press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

5)

Liliane Lijn, 'A for Elm' & 'Jewel in the Woods'

Giles Goodland, 'Hand Made Poem'

(This month, press free press RESPOND to two works from the Poetry Library's current exhibition of visual poetics, running until 14 April 2013)




The freedom of these works to take the form of any object and the admission of objectness that poetry books often conceal. To jump forward again, the next question seems to be does text need to be part of an object. Lijn's 'koans' could be transferred to a virtual space - in a way seeing them in a glass case is a virtual experience. But the digital virtual space brings a new succession of possibilities that is ongoing, including the question of connecting between virtual and physical space.

//

Repetition as an action in the visual poetic form, both build the visual through repetition of text and not of object. Text then becomes a textured experience, a textured reading experience of building a whole. This sense of wholeness is important in each, both are attempting to create a whole; we view it and read it. I’m interested in whether we view or read these objects. View in terms of I am looking at, read in terms of I am actively reading. Each is making me look and read but in different ways. I question my response to each object as I look and read them; looking becomes aesthetic, reading less so; looking before reading, or reading and then looking – how does this shift my relationship to the object?




The physical rupture of materiality is in both. There is a building of texture through an awareness and engagement with the materiality of text and object. How this builds a relationship of difference is interesting. Difference in how we engage. I am drawn to the physicality of the hand of how it is formed as an action or re-action to the text and how we engage with it in more physical terms. Both poets are making me form a bodily interaction. This physical construction of text is important. The physical becomes a way to rupture the text & our experience of it, a breaking of it. Yet this can happen in a book, in a non visual poem, all poems are visual, but these foreground this by engaging with materiality.

//

A for Elm also offers an interesting reading/looking experience. I picked out the word HEATHER which is broken so that as the koan comes round one may first read HEATH and then a split second later read HEATHER - shifting pronunciation. This kind of act connects to questions that come out of reading poetry, especially where repetition is used as an aural strategy. The koan is constantly offering another chance to read or ‘hear’ again as the eye darts differently over the moving surface each time.




but for me the distinction between text and materiality was also important in the Goodland. On the one hand (!) we have the act of putting on and removing a plastic glove, with red paint as intermediary material, on the other there is the process of writing which is determined by received cultural linguistic associations, all around the word 'hand' - there is also the uniting act of laying out the text, printing it onto acetate and incorporating it with the glove. The glove is a text of its own, bringing in references to blood and hygiene - it is also not a real hand but the idea of a hand.

//

Earlier you ask about the need for text in these objects and I go back to that. Or rather u question what text is in each and its status. So we need each object to inform each text or vice versa. Status of text in the visual and whether it becomes merely visual is important. Both of these pieces make us read, this is important, whereas they could easily not engage us in terms of text as language. Thinking about wholeness as an object and whether this is achieved in each; does the visual win? Does the language win? Does there need to be a balance?




The repetition of these multiple hands and how this continues to build associations between the visual & language as an enactment of doing and production is important to me. It is an ongoing engagement with materiality, form and language. Both poets build on these, use the materiality, the form, the language, to build 'wholes' which question their status as object and allows us to question our interaction with them. The visual is not a footnote here, the visual is not an aside but rather a way to form the poem, to write the poem and to read the poem.

//

What about a book where every page is a Giles Goodman hand? What about this in reproduction- harder to conceive with the Lilian Lijn pieces but a virtual space connecting these cones could be constructed – maybe even an e-book. I noticed that Phaidon have produced a book where every page is a different Ed Ruscha painting – are these works always and inevitably in dialogue with the idea of a book? As poets beginning a project do we need to consider the full spectrum of possibilities afforded by the meeting of object and text, of object materiality and text materiality?




Liliane Lijn, website

Giles Goodland, Shearsman Books


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

press free press RE:RESPOND

Re:active re:reading.

