In 2010, we are not planning on any radical (or, indeed, any) changes to the formula. But there are things from 2009 I’d love to see more of…

More transformations

My favourite so far is an exquisite flip along a homonym axis by Jeremey Over, who took Tim Atkins’ Italian father of the sonnet, ‘Petrarch #5’, and made him ‘Petroc Trelawny’, the presenter of the proms on Radio 3 and BBC4. Their conversation continues to probe the Romantic inheritance, parenthood and bees.

More investigation of the anthropocene

The conversation between Jared Stanley & Siddhartha Bose is exciting not only for its use of prose poems, rare on the site, but also the explicit, but by no means straightforward concern with anthropogenic climate change. Bose has taken Stanley’s compelling post-pastoral landscape firmly into an urban context and I’m looking forward to seeing how he responds. In their elegant but turbulent back and forth, Fergus Allen & Stephanie Bolster also worked with a palette of ‘creatures/Eternally eating and being eaten’ (Allen). Bolster’s poems, I think, have a wonderful sound play: ‘A cricket does what crickets do and the air quickens’.

Which reminds me: More transatlantic (and other more distant) connections

Because interesting things seem to happen when languages meet.

More explorations across the screen

Simon Smith & Ryan Murphy are involved in a conversation which breathes in and out with each poem, Smith exploding into clouds, and Murphy contracting. There is a very careful attention to formal echoes between these two, where ‘i/Phone’ becomes ‘i-/Solation’. Still going, it feels like this has the energy to run and run: as Smith’s poem has it, ‘And it doesn’t stop.    None of it/stops, ever’.

More pictures

Because so far we’ve had only a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible.

More contact

We love to hear from people who are visiting the site, as well as our poets. Do let us know what you’re up to. On that note, congratulations to George Ttooulli, whose collection ‘Static Exile’ came out late last year and is a treat.

Last year I began sending e-mails something like the following to a number of poets whose work I admire:

I am hoping you will consider contributing to a new project I have in mind. Basically the inspiration for this came when I was at a painter’s studio and he mentioned to me that a particular painting had come about when the artist in the neighboring studio was throwing out a canvas she had given up on. He took her abandoned painting and painted his own painting on top of it, but you can still see her painting coming through at certain points. Well, this gave me the idea to ask a number of poets whose work I like if they have a poem that they’ve abandoned that they would consider giving me to work on—to write on top of it, so to speak, the way that painter painted on top of his friend’s painting. So give it some thought and let me know if this is something you’d be willing to do. If it seems too uncomfortable or whatever, don’t worry about it, I completely understand. It’s such a personal thing. That’s why it interests me of course—an opportunity to delve in a different way into the work of some people I admire in the process of, I hope, coming up with something of my own, or maybe of both of ours, but anyway in part my own. Of course, I may not end up being able to do anything with some (or maybe even any) of the things people send me. But I’m curious to see what happens. Let me know what you think.

The origins of my desire to work with the “failed” or “abandoned” efforts of other poets undoubtedly lie deep within the history of my work. I have always been fascinated by the obviously self-contradictory notion of a text whose final form would nonetheless be predicated on the suggestion that it could easily have been otherwise. My first chapbook, The New Lessons, whose form was much affected (as I seem to recall) by my then-recent discovery of the books of Jack Spicer, was a sequence of poems with, at the foot of each page, some sequences of words that seemed to suggest the reader could substitute any one of them for certain words in the poem above. Two subsequent sequences, Fate/Seen in the Dark and Hidden Figure, with their parallel texts, were undoubtedly influenced by my reading of the alternating voices in John Ashbery’s “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’” and above all on the “simultaneous but independent monologues” of his great “Litany,” but even more so, I think, by the parallel text editions I had used during my failed years in graduate school, books in which the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude or the A, B, and C-texts of Piers Plowman were juxtaposed—that is, although I hadn’t worked the idea out fully, I was struck by the notion that my parallel texts were somehow versions of the “same” thing, no matter how different they appeared. That only happened later, with my four “Opera” poems, where the second, third, and fourth poems were presented as remixes of the first.

The remix idea could have led to the idea of working with material gathered from other poets, and arguably should have, since it is standard practice to remix the work of another artist, not one’s own. But that didn’t happen right away. The idea made me nervous. Working with someone else’s material evokes considerable ambivalence—is one honoring the other person’s work, vandalizing it, or both at once?—and I wasn’t ready to handle it. I remember not long after the publication of Opera giving a reading with a friend whose poetry I admire greatly—am in awe of, frankly, having always to ask her, “How the fuck do you do that?” She had written a long poem taking off from a line in one of mine and presented it at the reading. I was furious; I couldn’t bear the sense of competition, the feeling that she was outdoing me. Today I would react very differently. It would probably cause an incurable crush or something. That’s how much I’ve become caught up in the pleasure of the text of the other.

