Published: two works from Aletta Ocean Empire in The New Post Literate

Michael Jacobsen is doing a grand job at his e-journal The New Post Literate in collecting and documenting contemporary explorations of the asemic poetry and abstract writing which is a big interest and concern of mine in practise and especially in my teaching nowadays.

This will culminate in a new book next year with Blart Books, ( http://blartmagazine.jimdo.com/blart-books/ ) entitled Aletta Ocean Empire. It will bring together a series of hand rendered ink and handwritten abstracts and illustrated texts. Two of the early works have now been published.

http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/3-excerpts-from-forthcoming-book-aletta.html

Published: an artpoem in Oxford Poetry

Grand to have this art poem, on the left page, in the latest issue of Oxford Poetry. Thanks to Lavinia Singer and the editorial team at OP, which has been publishing since 1910. The work will be featured in my debut art book, published by Stranger Press in 2017, called I fear my best work behind me. This is what I wrote to contextualise the poem...

"The poem on the page is first a series of markings made upon a surface. Obvious, but it seems to me a great source of often profoundly underexplored potential for the poet. That is the continued realisation of this fact - of black on white, of colour, material, front, handwriting, of dead and living space, of a computer screen or piece of sliced tree - all that is happening aside from semantic content, and the relation of these things in changing, fluctuating, the semantic meaning and content the poet should worry over. 

This work draws from the influence post-war central European avant garde pioneers like Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont and Constant Nieuwenhuys have had on my work, all of them poets in the purest sense, all too erroneously and conveniently labelled artists. It draws on asemic writing, experimental logograms and illustration but it also a poem in the clearest, anthropomorphic sense" 

And from the editorial ... "Encrusted in paper word impasto, this issue of Oxford Poetry celebrates the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Some poets respond ekphrastically to works of art (Richie McCaffery, Jeremy Valentine Freeman Ganem, Pascale Petit, Nancy Posey). Others paint worlds through bold metaphor and surreal imagery (John Burnside, Rebecca Perry, Mark Waldron, Astrid Alben, Martha Kapos) or evoke the subtleties of consciousness, memory and perception (Dominic Hand, Fiona Sampson, Denise Saul). Others step into the realm of visual poetry (SJ Fowler) to shape their words on the page (Chris Kerr, Elaine Feeney)." http://oxfordpoetry.co.uk/

Fjender in Copenhagen

D is soft in Denmark. Sondergaard is Sonnegoe, Kierkegaard is Kierkegoe, Knausgaard is Kenausgoe. A happy, strange week in Copenhagen to finish off the Fjender project for now. Really at the core of this offshoot of the Enemies project was the relationship between myself and Morten Sondergaard, and his hospitality, generosity and energy of ideas has made my time in Copenhagen memorable. To have the time to really communicate with someone, to refine ones ideas in the face of such openness and intelligence is a wonderful thing, the very physical actualisation of an approach I’ve tried to take to my writing, my events and all such things, where process is emphasised over product, with the hope that the positive former will take care of the latter.

vikings on exhibition at Ark books, Copenhagen

My last day in Denmark was spent visiting the Asger Jorn exhibition at the national art museum, with Peter Jaeger and Morten, two wiser, kinder poets you couldn’t hope to meet. Having just taught Jorn as part of my Poetry School class a few weeks back, as he was a fundamental part of the CoBrA group, and been entranced by his work the further my investigations went, this was a perfect combination of things. Once in awhile an exhibition does what it is supposed to do to you. Once I had spoken to Morten and Peter at great length I found an arts supply shop, bought indian ink and paper and a scratch pen and took to finally completing a project of asemic writing I had begun years before. This is the purpose of all the stupid emailing bullshit, all the admin, the fraught running between working fulltime, training, teaching, organising – to open up days, like a aperture, where I am overwhelmed with the feeling of being fortunate to be able to experience life as a choice, to have the complete freedom to have experiences beyond my own small world, in new places, with new people, who are wiser and kinder and more intelligent than I, and to be able to create reflections of that experience without limitation.

Overall it was a week split in two, dark days and light days. The day at the zoo, commiserating with the surviving giraffes and spending hours by the bears, finding Kierkegaard’s grave by accident, visiting Ark books, who were hosting our reading and exhibiting my books and runic art, and then reading in the strange literature house with Morten, Peter and Martin Glaz Serup was wonderful. I am sure it will be the beginning of much, the Fjender project, rather than an end, and over the three events and month that it has lasted I have proven to myself that this mode of organisation, creating partnerships in writing across nations and languages has the potential for brilliance I thought it did.