1)

10/12 - 01/13



The personal is something which is driving these poets, but in very individual ways. Returning to the Hampson I sense that sense of absence; I wonder about what surrounds the language in terms of where it has been lifted from. This idea that language always comes from somewhere else, somewhere outside the poem. The poem giving it a new context constructed by the poet. A Davenport cell is a context, a bit of Waffle is, the way in which Flick moves in Crewe’s constructed landscape for it. Context of and for the poet is of interest to me. How / where / why the text is built into a context and where this then fits in a wider context of poetics or art or literature.

//

The 'personal' and the single consciousness - we often talk about multi-vocality and multi-consciousness but this sense of or rejection of the 'personal' brings us to the single consciousness who is reading, who is of course one of many (potentially, conceptually) but singly is reading 'for' - 'reading for' another like him/her? Is this naive? Is this why writers resist the personal? There is the heightened persona personal of Robinson, or the fantastic figure of Flick in Crewe - do these personae represent this desire of consciousness?




I’m changing the subject, but … … How do the poets show their influences? Terry re-visions Queneau. Davenport references everyone and the title is from Bob Cobbing but also a near-homonym for Apollinaire etc. etc. But both are finding new territory. Davenport presents us with a grid that for Mac Low was a means to a poem, there it is the poetic text.

//

The action of reading as an experience which should be challenged and is under construction: Davenport builds cells of multiple and physical reading strategies. I think he is not only asking how to write but how to read. Terry also challenges my how to read. With James Davies' comments in my mind returning to this I see it as a more formulaic piece, asking questions of reading in relation to the book, reading as a movement from and between and across ideas/structures/experiences. The awareness of how we read becomes important to me. Or how we are reading. Or might re-read.

Our reading/re-reading brings with it a context




There is something fragile and breakable within all these voices for me. You touched on Fowler and Kelly building a joint vocabulary or voice, but it still breaks away in the poems' structure. This is something occurring in the Ashcroft too, is there a pre-occupation with attempting to find a voice? Not one of the texts function with one voice. Is there a pre-occupation with attempting to find a voice? Not one of the texts functions as one voice. Is there a pre-occupation with attempting to find a voice? Not one of the texts functions in one voice.

with – as – in –

//

To speak the poet must appropriate - covertly, consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously, conspicuously, inconspicuously, subtly, unsubtly, from seeing something, from hearing something, from out-sourcing, from in-sourcing, from delegating the work of 'poet', from taking on the work of 'poet' -

voicing voices voices
voices voice voicing
voice voicing voices

Vocabulary is important
Choices of vcices

Why does the same word(s) crop up in two different books?

e.g. 'dock leaves' in Kelly/Fowler and Crewe.




Let’s think of the texts among these eight books that seem to be more actively referencing a specific space i.e. site in which the poet finds herself – in Terry, Crewe, Ashcroft, Robinson, I read this.

Hampson and Davenport are explicitly re-locating the site of another text or texts. The textual site. In Terry, Crewe, Ashcroft, Robinson, in their sites – from their sites – what can writing do? What is it trying to do?

//

The poetics then as a functioner of language is a body moving form one body to another. Body is built and re-built. Body is writer is language is book is voice is reader is context is always moving away from me

We have placed these bodies alongside each other to arrive at more bodies.

Some questions

- Do we resist or depend on the book?
- How is the book being played with temporally?
- Where is gender in these works?

These are questions I always ask and have been asking and will continue to ask of these and more bodies.




Kelly & Fowler / Hampson (10/12)

Welton / Davenport (11/12)

Robinson / Ashcroft (12/12)

Crewe / Terry (01/13)


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

press free press RE:RESPOND

Re:active re:reading.

Away from the Poetry Library and each other we have 4x20 minutes to read/listen to every press free press RESPOND to date.

In the library we have 40 minutes to freely re:read the 4x2 RESPONDed publications.

Outside the library we are talking and writing in response: talking (5 minutes) / writing (5 minutes) / reading each other / repeat x 4.

Resulting 12 documents are unedited recordings of live talking and unedited transcriptions of live writing. 



