Poetry Beyond Text

I celebrated World Book Night with Sarah Bodman and friends in Bristol. Last year Sarah lavishly recreated every meal mentioned by novelist Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr Ripley as source material for our book Dinner and a Rose, and the sinister feast was so splendid we decided to make the fictional dinner party an annual event. This year the featured book was The Gum Thief by Douglas Copeland... and a full report will follow when I am completely recovered.

Meanwhile the book that rose from the ashes of last year's dinner is being exhibited this month at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is organised by Poetry Beyond Text, an AHRC funded project to investigate 'vision, text + cognition' in literature. The exhibition travels to Edinburgh where it can be viewed at the Scottish Poetry Library in May and afterwards at the Royal Scottish Academy. If you can't make it to either venue, there are images at the Poetry Beyond Text online gallery.

Picture This Conference

The programme for Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text conference at the University of Sussex is now online. Dorothy Parker's telegram to her editor (above) reflects my own feelings about my paper but Corpses, Cairns and Carrier Pigeons: Polar Postal Systems should be ready to deliver by 24th March.

I'll be investigating how the correspondence of eighteenth-century polar explorers was subverted by the environment, as indeed were their expeditionary goals. The letter is commonly defined as an object that travels over distance to a named recipient, but explorers frequently cached their correspondence in fixed locations, addressed to a general reader, while they travelled on. When stasis - death - became inevitable, farewell letters were composed and concealed on the writers' freezing bodies. Readers had to travel in turn to hunt for the caches or corpses which spelt out the narratives' conclusions.

I am studying the correspondence of two Arctic explorers: Sir John Franklin (1786-1846), whose disappearance while seeking the Northwest passage caused a Victorian sensation, and S. A. Andrée (1854-1897), the Swedish scientist who perished in his attempt to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon. Their communications will be compared to the culture of the indigenous people of the Arctic.

As documents originated by European authors but heavily influenced by polar landscapes these textual fragments are an interface between 'civilisation' and 'wilderness'. My poetic and ecocritical reading views these letters as temporal and spatial performances which resonate long after the text (SOS) has become illegible or obsolete.

I'll also be providing a workshop on image and text with the wonderful artist and animator Belle Mellor at the conference. All are welcome to join us at the University of Sussex for the weekend, which promises much interesting discussion on the art of letter writing.

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day 3

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day 2

London Valentine Event

I'll be revealing How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic and discussing the role of a writer in residence in the Arctic in Stoke Newington Bookshop on 14th February, organised by N16 Readers & Writers.

No polar bears will be harmed during this talk.

8pm Monday 14th February

Stoke Newington Bookshop

159 Stoke Newington High Street

London

Free (I think)

How to Say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day One

Poems in three dimensions

Wallace Stevens as seen by David Hockney

Thanks to all sixteen poets who came to the workshop on 'Poetry in Three Dimensions' - an introduction to book arts - at the Poetry School last weekend. We had some fascinating discussions about the relationship between poetry and design, and it was great to witness everyone's enthusiasm for getting stuck in and making their own books.

We looked at different presentations of Wallace Stevens' work by the artists David Hockney and Helga Kos. As a young man Hockney produced a print series in response to Stevens' long poem The Man with the Blue Guitar (itself inspired by a painting by Picasso); Stevens' late poems, set to music by Ned Rorem, feature in Kos' artist's book Ode to the Colossal Sun. Kos describes her three-volume work as 'a third, visual stratum to Stevens' poems and Rorem's music' and I've no doubt that in time this setting - which won the accolade of Best Dutch Book Design in 2004 - will be considered as iconic as Hockney's.

Wallace Stevens as seen by Helga Kos

The class drew inspiration from these artists' books to make three hand-bound volumes to present their own writing. As the binder Keith Smith writes:

'Bookbinding at its ultimate realisation is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space. It is not sewing but structure of content that ties together the pages of a book. Binding must begin with the concept of text and/or pictures.'

You can see images of Anne Welsh's beautiful setting of her poem 'Arran Jumper' over at her blog Library Marginalia, and the photos below show work-in-progress on Elizabeth Bell's poem on the sea deity Sedna, and Zakia Carpenter's ingenious thread-typography.

Pochoir stencilling