Extract from Writing Process Blog Tour, Interview (2014)
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’m immediately drawn to the impossibilities of making such distinctions, how the word ‘differ’ loads and unloads itself onto my typing hands. There is a particularity to my writing and a mundane tedium, especially perhaps in my inabilities to move beyond certain combinations or repetitions of words into what could be a richer, larger vocabulary. I like the little words, prepositions pronouns and connectors, and my writing is full of them, ‘as’ ‘’of’ ‘in ‘for’ ‘and’ ‘to’. My textual-textile work is perhaps more obviously distinct, though firmly grounded in the work of others, from Apollinaire to Ian Hamilton Finlay to Caroline Bergvall and many, many more.
Why do I write what I do?
I once wrote a series of academic essays, including ‘Why I write short lines’, ‘Why my lines go down’ and ‘How I feel about punctuation’. I found many answers to the ‘Why do I write’ questions in the process, but none that I could now know where to begin with, so perhaps they were not so necessary as answers after all.
I write as a means to stretch and move, to get closer to something of thought than the linearity of a sentence allows me. I write with a belief in the revolutionary potential of paradigm shifts in the way we communicate and so arrange ourselves socially. I make as a way of presenting these emotions, ethics and politics to my hands.
How does your writing process work?
Currently I am in an interesting mid-space operating somewhere between composition and improvisation. I used to write things that were almost entirely in continual process. They might stay in one basic outline on the page but every time I went to send them for publication or to read them aloud changes and modifications would occur. I was always very uneasy with allowing something to settle and in very few cases do I have poems which are now never touched, including those in print publications.
However my current practice requires a different process, as these writings must be fixed, in order for them to be printed out and photocopied and transferred onto another sheet of handmade paper. So I tend to allow for a circulatory writing that might end with the intent of being read again - the end bleeding into the beginning. I am increasingly writing versions, a poem that may have several columns and each column contains variations of the same. Rather than trying to edit into ‘one’ way of saying it, I am much more able to put down all the ways and allow my eye or voice to skip between with intuition in the moment of reading. A semi improvised act.
The transferred text can be reset into new, fresh wet pages where the fibres will incorporate and integrate each other, the text can be place on the surface of the wet sheet or I can lift the fibre and lay it under to surface, partially obscured. I can place it upside down, in reverse, I can stretch and condense the letters and curve and distort the lines of text in this wet stage. My choices as to how the text interacts with the surface are amplified, and as such the writing happens as much at this stage as it did in the initial typing. I do not meet the paper page with a clear plan of the text, but instead allow the text to alter the page and the page to alter the text. They perform each other and will mutually dry together into a ‘set’ piece of work, the fibres condense as the water leaves and they grip hold of their surroundings and draw them in close. Of course this is paradoxically fixed in many ways more than if written or printed on a traditional page, and the impossibility of these conflicting experiences of permanence and impermanence are perhaps key to the continued drive of my practice.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’m immediately drawn to the impossibilities of making such distinctions, how the word ‘differ’ loads and unloads itself onto my typing hands. There is a particularity to my writing and a mundane tedium, especially perhaps in my inabilities to move beyond certain combinations or repetitions of words into what could be a richer, larger vocabulary. I like the little words, prepositions pronouns and connectors, and my writing is full of them, ‘as’ ‘’of’ ‘in ‘for’ ‘and’ ‘to’. My textual-textile work is perhaps more obviously distinct, though firmly grounded in the work of others, from Apollinaire to Ian Hamilton Finlay to Caroline Bergvall and many, many more.
Why do I write what I do?
I once wrote a series of academic essays, including ‘Why I write short lines’, ‘Why my lines go down’ and ‘How I feel about punctuation’. I found many answers to the ‘Why do I write’ questions in the process, but none that I could now know where to begin with, so perhaps they were not so necessary as answers after all.
