life were as one, he was a visionary and the world will be a little dimmer without him. On that afternoon John generously donated some works for the National Poetry Library collection in London, where I work, and those works are now held with the original pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, for future generations to access. For as long as humans have an interest in how images and words collide - which will be forever - John's work will fascinate, intrigue and delight everyone who looks at them. john furnival, 'statue of liberty' (1977-78)
Post a Comment
Read more

typewriter poems

Image
I have been using typewriters to create typewriter art and poems for many years, but have never owned a typewriter until now. Lockdown presented the perfect opportunity to fill the longer days and quiet time with the happy thud-thud-thud of the alphabet. I took advice from Barrie Tullett, the brilliant typwriter artist and visual poet, and went for a Silver Reed 500. This is the first work I made on the machine, a further homage to James Joyce.
Post a Comment
Read more

poetry objects

Image
Over the past few years I have been working on a series of 'poem objects', using a wide range of materials. I later discovered the work of Joan Brossa, who also worked at this intersection between the visual arts and poetry. Each of my 'poem objects' is numbered. poem object #7 'sound poem' poem object #4 'the monarchy' poem object #1 'the solar system'
3 comments
Read more

poems from the edge of extinction in new york

Image
I've just got back from launching Poems from the Edge of Extinction  in New York. This anthology includes 50 poems in the world's endangered languages, and the launch at Bowery Poetry included readings from Laura Tohe, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort and Bowery Poetry founder Bob Holman. It was my first time in New York, a city which has taken on elements of the mythic in my poetic imagination. I took Walt Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', Lorca's Poet in New York and Hart Crane's The Bridge, as companions. The Bridge has become a really important text for me over the past for years, and like all poems that I return to, has aspects which I just can't work out. How did Crane come to fuse Elizabethan rhythm and diction with Modernist techniques? How had he come to live in a room in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights where the bridge's builder, John A. Roebling, had previously lived? And the visions ... Whitman of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

new poem: talk to that

I've noticed a trend of people asking 'can you talk to that?' (rather than 'What are your thoughts?, or 'Can you say something about that?'). Maybe it's just a literary thing. Can you talk to that? TALK TO THAT There came a point     in human interactions when people asked        ‘Can you talk to that?’ not, ‘What are your thoughts?’   or, ‘Can I have your view?’ or even, ‘What do you think?’       but ‘Can you talk to that?’     overnight the abstract became the object    a mischief of rhetoric  that removed the person        from the dialectic.   ‘Can you talk to that?’  What fractal was detached,     what was the ‘that’ that wanted talking to?        Heel boy, sit, sit,   get back talk now, talk to make it sit,       the question has fleas! Lice! Tics!         ...
Post a Comment
Read more