There were two things that finally gave the idea to undertake this project. The first was a request from Kasey Mohammad to contribute to a magazine issue he was editing on the theme of “Do Your Worst.” He wrote, “Would you consider sending me the worst poem or poems you can possibly concoct? Or, alternately, an essay on some aspect of poetic worstness? Or a review of what you believe to be a consummately dreadful book of poems, etc.?” The issue never materialized, but I spent a long time thinking about the idea of failure—whether and how it was possible to present it as a positive force. I thought a lot, too, about something the painter Marlene Dumas once said: “A big mistake is better than a small one.” So, a good rule of thumb when revising would be, “Correct the small mistakes and amplify the big ones.” Anyway, sometime later—as alluded to in the e-mail I quoted at the beginning of this text—I found myself in Tel Aviv, visiting the studio of another painter friend, Tsibi Geva. Among the paintings he showed me was one that, he explained, had been painted on a canvas he’d obtained from the painter in the neighboring studio. He saw her throwing out a painting she had given up on as a failure, and he asked her if he could use the canvas. So Tsibi painted his painting on top of hers, but certain traces of her painting still showed through his.

Bingo. I knew I could do this: I would ask my fellow poets do give me their failed or abandoned efforts, the wretched refuse of their teeming shores. I would try my best to make them citizens of my own poetic country. I did this knowing full well that there is something uncomfortable about the whole idea—both of showing someone else the work one has decided isn’t good enough and of letting go of something that really one just might be able to do something with, later. That’s why I am so grateful to the poets who agreed. They’ve done something that can’t have been easy. (And many of those I asked could not do it, which I understand.) I started calling it “the abandoned poems project,” and when I’ve published a few of the results it’s been as “from The Abandoned Poems” but whether that name will stick, I’m still not sure.

Some of the poems I received already seemed almost good; they just need more or less extensive improving. (One poem I had to return to sender, saying that I’d have felt like a thief taking it: It was already perfect as it was—except for that title.) But others hadn’t been finished for good reason. There was something fundamentally wrong, self-defeating, about their underlying impulse, insofar as I could make that out. Without that impulse I could see nothing to work with, but something about it was almost intolerable to me. All the wrong notes are right, as Charles Ives said, but some music is just wrong no matter how many right or wrong notes are in it. To see this project through, I would have to learn to let some of that wrong music into my work and I would have to learn, somehow, to right it. This turned out to be the hardest part of the job I’d set myself. By the way, although I’m sure I won’t be able to use every poem I was sent, the unused poems are not necessarily “worse” or more problematic than the ones I use. It’s just that their problems, sometimes quite superficial, were ones I couldn’t see a way to solve.)

Something else that feeds into this project is my long-standing envy of musicians and the way they get to collaborate with each other, providing mutual inspiration. It always seemed like so much more fun than working away in a room all by yourself as we poets usually do. Until now, I’ve never seen a way to overcome this isolation. Not that I would consider these poems to be collaborations, mind you. However much or little of the original poet’s writing remains in them, I alone am responsible for the final configuration. The poets who contributed to my project had no say in what I would do with their words. I’m still not ready to give up that much control. (As Dumas said about her collaborations with fellow painter Bert Boogaard, “I don’t try to become one with someone else. I wanna be two.” Or as I recently heard Charles Bernstein read from a not-yet-published piece of his, “I want other voices / but I want them always to be / / My own other voice.”) And yet I’ve given myself something of the pleasure I imagine I would get out of a full-scale collaboration—the pleasure of getting closer to another poet’s manner of working, his rhythm, his sensibility for the texture of words. At times I get an almost physical satisfaction out of being able to work with language that seems to bear the traces of having passed through another person’s ears, eyes, hands, nervous system.

There is no special methodology to how I’ve proceeded. Each poem seems a special case, demanding its own improvised response. In one case, where a poem was built around a repeated phrase, I started by substituting a new anaphora for each case—then I started looking for what to do to make them work with what was already there. In one case, I used the original poem whole, in a form only slightly changed from the original, but doubled the length of the poem by inserting a new line after every one that I’d been given. Often enough it’s just a question of working on the poem much in the way I normally would work on one of my own, just worrying at it line by line, trying to hear its inner structure and bring that out. Of course I know that inner structure is one that I’ve imagined, not one that really came from the poet who started the poem—but it’s also one that I’d never have found on my own, which is why I continue to find this process fascinating.