1)

10/12 - 01/13

(link)

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

4)

Sarah Crewe, 'flick invicta'

Philip Terry, 'Advanced Immorality'



Thinking about the place of language as a whole and how it functions. How does/can it move from the poetic to the conceptual? Is there a difference? There is a distance between how language is functioning throughout the different texts in the Terry. The movement of how we read is affected, or how I read.

Crewe’s language functions in a different way, it functions as poetic throughout, the movement of it coming from a series of internal perspectives. Perspective of the language and what is placed against interests me in her work. The gaps are visible by space. I kept thinking these poems were skeletal figures being eroded again and again. I’m interested

//

In 'Advanced Immorality' and 'A Berlin Notebook' Terry finds poetic structures that neatly hold the tension between the economical/sparse and the more expansive, more speech-like tendencies in the writing. These are composed in units of text that are counted and repeated for instance, in 'Advanced Immorality':

3 6 3

7

1 2 1

where the numbers indicate lines.




In ‘A Berlin Notebook’ the rigorous count-structure allows a sampling of space/place, so the ‘businessmen’ fill the 12 allocations above and 4 allocations below the ‘free’ text, suggesting that they are a sample of countless businessmen. Picked out for the middle section is, ‘in sunglasses, on a cord, on a bike, mouth like a handlebar moustache’ an image that is picked out from a countless background.

Crewe’s structural methods are more oblique, yet we see a similar intention in ‘flick / Newsham park’

//

The reader and how they read is being considered by both. There is a sense that order of language is important but there are ways this can be broken in the reading experience. The 'Berlin Notebook' interests me because of its ordered quality but also its insistence and constant re-ordering of experience and the space of the city. Structure then allows for the language to move in this freer way - for associations to be built in the reading

Building of and taking away 'FLICK' in Crewe is built and taken away. Flick is object, body, person, thing and somehow breaks apart the actual structure of the collection.




Movement between pieces is difficult for me in the Terry, I want to spend more time in one place than the other or figure out how one is working differently. How he functions as a writer is interesting to think about then as he is doing multiple things, he is making language function in multiple ways. Does this make us think about the potential of language, the potential of how we can write. Is Terry commenting on the functions of the poetic? The fact the poetic and its meaning can shift in one volume? What is his poetic if it moves throughout?

//

I would compare Terry's book with last month's Joanne Ashcroft. In each we are able to observe how the writing shifts given a new set of rules. Perhaps Terry's shifts are more extreme - HAMLET certainly seems to follow a conceptual writing tradition.

There is something in Crewe's positioning of text that seems more instinctive and responsive to the point where it could be said a structure is not required?




I am glad to have found the poem ‘Advanced Immorality’ and will return to it, yet there is something in coupling it to Appeal in Air by Philip Davenport, how that is a real book-object that is perhaps interesting. Or is this a fetishistic response to Davenport’s book?

I would also like to mention the tendency in both Crewe and Terry to use two-word units e.g. witchhunt graffiti / fountain obsolete (Crewe) and trotting dog / Flowering orchid (Terry) – this tendency to engage in two-word units is intriguing!

//

The economics of poetics and where poetry finds itself today, should a poetic book be a place where there are multiple sides. I kept seeing a book on the shelf called 'Poet's Market' and there is a need to think about that, where is this.

The multiple uses of the book as a space to not only offer a narrative or an aesthetic like Crewe but a space for experiment and many poetics functioning at one time. Is the book appropriate for poetics? Is there more we can do? Should it change? Can we define our own poetic or 'a' poetic?




Saarah Crewe, 'flick invicta', Oystercatcher Press

Philip Terry, 'Advanced Immorality', if p then q press


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

3)

Sophie Robinson, 'The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair'

Joanne Ashcroft, 'From Parts Becoming Whole'



There seems to be a core in Sophie Robinson's writing in this book and the core is a body-self experiencing and self-consciously writing and trying to heal the divide between experience and writing. The residency at the V&A, the word installations, do not pull far from this core, from this scribed sense of longing, loss, desire, self.

you wouldn't write

yourself a poem

you can't arrest

yourself in the

dead of night or keep

yourself a secret.

