There’s a new picture up in the chain between Ahmet Unver and Oliver Smith.
Stand by for the remaining two in this series, and some new photographers involved will be announced very soon.
May 21st, 2009
Poet David Hart goes from one thing to the next:
Invited to contribute a note, I have in anticipation wandered from collaboration via response to chance and on, more darkly, towards fate. Or, alternatively, luck.
A long time ago I struggled with free will and never resolved it. It suggests to me personal identity isn’t resolvable, while personal responsibility can’t be disposed of. Free will is taken to mean control, but alternatively, while allowing for plenty of good please and thank you, will, that has its own kind of freedom, might return with clues to the unexpected poem.
I might write a line conveying a street, and I ‘think’ – as if ‘from nowhere’ – egg-cup and after that blue shirt and I don’t know why. Nor do I know how it came about that my parents met. Fate – or luck – is built macro and micro into what we are. No getting away from it.
I didn’t know, till my handy screen dictionary told me, that blog is short for web log. This web shifts retrospectively network of fine threads, the spider’s beautiful artistry – “Oh what a tangled web we weave”, which I’d thought was Shakespeare and is Sir Walter Scott – also membrane between the toes of a swimming bird…And on to ship’s log…
If I’d asked my English teacher many decades ago, “Miss, what’s a blogosphere?” She might have said, “Well, sphere…” More likely, “Is it April Fool’s Day?” Another teacher might have said, “Don’t try to be clever with me, lad!” And anyway, without super-precognition, I couldn’t have asked. Is web, blog, Twitter, Hi!, and whatever more thus far escapes me, altering – enhancing, machinising – luck, shift, possibility, fate?
Rehearsing my opening phrase, I saw that it might suggest d, and now that I have looked one up, it could be the opening note of ‘Blow the wind southerly’ (I’m in Birmingham). Am I right that after a performance the director might give an actor a note? What is it about nota bene that makes it seem more important? Or merely antique?
What’s interesting, I suppose, is what inhabits us, by whatever means: dreams, talk, singing to ourselves, memories, books, sighs, log noggins, webbed fingers, etc. etc., all and much more not least by chance. So that when we use, employ, devise, ride with language, it is lucky fate offering us unexpected meaning, musically. Possibly.
David Hart’s pamphlet The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks, or: knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers is out now from Nine Arches Press.
Many thanks, David.
April 21st, 2009
We’ve been busy in the last few weeks reading submissions, contacting new poets and making some early plans for the Livestarlings event we’re going to hold in London for our six month anniversary in June.
We’re pleased to be welcoming four new poets (two new conversations) onto the site in the coming couple of weeks. The first conversation, between Andrea Porter and Heather Taylor, is only three poems in and has already gone from the big bang to children’s toys. Enjoy that here.
We’ve also paired Chris McCabe and Claire Crowther. That’ll be up soon. Can’t wait.
If anyone wants to hear more from us, we’re tentatively playing with Twitter, too.
March 2nd, 2009
Small thing really: I’ll be trying as best I can to get poems up as they are written, before waiting for them to be complete chains. So you might have to wait a tantalising week or two to catch the end of the conversation. By which time you may have anticipated something entirely other. I’d be interested to know…
Excited to say that now up is Geoff Sawers and Peter Blegvad, writing birds and dads.
February 24th, 2009
It’s been a pleasure to read the three new chains of poems which have been added in February, from Zoë Brigley and Meredith Andrea, Rebecca Farmer and Jane Griffiths, and Helen Mort and Charles Johnson.
Each chain has its own way of working. Helen began in Cuba and was taken to Somerset by Charles; when the voice in Helen’s response leaves there, ‘my footprints barely follow me’, and Charles takes them to Carnegie hall: trading places seems to have been one way the two poets have worked. A strong (female) character, among several, has emerged between Rebecca and Jane, for whom dates and times seem to have been more fecund than place. Meredith elides a vowel to take her chain with Zoë from ‘tin soldier’ to ‘tin solder’. Their poems are linked by play on subtle rhymes, sound patterns and metallic details.
Zoë and Meredith have taken on couplets for their first three poems, then, broadly, four-line stanzas for their last two. Other poets have mirrored each other’s forms, too, to give their whole back-and-forth a discernible form. I wonder how much they are conscious and how much they just happen, like slipping into another’s accent in conversation. I wonder what to call these grander forms.
A big thanks to all the poets. I look forward to seeing how Helen and Rebecca finish their chains – whether it’s by continuing with a character, or shifting place, or something else. And naming those new forms.