Poem

We’re heading in the right direction. We don’t know

what we’re going to know but we’ll open a bottle and taste

agave. Heading in the right direction: my latest

near-death experience, as a stand-alone

or as an add-on. In the right direction, fact fans:

seeing things and then getting wicked ideas. I’ll top

whatever I see. The right direction: to live

to 80. I try and stretch all the time and do some sit-ups and

push-ups. Yeah well, if you’re heading in the right direction:

We have more silence in our ears, a poem

I never knew was mine, loud songs

in memory of a hairline fracture. It better

have some pretty damn amazing gameplay. You’re heading

in the right direction: getting into the meditative state as many

moments in the day as you can. Is this just madness? I don’t know,

man! You’re heading in the right direction so who am I

trying to protect? But don’t forget

last night: I love the drama

of role playing. I’m a drama queen, and that’s what

we do. It’s like bottled liquid sunshine, and heading

in the right direction: my kids. I want the kids

to do what they truly want to do, but heading

in the right direction. We’ll hold hands and never, ever

look back. I always mocked your game

because my whole game is speed, while yours

is obviously jumps and ramps. The right direction: where words

go missing. Sentences between leaves. Made-of things

won’t hurt you. And one more thing, Batman, about what

we are trying to achieve, about us getting better. I’m doing

what I feel the need to do. Slim, lethal, the ghost

of an absence, you’re heading in the right direction:

equality. If we’re going to be equal, then let’s all

be equal. New visitors forever, heading

in the right direction, despite rumors

the place was haunted: parents and animals.

It’s a bit bitter. It was her long hands

I couldn’t stop looking at. This is not about me being unhappy

with what I’m being paid. I signed a contract

and I’m going to live up to it. Everything I see or hear

reminds me of the poem I’m working on, reminds me

you’re heading in the right direction. But I

figured something out for once: that heading

in the right direction, toward an inability

to see the universe, in all its glory, as a total accident

that came from nothingness all by itself: impossible.

I’ve got a pretty good work ethic, I can say. I will be fine

if I get a job but totally not fine if I don’t. That

sucks. I need money, the source of most

of my problems. We lead symmetrical lives, both heading

in the right direction: live performance

as you can probably tell. The right

direction: the music. The live stuff, it sets me free. It’s

that hour. We go up to the door. And in the right

direction: to avoid a violent confrontation. I’d rather

back off. Some guys’ll grab hold of you and bust you up. So

I guess it’s time for me to catch up with myself. Maybe I’m a bit

anxious, and my whole “deal” is paranoia, what’s my bag

you ask? Well, all you cool cats promoting Bigfoot’s existence,

fly away with me in the right direction: fishing slow

and just having confidence in what we’re doing. We’re kind of

the new kids on the block. These words in memory

of Electrelane, the only band we ever heard

in the last world. Goodbye. Okay okay—they’re heading

in the right direction: “Fuck work” is the slogan

that started this company. It may not seem simple,

but practically, it is. I believe you should stick with the religion

you were born with. For me that’s Judaism, and so that

is the only religion I’m against. The others don’t even exist for me.

My photo shoot alter ago, you’re heading in the right direction:

to get these guys paid. Then, I’ll go back to the planet

where I came from. I feel kind of like I just

wasted a lot of time giving someone else pleasure but

we agreed to do this and we’re doing it. With poppy seeds

between my teeth. You watch them slowly

and you’re heading in the right direction: looking

for a good fuck. The next day I couldn’t walk. Pop stars

for breakfast. The kiss that almost killed me. Well, in a way,

but not really, because of heading in the right direction: I never

even buy clothes because I get free clothes from all of my friends

who make clothes anyway. Whatever. Keep heading

in the right direction: promote tools that allow people to organize

and communicate in groups, particularly in local communities

around the world. I have no desire to be a pop

crossover artist. I wear a hat and I’m heading in the right

direction, playing my guitar. But I want to hear more hymns

that were done that way. To have my cadence considered

for centuries. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

After K. Silem Mohammad

(Originally published in With+Stand 2, 2008)

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet living in London. His books are Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003) and Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009) and he has also published chapbooks with Burning Deck and Mindmade Books (formerly Seeing Eye Books), among others. He is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. You can read further examples of his abandoned poems here and here.