I write as a means to stretch and move, to get closer to something of thought than the linearity of a sentence allows me. I write with a belief in the revolutionary potential of paradigm shifts in the way we communicate and so arrange ourselves socially. I make as a way of presenting these emotions, ethics and politics to my hands.
How does your writing process work?
Currently I am in an interesting mid-space operating somewhere between composition and improvisation. I used to write things that were almost entirely in continual process. They might stay in one basic outline on the page but every time I went to send them for publication or to read them aloud changes and modifications would occur. I was always very uneasy with allowing something to settle and in very few cases do I have poems which are now never touched, including those in print publications.
However my current practice requires a different process, as these writings must be fixed, in order for them to be printed out and photocopied and transferred onto another sheet of handmade paper. So I tend to allow for a circulatory writing that might end with the intent of being read again - the end bleeding into the beginning. I am increasingly writing versions, a poem that may have several columns and each column contains variations of the same. Rather than trying to edit into ‘one’ way of saying it, I am much more able to put down all the ways and allow my eye or voice to skip between with intuition in the moment of reading. A semi improvised act.
The transferred text can be reset into new, fresh wet pages where the fibres will incorporate and integrate each other, the text can be place on the surface of the wet sheet or I can lift the fibre and lay it under to surface, partially obscured. I can place it upside down, in reverse, I can stretch and condense the letters and curve and distort the lines of text in this wet stage. My choices as to how the text interacts with the surface are amplified, and as such the writing happens as much at this stage as it did in the initial typing. I do not meet the paper page with a clear plan of the text, but instead allow the text to alter the page and the page to alter the text. They perform each other and will mutually dry together into a ‘set’ piece of work, the fibres condense as the water leaves and they grip hold of their surroundings and draw them in close. Of course this is paradoxically fixed in many ways more than if written or printed on a traditional page, and the impossibility of these conflicting experiences of permanence and impermanence are perhaps key to the continued drive of my practice.
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extract from the essay 'how I make I write'
XY Magazine / 2011 The space of performative poetic practise allows for both a visual and aural manifestation of the synthesis of a certain kind of a speech, a linguistic utterance, a word-sound or sounded word. By performative I mean the process of that poetics, the track of the speech, with its residue and projection as a tracing of the movement of a performed language, one necessarily constructed and containing the noise of that construction. By poetic I mean the poetic space of a language, in its simplest sense the space where words meet and make. This meeting and making is both mediated and manipulated by the writer and in turn also by the reader. Poetic space contains the senses and sounds of linguistic motion. This is a motion of itself, which is to say it is without statement or sentence or set intent. Or rather, while it remains subject to these, as to many other external factors, it is not defined by them or their characteristics. Poetic space bridges the visual and the aural, it requires elements of both the seen word and the said word, the written and the read, the sounded and the heard. extract from the essay 'why I write short lines' Rattle Journal of Text and Image / 2011 keep the repeat on round the wrist to form a circular line it would not meet itself. Its purpose is not to sever. If subtlety of breath allows for a forgetting, so can a silenced blood flow, muffled by the soundproofing of skin. A cut is not so much the voyeurs need to see, nor the scientists need for hard proof, as it is the plain want for an awareness of life. It needn’t be a long reflection, a contemplation, but neither is it an entirely impulsive immediacy, one that is lost as soon as it begins to form. It is a desire for dimension. on of a beneath protrudes the spine insides a release you feel it slipping to A written line is short across the page, but its weight both deepens into another line below, and deepens to a line behind, having bled through the fabric of the paper and stained markings on the overleaf. At the same time it is hardly conventional weight. It is an upward weight forcing words up off the page. Bleeding through the fabric of the space between eye and paper. It is an embedding that pushes over the edge, so the word sinks into the page and then |
I’m trying to write you something to summarise your mouth I’m trying to write you something to summarise your mouth mouth-moves in phosphorescent glue traceable therefore returnable to that is the logic we had to have to that is the language I knew no shape all glow out of the other side, appearing aloft above the next, then falling to the surface, through, into, and above again. It is a continual deepening, but not an easy smooth ride. It suffers bruises and burns as it hits one surface to the next. The friction that sands the edges of the inch-lines causes sparks that singe the skin. An inch is not really a word length, but it is its distance, the expanse in a mouth that savours it throughout the entire swallow. Not just the way it taps on the teeth but the vibration in the fall down and the echo at the pit of the stomach. This isn’t a drawn out or overstated pronunciation, it isn’t a slowing down of the word, but a speaking of it or hearing of it at all angles, from above, below, across a pumped up swells the structure airs rushed of their etiquette in considered shimmer shimmer quakes the solid |
Extract from the essay 'how I feel about full stops and commas'
Lapidus Journal / 2012
Commas are breaths. Commas breathe. They let you off. They let you breathe. But it is a sort of false breath, one hooked up to a respiration machine which calculates the rhythm for you. If I gave you commas I would be giving you my breath. I would be both the machine and the patient. Either way, I am deadened.
