cenotaph south radio and online appearances, november 2016


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poetry objects

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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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the new concrete: an online course in attentive poetics

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‎ 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...
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Geoffrey Hill made the mistake, as a young poet, of stating in his biog that his dad & grandad were both village policemen. Critics have since made much of this. Al Alvarez recently wrote in The New York Review of Books that Hill had a 'Working Class upbringing' though most have pitched it as 'Lower Middle Class'. As if there is no difference. The connexion seems to be made between the upbringing & 'difficulty' of his poetry that Hill is somehow calling on his family history in trying to police the language. Back we come to the moralistic top of poetry as being about an essential emotion or truth that should be commun icated clearly & without obfuscation - that speed, density & abstraction are an abomination of the art and of our duty to relate as responsible human beings. That the randomness & chaos of life should not be reflected in poetry, but made clear sense of. That the poet should 'have' something the reader can 'ge...
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