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg specializes in interspecies communication. Currently sailing as part of the Arctic Circle project, here he answers some questions on the nature of process and inspiration.

Likestarlings: As a jazz musician and composer you were obviously familiar with making ensemble sounds. But what first alerted you to the possibility and potential of communication/ collaboration with species other than our own?

David Rothenberg: You know I think it started in high school when I heard that Paul Winter was playing with whale and wolf sounds. He had a lot of influence on me back then. After a while I started to think that he would bend natural sounds into his own very sweet and beautiful music, while I wanted my music to be more changed by the encounters with other species’ worlds of sound.

Ls: What was the feeling (if you can articulate such a thing in words) when you first KNEW you had a response, a musical response?

DR: I write about this in the beginning of Why Birds Sing and the end of Thousand Mile Song. At these rare moments, with some birds and some whales (though not MOST of them!), I feel as if I reach beyond my species’ lines, to communicate where words cannot. I don’t KNOW if it is happening, and don’t want to make myself the hero of any kind of grand story, but there are these humbling moments when it is possible reach just a tiny bit the edges of human understanding to make music with other creatures.

Ls: These sorts of communications of course require a special kind of listening. To those interested in jamming with whales you say: ‘One piece of advice I would offer is: listen more than you play. If you can’t hear the whale, you’re playin’ too much.’ How does listening with a view to forming your own response inform the way you listen?

DR: It’s always important not to play too much, especially as an improviser. I imagine I’ve entered into a world of musical interaction where each of us is trying to contribute something…

Ls: And have there been any times when you’ve been silenced?

DR: Sure. By the moment. By people complaining. By the sheer fact that nature’s music is fine as it is, that it doesn’t need us!

Ls: The Peruvian singer Yma Sumac is, perhaps fancifully, supposed to have learnt to sing in response to the birds. What have you learnt musically from these sorts of collaborations?

DR: Well, Yma Sumac could do anything! Plenty of human musicians have learned from birds, and in my book I argue that as the human sense of music becomes more open to new rhythms, tones, and scales, it is better able to make musical sense of nature.

Ls: It’s great to read you on English poet John Clare and his close listening to and interpretation of birdsong. Have any of your own compositions been directly inspired by your unusual interlocutors?

DR: So many of them! Both Why Birds Sing and Whale Music are my CDs most inspired by encounters with these creatures.

Ls: There seems to be something profound about the fractal nature of some birdsong and of whalesong, its seeming endlessness, with minute and infinite variations. It’s both ephemeral and enduring…

DR: I’m glad you think so! How much fractals can help explain music is an open question, but they may help. I’ll have to ask Mandelbrot about it next time I see him at the Cornelia St. Café…

Ls: Finally, what’s blossoming in your brain as the next possible collaborative project?

DR: My next book BEAUTY SECRET: How Art Informs Evolution, begins with the puzzle of why is it that if you speed up a humpback whale song it sounds like a nightingale. Are there certain patterns in nature that have been produced by evolution to be simply beautiful, with no real adaptive purpose? Darwin thought so, and that’s how he came up with idea of sexual selection. But are sexually selected traits RANDOM, arbitrary, or might they reveal certain rhythms at the root of nature itself? More of a big concept book.
After that I think I’ll do something with the music of insects, their trance-like qualities, the way different species listen to each other in some great hive-mind kind of way…

David Rothenberg [felicitously pictured there with a starling] is the author of Why Birds Sing, also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Sierra. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. His first CD on ECM Records, with pianist Marilyn Crispell, will be released in 2010. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

www.thousandmilesong.com
www.whybirdssing.com

Collaborations often emerge from relatively separate artistic communities who, while their policed borders discipline their form and concentrate their fields of energy, thrive when the authorities are given the day off. Under such circumstances smugglers from the different arts meet to exchange what they hope, or assert, are premium goods. Sometimes the meeting becomes a little rough, a little disorganised, or a little too enthusiastic: different merchandise spills into each other in the swap and a new contraband is formed.

I first worked with the artist Ronald King in the 1990s, first getting to know him on one of those days when the border guards had been told to go home early: a small press book fair on London’s South Bank. At these fairs there is typically a range of different arts represented: visual artists, conceptual artists, sound poets, academic poets, lyric poets, visual poets, performance artists, political activists, fine press experts, book artists, and so on. At that time I was co-running Vennel Press, which published early poetry collections by W. N. Herbert, David Kinloch, Elizabeth James, and Peter McCarey, and Southfields magazine, a cultural review. I had a stall at the book fair and so did Ronald King, who was representing his book arts publisher Circle Press.