If I give you my breath, can I continue to breathe myself? And yet, if commas breathe breath into words, in writing without them I am choosing instead to deaden each letter, which will lay scattered around amongst scoured skin flakes. Because I like to exfoliate. I like to brush off the past. It is an ultimatum of sorts, you may have my body or my words.
Another machine-false separation, as if punctured veins could spill anything other than red ink. (The sort used by teachers
to correct bad grammar). Though this is less about punctuation than it is about punctures, which must then really be about containment. Full stops. Which are frontiers. Which are breath breaks.
Breaking is the moment of change. I feel uneasy around change, it asks for choices to be set down and adhered to.
It is a commitment. Once broken, even the best repair work cannot return to the constant. The constant being the repetition, which is the comfort (for as long as it is a blanket to warm yourself in and not one that inadvertently suffocates).
It is no coincidence then that a movement across borders is referred to as a break. It is a desire for safety and a resistance against the frustration of adjustment. The period where you must suffer a shortage of breath whilst learning to breathe in new air. Breaking of course, suggests there was a superiority to that that was before, as if something could be perfect in itself, enough in itself, to remain unchanged. Yet, it does not need a direct break for cracks to nonetheless appear on the surface. They emerge of their own accord, and so it becomes easier to make clean quick breaks, like the plaster pulled off swiftly and with purpose. Break and
break and break offers a surface that is too unpredictable for cracks to develop. Cracks which are the slow plaster removal pain. Break and break and break which allows for you to create, to remould, to adjust on your own terms, to turn shortage of breathes into staccatos and to not consider this a lack but just another rhythm. Maybe this is exfoliation, a brushing of the past in a controlled practice, an enforced confrontation with change. A strengthening exercise. A test. An attempt.
Punctuation marks scar a text. Tiny reminders of the barrier between inside and outside expression. Between the what to say and how to say.
Inside our body we make sense, but crossing to the outside and encountering others, communicating with others requires mediation. This is the journey of the word, and this is the journey of the breaking, the breaking of self understanding to a place of communication. Between the words I have inside and the words I place on a page, there is the moment of their translation into something tangible, letterible, spellable, grammared.
I’ll walk you across and through it now. It is a bracken-covered no man’s land between the inside and the out. Even the lightest step treading through will leave a broken trail. And your skin covers quickly with scrapes and scratches. In the silence all that can be heard is the sound of snapping, and sentence length inhalations. Sentence length inhalations. This is not the breath that you know inside, the one that flows un-punctured. On the outside you must breathe shallow
so all can take a share, other breaths need space, need air, their own air, to read you.