//

Structure of the Robinson book as an object functions with ongoing themes of BODY/LOVE/LOSS/REPAIR/LANGUAGE and I'm interested in how these function differently in each section. The “I” for instance, does it shift perspective throughout? Does it shift itself as a body? Does it move its perspective through writing? In Ashcroft we see this progression happen more clearly through the sections – she is linking these works – grouping them. Robinson provides us with a selection of work asking similar questions, but functioning differently.

The I in the photos for example is different to the I in Lotion. I'm interested in the collisions of the I's in each section; what she is placing in opposition to herself or to the writing.




Where to place poetry or how to place language into a poem, when the body/self is so heavily relied on. There is an ongoing struggle to locate the self/body in the writing but a constant resistance to allowing it to fade out. The female body in both is of concern, both ground the language and its place in locating it, building towards a body: whether this be spatial/performative or physical. Ashcroft builds or her body emerges, is this a writing body / poetic body of writing or an actual body

//

When Robinson removes the word PRESS RESET from an oven display in “kitchen” (pg 22-23) and frames them in red ink in the body of her poem it is almost a reciprocal act from allowing lines of her poetry to escape into a ‘real’ photographic context.

In Ashcroft’s “A stroll in the Park” (pg. 23) there seems to be a linguistic sensory fusion that incorporates found speech to give a brief document of experience. Ashcroft allows random text/imagery to disrupt her self-reflection, yet in this poem all is filtered through her poet-consciousness.




Ashcroft reveals herself as a poet very accepting and entertaining of past and present avant garde strategies and incorporates some romantic/confessional strategies too. Robinson explores text-art and sometimes brings in the 'concrete'. Neither collection is pushing too hard against the book as a physical structure.

//

A sense of optimism in the action of writing drives Ashcroft, her sense of play leads to moments of real clarity in the writing. This is brave! Robinson’s brevity comes in the form of a constant persistence at these self referential themes, is there a tireless action of doing, happening, or a constant questioning which leaves this heap of language as a result. Poems as heaps of loss or ruin or bodies.

Ahscroft’s poems do not function in this same way, the motion moves more, collects as it goes, body is recognising change and not resistant to it in the same way.

A HEAP A CAPSULE

A ROOM A POEM

Poems as spaces which are closed off but are




A self curating; a self curating body how does this function in terms of the poetic strategies at play in the poems themselves. I'm moving away from the point but am interested in this. Both women curate themselves in the book and their writing functions as a body of work both expressive and expressing, it's a struggle and struggling, it's a being there and not being, both move from presence to non.
But the body of the book remains whole even if the language is not.

//

A response to a museum and the text object it produces makes me think of Olsen and Johanknecht’s Here Are My Instructions and how that played on the idea of an exhibition catalogue. For Robinson the experience of responding to exhibits feeds into her poetry- then her text installations- then her poetry collection.

In Ashcroft the collection of parts, or whole-ing of parts is the impetus if not for the writing in the first place, then for the final curation as a poetry collection, and pretty much abiding to the rules of a poetry collection.




Sophie Robinson, 'The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair', bad press

Joanne Ashcroft, 'From Parts Becoming Whole', Knives Forks and Spoons Press


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.


2)

Matthew Welton, 'Waffles'

Philip Davenport, 'Appeal in Air'



Form and content and how the situation of text and language can inform this is interesting. Davenport is working within the “form” of a spreadsheet, it is determining the inevitable form the language takes; the very physical space then constructs and deconstructs the language. Words are broken by the line of the cell – words are enclosed. The relationship then is one where the form becomes part of the construction of language. Davenport is not being allowed to build form in the same way Welton is. Welton has constructed his own cells of working, these also allow for a building of interaction between the language and the form it takes. Waffles repeatedly utters that it is under “construction” – the making of these phrases is interesting to me. The stencil action of repeating, yet altering; a word becomes a sound becomes a word again; there is a progression and

//

There are conceptual sections and divisions in Welton that are intricate and multiple, and yet the book observes a rigid visual decorum, perhaps pushing hardest against this in the square bracketed italicised sequence in the first construction. Davenport's post-poetic idea is to embrace the spreadsheet as a visual norm.