During the course of the day we started to talk about our shared enthusiasms for the book as a visual object. Once the fair had closed we took our discussion to the bar.

Ron, who has always worked with poets, collaborating with Roy Fisher over many decades, was receptive to an idea of an artist’s book that featured the white horses of the southern downlands. I had already written a single poem for it and imagined this poem as the entire text for the book. The fluency and ancient mystery of the Uffington white horse particularly fascinated us both and it seemed to anticipate Matisse’s jazz on a grand scale by millennia. I was also interested in the endurance of the shape of the horses over centuries, generations of care from their neighbouring communities sustaining these beautiful figures on the land.

The poem just didn’t work for Ron and he very gently declined it. He didn’t say why and I was swallowing my pride too much to probe. I am not sure if it was the poem as such or if it was that he just couldn’t find a way of reacting to it within his own form. Looking back, I think the poem, which works across the whole of a single page’s white-space and collages different kinds of literary register within that page, was actually doing too much spatial and typographical work for Ron to manoeuvre around and through. In a way it was asking Ron to be a printer not an artist and that should never have been the deal. I think this is important about collaboration, so important it’s a cliché – that each has to move towards each other and gain in the collaboration by, if necessary, appearing to ‘lose’ within ones own form.

What happened next was that really the horse itself grabbed me. Unusually for me, I couldn’t sleep: I kept hearing a kind of ghost beast running the hills and that imaginary stallion’s rhythm became the start of a strongly stressed poem that was not pictorial or typographical but a poem of movement. No doubt this was a romantic trope borrowed from tales of Ted Hughes’s thought-fox experience but the pulse seemed real enough to me.

This new text proved to be the catalyst. Ron conceived the book as a series of openings in which a single horse figure would move from standstill at the beginning of the book to gallop by the end. Using blind embossing, in which uninked metal is pressed on to dampened paper to produce an indented form (uplifted on the next page), he began to plan what eventually became a kind of slow motion flicker book that was extremely tactile. By using the centre of each opening to bisect the horse, Ron was able to ‘move’ the horse from zero to its greatest speed. It was fascinating to see that Ron avoided in any way copying the Uffington horse: in the course of the collaboration we had exchanged several images of it and it was certainly the horse we had in mind but Ron’s is taller, more slender, and at times more gentle (I think there are comic effects, too). I guess Ron had also been collaborating with the artists of the Uffington horse in a way – allowing those ancients their own space as well. Finally, Karen Bleitz, who years later I worked with on laser-cut books, typeset the poem in a clean looking sans serif font. Together, finally, after a serious false start, gift horse was made.

Richard Price’s Rays is published by Carcanet. He recently collaborated with Luke Kennard for a Likestarlings conversation, here. His website is www.hydrohotel.net. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library.

Tell us a bit about ‘If You Could’, if you would

If You Could started when Will and I were in the second year at Brighton University, and was initially a way to help raise funds for our final year degree show. The first question we asked was: “If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?” The project has grown from this question into lots of different incarnations and projects and we are now in our fourth year.

What’s happening for this year’s project?

This year we’re asking 40 artists who they’d like to collaborate with on a project. They don’t necessarily have to be creative  – it’s acting more as an excuse for artists that we admire to work with others with whom they’d like to create something. Who they choose to work with, and what they choose to make is entirely up to them – we curate the show according to their pieces and their wishes. It’s all about facilitating exciting pieces of work from practitioners we admire, with no hidden agendas.

If you could pair any two people, who would it be?

Alex: I’ve always love David Shrigley and would love to see him make a piece of furniture, or a product – so I’ll go for a Shrigley with the quick wittedness of Martino Gamper.

Will: I think the idea of any two creatives at the top of their game coming together to create original work is exciting. I like the idea they are being pushed slightly outside of their comfort zone and there’s potential to see work they otherwise wouldn’t have produced.

How do you think the designers and illustrators benefit from this kind of collaboration?

Well they get to do something that they want to – so the benefits of that are easy to see. Any break from commercial work that facilitates experimentation in someone’s everyday practice can only be a good thing. Especially when they are as talented as they are.

What was the best possible outcome you could imagine when you first thought of doing this?

That it would happen and as many people as possible would see it and gleam something from it.