So you write with full stops, and you let yourself slowly deflate as each one pierces new layers of surface as it tries to heal from those scratches. And you are a bracken bonsai tree, stunted. Growth cornered and comma’d off with scissors. A skin that contains at the expense of its contents. The evaporated insides leaving an empty, shrunken shell. Would I rather deaden than puncture? Taking breath from my words is only the breath of a certain air. One that is for sharing. The one we take for granted. The outside. It does not mean they are not still breathing from their own source, the one permeating skin from the inside. My blood is filled with froth. I am ventilated.
My deadened words, the ones without commas and full stops, are deadened, not dead. The difference is one of motion and one of emotion. Without sensation they are a numb. They are the lain down aftermath of the journey. They are the ringing in the ears after cries have ceased. They are the knitting of scars from the scrapes and scratches. They are deadened and they need this. They need this moment void. They need to be still and suspended. They are rag dolls. They are in pretence for a while, they are resting.
Numbness and restful stillness are purposeful. They are not dead, involuntarily without motion or emotion. They are still and they are not breathing, but air permeates them nonetheless. It seeps in through the skin as calmly as it leaks out again. It is an all encompassing, decentralised breath, one that is different, less obvious, less owned. It is continual, it does not tire. It is open, it does not need the throat to relax, the windpipes to release, the nostrils to flare and close. It is as open as becoming shapeless, it is borderless.
This is how my words live. And this is how they feel and move. It is a sort of sleep travel. One that soars over skies. It is without gravity. Without regulation. It is shapeless.
It is clear and clean, free of scars.
Yet there is space in this shapelessness. It is shapeless space, but space all the same. I would like my unpunctuated words to give the feeling of this decentralised breath. The feeling of continuity. A continuity which is not the same as the density found in a nonstop breath whereby a sentence spoken that does not provide the chance to breathe leaves one gasping and breathless, grasping at words that never fully form.
This is a different sort of breathing. It is a different sort of nonstop breath, somewhere between active and passive. It may be not articulated but this is not the same as not expressed.
Yes, the space is vast and, without markings to guide, it cannot be navigated and so must remain in a certain silence. The silence of a scar, which is a sound but of a different quality, a skin but of a different texture.
To be free of scars it becomes completely scar, it is a defence, scar cannot scar on scar. From my unpunctuated place I cannot capitalise. I do not favour. I do not have to decide. And with this I can curl into myself and listen to the whispering of other’s breaths, my spine a row of full stops continuing into ellipses that fall over each other as I curve. It is the stop that can continue. It both makes the break, and makes the bridge to cross it.
Lapidus Journal / 2012
Commas are breaths. Commas breathe. They let you off. They let you breathe. But it is a sort of false breath, one hooked up to a respiration machine which calculates the rhythm for you. If I gave you commas I would be giving you my breath. I would be both the machine and the patient. Either way, I am deadened.
If I give you my breath, can I continue to breathe myself? And yet, if commas breathe breath into words, in writing without them I am choosing instead to deaden each letter, which will lay scattered around amongst scoured skin flakes. Because I like to exfoliate. I like to brush off the past. It is an ultimatum of sorts, you may have my body or my words.
Another machine-false separation, as if punctured veins could spill anything other than red ink. (The sort used by teachers
to correct bad grammar). Though this is less about punctuation than it is about punctures, which must then really be about containment. Full stops. Which are frontiers. Which are breath breaks.
Breaking is the moment of change. I feel uneasy around change, it asks for choices to be set down and adhered to.
It is a commitment. Once broken, even the best repair work cannot return to the constant. The constant being the repetition, which is the comfort (for as long as it is a blanket to warm yourself in and not one that inadvertently suffocates).