Is the personal in Davenport shown up in

e.g. “Can’t remember” (D469)

which appears in the row that is generally a list of names of contemporary experimental poets. It seems to show the human/personal in this data-collector, this spreadsheet filler. In Welton the personal similarly appears, in his confessions

e.g. “The real mistakes I maybe make”

but also in reference to the speakers girlfriend and “girlfriend’s kid”. Welton defines a particular local personal field through repetition of certain words.

//

The sense making stategy; a way of working which attempts to work through process using language as a tool.

In Waffles we have three distinct strategies at play in three sections. How do these link together? Is there a common strategy?

Language is being manipulated in both texts with a playfulness. Does this allow for more accesibility?
What makes these pieces accesible?
How do we read each of them?
Can we read the Davenport with one voice?
By putting these together we see just how difficult the Davenport is to navigate.
By difficult I mean;




This “I” is important in Waffles as it is one which is moving as an “I” in the poems but also as the “I” of the poet. I wonder about the separation or closeness between these two “I’s”.  The link between the poem and the personal perhaps? We see definite cognitive moves taking place in Waffles, there is a visible “construction” and de-“construction” of the forms this “I” finds itself in. Do we see it move from an “I” of “multiplicity” to and “I” of “minimality” as constructions of six principles?

//

The poet's mind and eye in Waffles refers back to the same real/unreal images and among these repeated images e.g.

monkey
coffee

is 'a pile of apple waffles'

To pull this word out for the title is to emphasise its other meaning to do with speaking - but also, as we have just mentioned - this grid structure that may or may not be a clue to the constructions.

Either way there is a play between the visible real/unreal and the invisible structures and concepts perhaps producing the visible - it is language that connects




Davenport is celebratory, public, joyful, claiming poetic space, hijacking the spreadsheet form. Welton also constructs his own space but within an already understood poetic framework.

//

The idea of context and where to place these texts is worth considering. We have drawn them together by chance, yet they each comment on the other interestingly.
Davenport creates a structure of poets within his text; an army perhaps, constructing a space for this work to sit in, to be nested in.

I wonder then where to place Waffles, what traditional or non traditional space. It is pushing outwards with its conscious decision to play with form & break verse traditions by paying attention to the construction process of form. This interests me; its construction interests me.

Davenport begins with a topical structured space of the spreadsheet, yet explodes it with language. It is a reading score of experience & constructs a space which is



Matthew Welton, 'Waffles', Egg Box Publishing

Philip Davenport, 'Appeal in Air', Knives Forks and Spoons Press


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.


1)

S Kelly & SJ Fowler, 'Ways of Describing Cuts'

Robert Hampson, 'Out of Sight'



Thinking about physicality first, the object and how voice manifests itself in this object. It’s apt then that we think about single and plural voice and how this can manifest itself physically. Kelly and Fowler are in dialogue with each other, they are also in opposition; physically they come together at “drowning”, the physical space between them once vast is “cut” and merged. This action of cutting through the space to come together interests me. I wonder how they physically dealt with space, whether it is related to distance, or time, or a marker of separation between voice?

Hampson’s physicality comes in a slant, a block of slanted text justified and strong on the page, yet there is a difference between how it acts

//

We are comparing a book with multiple pages with a single fold. A similarity that springs to mind is how in both cases there is resistance to the provided structure, so the dialogue between SJ Fowler and S Kelly is not played out on opposite pages but across an invisible horizontal divide that can disappear, and Hampson's text is printed across the fold and at an angle with the page, disrupting the visual experience of reading, from opening the fold to encountering the text, to reading the text.




“how it acts” – is it one act – is it a single appearance? As with Fowler/Kelly there is still a sense of the linear. As with McCaffery’s ‘Lag’ the text between commas presents a separate image or proposition, but it begins like a film treatment and ends with a full stop.