Please tell us a bit about It’s Nice That

It’s primarily an online resource of creative things we’ve seen but we also branch out into the offline. It’s Nice That is a way of us being able to provide worthy primary content to an audience that we respect.

Will, tell us about Alex / Alex, tell us about Will

Will: Alex does all the things I can’t do.

Alex: Will does all the things I can’t do.

There are a number of things neither of us know how to do, so we find people who can.

What different roles do you bring to your work?

It depends project on project, but in general I guess I do a lot more of the management and organisation, and Will does the design and finishing. The idea and direction is always driven by the both of us and to be honest we cross over quite a bit, and every decision is spoken about, so it’s not really too important what either of us do individually – it’s more about a final outcome.

How does the fact that you’re designers yourselves affect the curatorial work and commissioning you do? Does the fact that you curate and commission affect your own design work? Is there much overlap, and where, and how?

I think any background knowledge in the area you choose to make your living is a good idea. So I see our background as designers as the reason we became interested in what we do. We are very much still designers, whether we are commissioning, curating or working on commercial projects – it’s irrelevant what stamp you put on it.

We have an appreciation and respect for the talented people around us, and that’s the most important thing.

http://www.itsnicethat.com/

http://www.ifyoucould.co.uk/

But poetry is always a kind of collaboration. As a poet you are using the expectations and, to different degrees of self-consciousness, the literature and other phenomena of the past and present, to make ‘your’ poems: you are collaborating with the strange structures of language which discipline you, channel you, force you into a give and take. You are also encouraging a reader to collaborate with you by bringing their voice (internal or external) into the auditorium of the page and the great freedom is that they can never read the poem in the way you can, they must be free to improvise the poem in the reading of it, they must ‘possess’ it as well as, for the moments of reading at least, be possessed by it. It, not you: “you” have already started to disappear.

One of my earliest collaborations in poetry was back in the mid-1990s with Leona Medlin, a fellow poet in the workshop we share. We took some already translated Rilke poems and began to work our damage. Why Rilke? – it’s only the zoo poems in Neue Gedichte I like, and that is only slightly. You can’t really go wrong with a panther. As for the rest of Rilke – angels, advice, transcendence, sacred-y classical references – I think poetry may have had enough of those for the time being (though of course each to their own… and I actually do mean that!). Then we mutated them so much between us that they became not Rilke, not Medlin, not Price. I found I liked that synthetic product – PriMedRil I suppose you could call it (normally used in industrial contexts – I think they have just banned it for personal use) and we soon found that the editors of the magazine Object Permanence liked them too, snapping them up before we’d done human trials. I found that collaboration wasn’t nearly as bad as sharing. It was more like mixing the ingredients in the fume cupboard together. In its solid form it was probably going to snarl the world’s oceans in years to come but you could make unisex day-glo clip-on ear-rings with it that didn’t hurt for the first twenty-five minutes and in a certain light made its readers look gorgeous. I’ve lost the texts of those now – I hope a national library somewhere has kept copies of the magazines – and my next collaboration wasn’t with a fellow poet at all, but with an artist. Some of the lessons I learnt with Leona and Rilke though were brought to bear on that project (I just can’t shake this didactism), but that’s another story for another time…

Richard Price’s Rays is published by Carcanet. Recently he collaborated with Luke Kennard for a likestarlings piece, here. He is the Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library. His official website is www.hydrohotel.net.

Livestarlings from Caleb Klaces on Vimeo.

© Ian Hamilton Finlay

Whilst there are obvious connections to be made in the way in which images have historically (both conventionally and radically) been layed out on pages, my thoughts turned towards the way in which a sequence of images is hung on the wall, in particular Paul Graham’s installation at the Deutsche Boerse Prize at the Photographers Gallery this year. Graham’s works in the show, an excerpt from his 12 book series a shimmer of possibility (2007), rise and fall on the gallery wall in a collection of fleeting verses which force you to move in an out from the wall, and even stoop to see some of the lowest pictures. Images seemingly repeated – but actually incrementally different – also have considerable effect in the reading of the whole work. Graham specifically cites a literary reference for a shimmer of possibilty,  Chekov’s short stories, and though not specifically poetry it’s still a good case point in which to consider the other devices at play when presenting both photographs and poems.

© Paul Graham

Installation Week Two by students from London College of Fashion, ‘Read the directions and directly you will be pointed in the right direction’, is up now. Website here. Real life here. We’ll be keeping up with the collaborative installation-in-installments over the next few weeks.

‘I think computers have something to do with it’, says co-curator Joe Coppard of Pat and Trevor