Back to Basics

Having organised myself an *uniterruptable* space to study in at home I’m gathering notes and re-reading to compose my poetics for the current practice-led research project that I’m undertaking. The first draft of the first set of poems, ‘What the Tree Said’ has reached the stage where it needs honing to reflect some of the intentions it has build itself around. In using poetics to tidy it I’ll get some of the poetics for the project formed at the same time...

While contemplating those intentions I finally came to an understanding of why I don’t write occasion poems very much and why those poems, that come as a kind of spurging up from my boots, seem more satisfactory. And it is simply that I use, and have always largely used, poetry as a means of working out. Which is not exactly as a personal expression, not always expressive of some inner angst but as experiential of being in the world and of the happenings therein. The page as receptacle and unanswering ear with an unspeaking mouth which sounds violent but is a safe non-judgmental, uncritical place to pour a muddle of ideas into. A place which allows digestion of and reflection on the cloudiness of being. A space in which a thread of sense can be grasped at, then re-cast...

I have kept diaries for recording and talking through things that have happened as if addressed to a listener. Another individual is implied, even a splitting of the self in a call and response fashion. However poetry makes word call to word, it is the self working out in words how the world is being constructed and is functioning in the knowledge that words can never fully capture this, can never pin it down. Which is apt because the world, existence, can’t be pinned down in that it also is constantly changing. Another sight / sound comes in which keeps perceptions in flux. Any utterance can barely hold itself together for a split second and is changing even inside that. That the word is not static and helps us avoid specificity reflects the changeability of existence - the fluid nature of the word reflects the entity, the world, it is used to construct. All is sensed potentials. So, is it that we are aware of the ambiguity of our utterances, that we avoid committing to a fixed singular utterance in the knowledge that there are other possibilities we don’t want to close off from our existence(s). So it is seeming to me...

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