The editors of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century , Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, will be leading an online course for The Poetry School , beginning on 15th September 2015. The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015) One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it's impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these techniques might be put into practice in a particular poem or sequence. Edwin Morgan is significant here. His work is remarkable for its variety, dexterity and energy. I have always felt that his concrete poetry allowed him to get right down into the syllables, particles and phonemes of poetic language which he could later put to such effective use in his non-concrete work. Like an arachnophile coming back from year...
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...
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'
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