Ways of Describing Cuts with Sarah Kelly Knives Forks & Spoons Press (2012)
July 15, 2012 - £5 / 22 pages.
'These poems seem instantly to surpass the benign conversational format of much poetic collaboration, instead arising from a violent and impulsive sort of play. They wound us as all good poems should, but, staring each other down from the ends of the page as if from opposite sides of a room, the real drama becomes in how the pieces vie and rally with each other, somewhat like combatants in a friendly knife-fight, matching taunts, comparing their quick cuts for deftness. But there's flirtation and approval beneath the show as well -- the poems appeal to each other as much as they aim to appall, teasing, correcting and provoking, meeting each others' lunges with unexpected gentleness. Like the best friendships or dialogues, we find the players alternately at odds and back to back, until any simple sense of opposition is overcome, seeded with generosity and enjoyment, demonstrating how in such fruitful encounters as these we can in the best possible sense 'fail to maintain our solidity'. Sam Riviere
'Dogging among dock leaves, these dogs are people. Experience collaboration as (deliberate) mishearing, conversation as alliterative iteration, juxtapositions as jousts. ‘Not a poetry,’ the text lies. The lyric ‘I’ bifurcates. These two writers keep it tight, irresistible. Fresh cuts from two new tongues.' Robert Sheppard
On the process, July 2012 - Sarah and I collaborated over a nine month period in 2011. Her work has an intensity and a clarity I admire greatly, and I knew writing with her would improve my practise. She currently lives in Buenos Aires so we're not really able to launch the book upon release, but it is wonderful to have it in print, it is such a beautiful object and something I'm proud of. Always pleasing to be a continued part of the Knives Forks and Spoons endeavour too, I truly believe, in time, what Alec Newman has achieved over the last few years, will be seen a vital moment for British innovative poetics. The cover for the book is also a wonder, by the british artist Joel Ely http://www.joelely.com/
Reading with Sarah Kelly - Ways of Describing Cuts June 18, 2013
At the 77th edition of the longstanding London reading series the Blue Bus, on June 18th 2013, at the Lamb put in Bloomsbury, myself and Sarah Kelly relaunched our collaborative book 'Ways of Decribing Cut's published by Knives forks and spoons press with this full reading of the text, accompanied by a buddha box. writing with Sarah was joyful, her gentility and technique brings me away from myself into new arenas, and to revisit this work at least 18 months after we finished it, now she's back from Buenos Aires, and to find it fresh and communicative was lovely. i enjoyed reading with her. our buddha box vedic meditation accompaniment was supplied by david kelly. it's a beautiful object, and feeling pale in the face of clean readings this was the right, respectful way to contextualise this work at a place like the blue bus. it was a long, boiling hot night,
a review of Ways of Describing Cuts on Sphinx September 30, 2012
The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2012 £5.00
Note: Sphinx only reviews single author pamphlets, each of which is considered by three reviewers. However, we have made a special exception in this case (as a one-off) because it seemed fun to have a dual-authorship dual-reviewed (the two reviewer-poets are well-versed in collaborative authorship).
Ways Of Describing Cuts:jointly reviewed by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving
J: Each page in this collaborative pamphlet is an exchange between top and bottom, and although I don’t mean that in the S&M sense, there's a strong sense of the voices playfully resisting each other, like ferromagnetic materials of the same polarity—words as charged filings. Part of that, of course, is a result of the similarity in style: lines of variegated length (tending towards the very short) moving through disparate visual ideas at the speed of a film reel.
K: Lord knows we love collaboration, and you get a real sense of the back and forth, of the process, rather than a static product. The deliberate omission of titles, smooth transition between the two writers and sporadic punctuation all contribute to this effect. I also like the idea of not knowing whether this is actually a collection at all. It could be one long poem.
I can’t find any information about the two authors, even on the KFS website. The most I can find is a mention of their full names in the copyright notice. I do quite like the way their contributions aren’t attributed and sort-of run into one another, though I suspect, having read some of Fowler’s work before, that his are the pieces at the top half of each page.
J: I get the impression it’s a deliberate design decision across some small presses to avoid ‘over-introducing’ the poetry and poets, which sometimes means not introducing them at all. There’s a couple of quotes on the back that do the job of the blurb though, so in this case, the reader’s adequately primed. While we’re on design, I do think it was a mistake to attempt a mock spine on a saddle-stitched pamphlet; it means the writing on the ‘spine’ is actually split between the front and the back covers.
K: Agree about the spine. I can see the benefit of letting the poetry talk, rather than allow it to be coloured by details of the poet’s own backstory, but not everybody has the luxury of a website, and pamphlets, as well as being pieces of art, are to some extent promotional tools for writers. Poets in particular need all the artistic exposure they can get.
But to move on from the physical design element, there’s a real pleasure in soft rhyming and texture in these poems. In one block, we have “rubber . . . ribs . . . gobble . . . squib”. I’m not as familiar with Kelly’s performance style, but I know Fowler is fond of very sonic poetry. Much more subtle and engaging than the harder rhymes and rhythms of many slam poets.
J: One poem starts:
did you say trunked trees?
I’ve misheard again
The rhyming you’re talking about seems to me to be related to this theme (albeit a subdued theme) of mishearing. Because this is poetry, the poets aren’t listening to the sense of each other’s words but the sound of them. So each exchange has elements of a distorted echo of what came before it. Sometimes the echo agreeably repeats or re-emphasises or rhymes, but just as frequently it opposes, ducks, goes off on a tangent. Someone who didn't enjoy dissonance would probably find the pamphlet frustrating—the poems are extremely fragmented, and the music's primarily one of discordance.
K: Fragmented, yes, but if you abandon trying to wring out a simple narrative or straightforward description, there’s a nice splash of humour in here, which helps to ease readers into this style. Yes, some might be irritated by the whimsy and seeming non-sequiturs of
bally balloonbally bearswim my lady poetswim vegetable Octopi (sic)
but there’s enjoyment in the language, and the combinations of shapes, even if clear meaning's elusive. This free play also offers a good contrast to the darker, clipped fragments of
but together we
are neatly readykill them all.
J: Perhaps that’s not so much contrast, though, as part of the jostling between the two voices. To an extent, they’re trying to send each other up, undermine each other. think it’s all about the liveliness of the battle, rather than specific tones or synchronisations. It’s more versus pamphlet than collaboration, more match than match-up, and therein lies its distinct character.
Press free Press - Cremin & Ormonde discuss Ways of Describing Cuts October 5, 2012
http://www.pressfreepress.com/2012/10/press-free-press-respond-1-s-kelly-sj.html
A generous and interesting responsive analysis of my recently published collaboration with Sarah Kelly has been tended to by Becky Cremin and Ryan Ormonde at Press Free Press:
"S Kelly & SJ Fowler / Robert Hampson - press free press RESPOND:
A new 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 TALK and WRITE 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' TWO
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
FOUR“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 Mc Cafferye’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
SIXreading 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
EIGHTAlso, 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.
TWO 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. cont'd....
Sarah Crewe reviews Ways of Describing Cuts for Establishment November 22, 2012
http://issuu.com/alecnewman/docs/est_issue_2/1
The remarkable north-west based poet and editor Sarah Crewe has published a really generous review of my collaboration with the poet Sarah Kelly 'Ways of Describing Cuts', in the second issue of the Jo Langton edited Establishment magazine, the poetry magazine wing of the ever brilliant Knives Forks and Spoons press. This small collaborative chapbook has garnered some really positive reviews, which is heartening, considering it's experimental form and tone.
