The first four poems between Jennifer Wainwright and Loveday Why are now up. One noticeable thing about this sequence is how meticulously, and distinctively, the poems are paced. The ‘reeling’, ‘cantering’, ‘tangible speed’ of Why’s ‘Copeland’ is countered by a slowed-up sense of attendance in Wainwright’s ‘Just Visiting’, and ‘Hunger’. As well as sharing this command of momentum, there are recurring images of eyeballs, tongues and gullets; and there are hot things cooling down.
On the screen, you can see how both poets have their stanzas bulge about the middle. We’ve been planning the re-launch of the website this week, and thinking about the representation of these visual aspects on a screen, as well as the mechanics of reading sequences of poems online.
A couple of forthcoming exhibitions – Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA, and Harland Miller at the Baltic – take the way words look as their subject matter. Artist and novelist Miller has imagined books with glib northern titles like ‘Gateshead Revisited’, and ‘Scarborough: Have Faith in Cod’. These are painted as reproductions of iconic Penguin paperbacks – an ultimate textual / graphic brand. Meanwhile, the ICA’s exhibition of text-based art practices is inspired by the concrete poetry movement, which explored the literary and graphic potential of language.
Here’s Philip Larkin being surly in his Paris Review interview, making a defence of looking at poetry, as opposed to listening to it:
Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly.
We’ll be putting that to the test at our Livestarlings event, with readings from the site a week on thursday at the Betsy Trotwood pub in London. Do come.
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