Sending a huge thanks to The Wolf for asking me to interview Geraldine Monk for publication in the journal. I was honoured, and a little awed, to do it. It was great to get to ask Geraldine about her new work, They Who Saw the Deep, and she was very generous with her responses to my questions. I was chuffed to receive my copy (that striking green and red in the cover art) and then taken aback at the news that this is the last hard copy issue of The Wolf. It being Halloween today calls to mind that I also had some of my charm poems published in there too - thank you Wolf!
I went to listen to Geraldine Monk give a brilliant reading on Halloween at the much missed Storm and Sky in Liverpool a couple of years ago. For a Halloween read I’d recommend Monk’s Interregnum - just wonderful! My little wolves below.
0 Comments
My daughter's growing collection of Halloween pumpkin and squash on display. We have Crown Prince, Cinderella, Harlequin, Onion and Ghost! My job is to find recipes - pumpkin latte anyone? Perched on the clock is a yew tree wand which (!) Andrew picked up for me when we were on holiday in The Lakes this year. It was a fallen twig - for me it's not done to take one from the living tree!
Getting up to the weird orange light yesterday cast an eerieness over the morning, added to by it being 17 years since my mum died suddenly. The snapshot above which was taken in Boots photo booth and was sent to my dad working then in Algiers, is one of my favourites. My dad was a plumber and worked away for spells when we were very small. He used to write poems for her. I don’t know much about his time over there but I remember being told he asked my mum for some of my baby clothes to take back with him to give to a friend he worked with who had a daughter the same age as I was then. I do remember Dad bringing us Paddington Bear teds home one time and that I insisted on carrying mine all the way to primary school to show him to my teacher. Quite an achievement as that Paddington was pretty much the same height as I was, I remember peering over his shoulder to see where I was going!
In my research I’ve been using the term ‘Sound-Rich poetry’ and I have a statement of what that is:
Sound-rich poetry is fully aware of itself as an indissoluble union of speech and writing working along a spectrum, with sound as its life force and to which every aspect of the poem refers back. Sound-rich poetry has traces of music in the written form which works as a visual representation, or notation, of sound matter, and traces of song in its use of speech sound matter as material, as well as traces of song in fully realised vocal performances of that sound matter. My description of sound-rich poetry is based in a distinct way of working with sound through the musicality of language and structure, and through using the human voice as instrument. A vital form, continuously finding new sounds, structures and vocalisations, sound-rich poetry demonstrates awareness of, and draws on, developments in contemporary music and sound art practices. I’ve been using this statement to write a more detailed description and bring in examples to show what I mean by ‘sound-rich poetry’. But if you can get tongue-tied on paper that’s what seems to keep happening so I’ve shifted over to my blog to see if the informality of writing for that helps me to get from 'rambling around' to a detailed description. Below is an unedited excerpt from my first rambling around! I’ll begin with the first sentence and unpack that. Sound-rich poetry is fully aware of itself as an indissoluble union of speech and writing working along a spectrum, with sound as its life force and to which every aspect of the poem refers back. I started with this diagram shows the spectrum of the indissoluble union of speech and writing that sound-rich poetry is fully aware of itself as being: voice as instrument & musicality of verbal noise......sound poetry.....(speech-sound-writing).....visual poetry......visual noise visual ‘silence‘ verbal ‘silence’ sound art visual art song music Unpack, ‘an indissoluble union of speech and writing’ . . . And it’s here that I start stuttering and stop. Why can’t I explain this any further. Is it that I’m not convinced that that diagram is showing a spectrum of ‘an indissoluble union of speech and writing’ and that I even doubt the whole structure I’m giving to my description and suddenly think I should have started with examples of sound-rich poetry - Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Finnegans Wake, Chaucer, early Greek poetry (according to Pound as I can’t, but would love to be able to, read Greek). Is it that I think I can (or should be able to) write this off the top of my head and when I find I can’t I stop dead. (I go and put the washing I’ve put in the machine to spin.) The fragmentation that I think (in my previous blog post) comes from how I’ve had to sometimes manage study time around work also comes in to how I write - or the conditions - when I am at home - all those daily goings on around which interrupt. I managed to do my BA and MA and still do all the stuff at home I’ve always done. The degree of thought needed here when I apply it makes me forget what time it is, have I got something out for tea, has it started raining and I’ve got two lines of washing out . . . And perhaps it’s that kind of scattiness I’m not used to submitting to! Bringing myself back to sound-rich poetry then. Sound-rich poetry has a distinct way of working with sound through the musicality of language