In Hampson’s piece we always consider the text in relation to our understanding of a block of prose – a rather abstract detached notion – how about in Kelly/Fowler? Are we reading the text on its own terms or in relation to an existing model? Is the fact of two poets sharing the same book presented as a new

//

This disruption occurs in both through the physical and the use of text/voice. There is an interest in both texts in the physical rupture of the page and this is reflected in the ongoing textual rupturing. The use of speech, of how to speak or how speech is constructed is highlighted.

"not a poetry just a sitting and a speech"

S Kelly - SJ Fowler

This sense of conversation and dialogue being distressed or under duress, there being a pressure to express. One voice never allows the other to find itself. The one searching voice in 'Out of Sight' is constantly shifting and moving through a non poetry language. I wonder then how the poetic finds itself in both pieces. How the language becomes poetical and whether this is related to these physical dialogues being played out on the page.




reading experience? The sharing and action of sharing is of concern, as are they sharing or working against each other? Perhaps what is more necessary to consider is not that there are two voices, but these two voices both claim the “I”. There is then a shifting “I” in the text which flits between female and male. Both voices are claiming the “I” for themselves; what impact does this have on the text and our experience of it? The “I” in this text speaks to each other, moves between each other; I’m interested in whether the “I” stays whole

//

I was also interested in reading, perhaps specifically in reading for this purpose, whether an important part of reading is identifying language that self-referentially gives a clue to the process, this need the reader of poetry has to find in the poetry itself clues to how it should be received, and I think the first thing a reader does is to force a literalness to parts of the text to fit this purpose. For example I read in Hampson's piece a reference to movie treatments, and this reading brought a significance to 'there's more money in treatment than in cure'.




Also, what does this do to the reader? A reader is often assuming the I of the text, relating to it. Should we pick a side here? We are asked to identify with both sides of a poetic dialogue but also to replace our notion of poet with “dialogue between two poets”. There is something exciting in this dialogue as it exposes process to a point and we feel each voice constricting and liberating the other. However, we still wonder about the directions the writing(s) takes when moving away from or towards this structure.

//

This idea of literalness is interesting as we question how literal the author or authors are being. There is a mistrust between reader and author/authors in both texts as identity is always shifting away from the reader. In Hampson there is a constant and relentless labelling and retelling of this identity that leaves us freefalling with the 'I' perhaps? In Kelly and Fowler we mistrust the shifts between voices, I wonder where and if the I can rest, where you can rest. How the dialogue between bodies can resolve itself if at all possible. Does either piece resolve itself? Is there a sense that both are finished? Out of Sight



S Kelly & SJ Fowler, 'Ways of Describing Cuts', Knives Forks and Spoons Press

Robert Hampson, 'Out of Sight', Crater Press


more press free press RESPOND

press free press RESPOND

A monthly series of active reading.

Each month we choose two publications available to read in the Poetry Library - the selection is based on browsing and instinct.

We are mostly interested in reading new work.

In the library we each have 20 minutes to read each publication.

Outside the library we are talking and writing in response: talking (5 minutes) / writing (5 minutes) / reading each other / repeat x 4.

Resulting 12 documents are unedited recordings of live talking and unedited transcriptions of live writing. 



1)

S Kelly & SJ Fowler, 'Ways of Describing Cuts'

Robert Hampson, 'Out of Sight'

(link)


2)

Matthew Welton, 'Waffles'

Philip Davenport, 'Appeal in Air'

(link)


3)

Sophie Robinson, 'The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair'

Joanne Ashcroft, 'From Parts Becoming Whole'

(link)


4)

Sarah Crewe, 'flick invicta'

Philip Terry, 'Advanced Immorality'

(link)

press free press RE:RESPOND

Re:active re:reading.

5)

Liliane Lijn, 'A for Elm' & 'Jewel in the Woods'

Giles Goodland, 'Hand Made Poem'

(link)