To London, to record for The Verb, and for a new website celebrating living experimental British poets.
My work draws on at least two strands: clear lyric poems, which I like to collage into initially strange (estranging, defamilarising) patterns; and poems that are written with a language in every part more coded and/or esoteric. (Which I sometimes also make into collages...).
I went more for the latter, from my double-columns at www.ubu.com/ubu, when recording for the new website. Also it came to me on the day of travelling to Andrea Brady’s house (where we were recording), that it would be great if Andrea would read one column while I read the other.
(I read both by myself, live, on The Verb in October, and it took a full day to choose and rehearse a 5 min set that would work that way.)
Andrea kindly said yes and the results go online soon. We lost the first half-hour of work, which meant redoing the same poems all over. But we returned to them with a greater knowledge of the poems, and a better rapport.
My master-plan now is to record lots of the double-column pieces with lots of readers. It works quickly to take one of the columns myself, so far, but who knows? My aim is to get as varied and interesting a collection of readings as possible, that will work together played one after another.
Tuesday, 28 November 2006
