The Dark Would is coming

The Dark Would preview event at the Poetry Library last night was as generative and inclusive an event as would be expected for an anthology as necessary and timely as the Dark Would itself. Philip Davenport has poured two years of his life into building a document that should stand for a moment I have been skirting around for around the same amount of time - that is the point where genre definitions between avant garde poetry and art die away and the practise of text becomes the join between what has been previously perceived as two wholly different artforms despite their obvious objective similarity. The conversations I had many years ago with my friend Ben Morris when he lamented how Bob Cobbing had not been on his art degree and I said the same about the immense myriad of sonic artists like Ghedalia Tazartes not being discussed in poetry circles. The introductions I tried to make between those regular on the avant garde poetry reading circuit in London and those who were seen as performance artists or text artists, purely out of my own curiosity and obvious feeling that there was so much that could be shared between the two genres is really now becoming redundant. The inclusion of Patrick Coyle, Holly Pester, Tamarin Norwood, Hannah Silva and others in the recent Bloodaxe anthology speaks to that. Philip has gone a step further, specifically in the world of visual text, and concretely laid down a marker for the future, for the rest of the century in fact. Seeing the book's proof I was genuinely bowled over by it's form and content, it's range and it's ambition. It will be a step toward a sloughing off of the old guards and barriers and a new dialogue, long begun, has an excuse to increase in volume until it is one noise. I'm very proud my work with Anatol Knotek, a great collaborative partner, features in the book, and that I'm alongside so many peers that I admire like Emily Critchley and Holly Pester, as well as those who have been absolutely pivotal in my development as a poet and a person, like Carol Watts, Tim Atkins and Tom Raworth.