and structure. This can be heard, and felt, in the language materials, the sound patterning and rhythm in the poetry of Hopkins, Thomas, Bunting. But in sound-rich poetry every aspects of the poem refers back to sound. Language is not sound alone, it is sense, movements of meaning and it has visual aspects. Sound is the driving energy of sound-rich poetry but it works with sense and the visual. Sometimes sound becomes noisy, sometimes it becomes silent and the visual becomes noisy instead, or there is a movement of sense which grabs the attention. Sound behaves differently, not uniformly, using all its resources. This is illustrated by the poetry of Geraldine Monk, Bill Griffiths and Maggie O’ Sullivan. Their poetry is aware of sound and concrete poetry in the way sound and the visual work together. Rather, than explore sound poetry, concrete poetry and sound concrete as separate concerns their poetry moves between these: A vital form, continuously finding new sounds, structures and vocalisations, sound-rich poetry demonstrates awareness of, and draws on, developments in contemporary music and sound art practices. To circle back - Sound-rich poetry is fully aware of itself as an indissoluble union of speech and writing working along a spectrum, with sound as its life force and to which every aspect of the poem refers back. As ‘an indissoluble union’ speech and writing can’t be separated so we can’t have speech without writing in sound-rich poetry. They work together along a spectrum, how, and what does this spectrum consist of? At the two extreme points of this spectrum speech becomes louder more noisy until it is verbal noise while writing recedes to reach a vanishing point of invisibility. Conversely, at the other extreme point of the spectrum speech becomes muted until it recedes into silence while at the same time the visual becomes more eye catching, more messy until it takes over the senses as visual noise. Isn’t this saying that sound-rich poetry encompasses sound and concrete poetry and everything in between? Does it bring certain conditions of these together in variable combinations and in search of new sounds and structures? I come back to review the whole 'ramble' to salvage and revise - including that diagram. During the last 5 years I’ve had an on / off relationship with the methodologies for my creative writing practice-led research. I think in part because I’ve been doing this research part time. (Which I think has a methodology in itself!) And in part from a sense of an unruliness in my logical thinking which as a creative writer seemed unproblematic in making me lean toward creative thought. But, as I think through the methodologies I have been and am using, it becomes clear that making those links and that reasoning helps clarify what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and why. And I think give me a much fuller engagement with making poetry.
My experience of doing research part time alongside unrelated work (soldering circuit boards and office admin!) is that it can lead to a somewhat fragmented thinking, a stop / start method. I did sign up to do my research self funded and part time foreseeing no problem in that. But, a year in to my research, things changed for us financially from which we still haven’t recovered. So before, and around, the teaching undergraduate poetry and fiction at Edge Hill I worked the usual 9-5 with travel to Manchester on top. And these longer periods away from research activities, meant having to start again, having to refresh my memory at the start of each study session by re-reading what I wrote last, going over what I had been reading and (sometimes also searching for) notes I’d made. I feel, from the position I made at my starting point, I drifted off course inside this fragmentation: I have family responsibilities and it was impossible to escape that working a job had been made a an activity I had to do before making poetry, though of course I still did both! I could not risk stopping or taking a break from my research because I had to continue on this poetry making journey I’d started. I believe in and am compelled to, albeit at a slow and faltering pace, make sense of sound-rich poetry - what is it, how can I make it, what do I understand it as being, doing. Perhaps it is that I’ve muddled through. And perhaps recently I’ve been suddenly shaken out of a sleepwalking I’d got into. But other than being a mum there’s nothing else that I feel so happy and satisfied being in a state of than learning about, making, and thinking about the possibilities in writing. I know that I have a harder, more exacting relationship with how I go about making poetry than I do say with writing fiction. And I have realised that sometimes I’ll have to be sure to separate the two in order to make both separately to fully express in their different ways the ‘encounter’ I’m writing from, as is the case at the moment. Yet before my mind returned to feeling like a Dali painting I suddenly felt a strong conviction that it is through making poetry that there comes for me a sudden sense of an inner to outer physical movement and exchange to do with that ‘encounter’ I’ve been trying to write from; a possible passageway for and through language and expression of the tumult of thought, caused by and through which that encounter can in a way be redressed. And, my goodness, that is an amazing and exciting possibility which makes this poetry making journey more compelling than ever. |
LinksGeraldine Monk Archives
October 2017
|