It is no coincidence then that a movement across borders is referred to as a break. It is a desire for safety and a resistance against the frustration of adjustment. The period where you must suffer a shortage of breath whilst learning to breathe in new air. Breaking of course, suggests there was a superiority to that that was before, as if something could be perfect in itself, enough in itself, to remain unchanged. Yet, it does not need a direct break for cracks to nonetheless appear on the surface. They emerge of their own accord, and so it becomes easier to make clean quick breaks, like the plaster pulled off swiftly and with purpose. Break and
break and break offers a surface that is too unpredictable for cracks to develop. Cracks which are the slow plaster removal pain. Break and break and break which allows for you to create, to remould, to adjust on your own terms, to turn shortage of breathes into staccatos and to not consider this a lack but just another rhythm. Maybe this is exfoliation, a brushing of the past in a controlled practice, an enforced confrontation with change. A strengthening exercise. A test. An attempt.
Punctuation marks scar a text. Tiny reminders of the barrier between inside and outside expression. Between the what to say and how to say.
Inside our body we make sense, but crossing to the outside and encountering others, communicating with others requires mediation. This is the journey of the word, and this is the journey of the breaking, the breaking of self understanding to a place of communication. Between the words I have inside and the words I place on a page, there is the moment of their translation into something tangible, letterible, spellable, grammared.
I’ll walk you across and through it now. It is a bracken-covered no man’s land between the inside and the out. Even the lightest step treading through will leave a broken trail. And your skin covers quickly with scrapes and scratches. In the silence all that can be heard is the sound of snapping, and sentence length inhalations. Sentence length inhalations. This is not the breath that you know inside, the one that flows un-punctured. On the outside you must breathe shallow
so all can take a share, other breaths need space, need air, their own air, to read you.
So you write with full stops, and you let yourself slowly deflate as each one pierces new layers of surface as it tries to heal from those scratches. And you are a bracken bonsai tree, stunted. Growth cornered and comma’d off with scissors. A skin that contains at the expense of its contents. The evaporated insides leaving an empty, shrunken shell. Would I rather deaden than puncture? Taking breath from my words is only the breath of a certain air. One that is for sharing. The one we take for granted. The outside. It does not mean they are not still breathing from their own source, the one permeating skin from the inside. My blood is filled with froth. I am ventilated.
My deadened words, the ones without commas and full stops, are deadened, not dead. The difference is one of motion and one of emotion. Without sensation they are a numb. They are the lain down aftermath of the journey. They are the ringing in the ears after cries have ceased. They are the knitting of scars from the scrapes and scratches. They are deadened and they need this. They need this moment void. They need to be still and suspended. They are rag dolls. They are in pretence for a while, they are resting.
Numbness and restful stillness are purposeful. They are not dead, involuntarily without motion or emotion. They are still and they are not breathing, but air permeates them nonetheless. It seeps in through the skin as calmly as it leaks out again. It is an all encompassing, decentralised breath, one that is different, less obvious, less owned. It is continual, it does not tire. It is open, it does not need the throat to relax, the windpipes to release, the nostrils to flare and close. It is as open as becoming shapeless, it is borderless.
This is how my words live. And this is how they feel and move. It is a sort of sleep travel. One that soars over skies. It is without gravity. Without regulation. It is shapeless.
It is clear and clean, free of scars.
Yet there is space in this shapelessness. It is shapeless space, but space all the same. I would like my unpunctuated words to give the feeling of this decentralised breath. The feeling of continuity. A continuity which is not the same as the density found in a nonstop breath whereby a sentence spoken that does not provide the chance to breathe leaves one gasping and breathless, grasping at words that never fully form.
This is a different sort of breathing. It is a different sort of nonstop breath, somewhere between active and passive. It may be not articulated but this is not the same as not expressed.
Yes, the space is vast and, without markings to guide, it cannot be navigated and so must remain in a certain silence. The silence of a scar, which is a sound but of a different quality, a skin but of a different texture.
To be free of scars it becomes completely scar, it is a defence, scar cannot scar on scar. From my unpunctuated place I cannot capitalise. I do not favour. I do not have to decide. And with this I can curl into myself and listen to the whispering of other’s breaths, my spine a row of full stops continuing into ellipses that fall over each other as I curve. It is the stop that can continue. It both makes the break, and makes the bridge to cross it.
