1. 
   annamaria
   January 16th, 2009
   

   lovely work Jay. a title came to mind”Songs of a Fitful bird” It’s interesting to read that you don’t often write about nature, i suppose we write what surrounds us, i reckon nature gives me metaphors for everything, the changing of the seasons. when i come to the big city, i always notice nature stealing crevices and squating between cracks in pavements, interlopers, finding homes where nature has been pushed out. i visited an allotement run by a group of indian ladies once in London, they grew spices and herbs for cooking and talked of home, and best of all, swapped seedlings with an old eastender in the next plot. the allotment became a place of stories between the cultures.
   very inspriring, as is your work.

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2. 
   Jay Bernard
   January 17th, 2009
   

   I notice that too! Hundertwasser, an Austrian architect famous for his insane buildings, called them ‘tree tenants’; plants that grow out of windows or in drain pipes. I often imagine how cities will look once we’re gone – and whether the people to follow us (if they are people) will thrive and evolve according to our rubbish. Whether, in, say, 2000 years’ time, the houses of parliament and Shakespeare’s Globe will be so overrun with plants that the walls are gradually digested and vanish completely.

   Hm. Might be a poem there.

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   Naomi Wilds Reply:
   February 12th, 2009 at 4:51 pm

   Someone has worked out how long it will take for motorways and urban centres to be overgrown, if humanity wasn’t around – I can’t remember how long it is though, sorry -

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3. 
   Geraldine Collinge
   January 17th, 2009
   

   http://www.kunsthauswien.com/english/malerei.htm

   Hundertwasser is really interesting. The way he has reimagined buildings is fascinating. As we move from an industrially based society the way that he has designed housing estates and hospitals is very pertinent.

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   Jay Bernard Reply:
   January 17th, 2009 at 5:07 pm

   @Geraldine Collinge,

   Yes, I visited the kunsthaus. Luckily it was during the late afternoon and in september, which I think is the perfect atmosphere for his buildings. And the water tower! As he says on the page you linked to, it’s not difficult, it doesn’t take a genius to know that ugly buildings = unhappy people. Whenever I see yet another block of ‘luxury flats’ going up, I wonder buildings like his aren’t standard…

   Also: Garbage Warriors. I reviewed it a while ago here. Same idea, though slightly different principles.

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   Geraldine Collinge Reply:
   January 17th, 2009 at 6:45 pm

   @Jay Bernard,

   I’m intrigued by Zaha Haddid’s approach to architecture
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7807000/7807721.stm

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4. 
   Jay Bernard
   January 17th, 2009
   

   I have to say, I am probably one of those people who does not like ‘the fantastic’ as she puts it in the interview. But I just find her work so aggressive and in a weird way, anachronistic; her idea of ‘modernity’ (from what I’ve seen) is a little like starship enterprise, and I guess I appreciate a warmer, earthier aesthetic.

   Have you seen any of her buildings up close? She has one in London apparently, but it’s very small. After this conversation I might go check it out…

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   Geraldine Collinge Reply:
   February 13th, 2009 at 7:00 pm

   @Jay Bernard, Did you go to the building?
   Where is it out of interest.

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5. 
   Charlie
   January 20th, 2009
   

   Jay, really beautiful words:) I lived in Camden for many years, and going up to Hampstead occasionally was like entering a different world – I loved your description of the ‘Georgian skulls of large houses and the wealth glowing behind the teeth’ – just how I saw them then and now. In answer to your question, yes I sometimes find myself recycling the same lines on a theme, or tempted by similar phrases. Do you think that as long as it goes in a new direction that’s ok?? hopefully:)

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   Jay Bernard Reply:
   January 21st, 2009 at 12:10 am

   @Charlie,

   Yeah, exactly. I might post about this – the idea that a poet might use a single original thought over and over until it comes to define their poetry. I know that I see it in novels. Jean Rhys immediately comes to mind. I’ve read all her earlier novels (which outclass ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by many miles) and she just repeats the same images of cheap hotels, rich men, gentile destitution and windy streets, but it’s brilliant. Also actors: Robert De Niro and his distracted silences; Johnny Depp and his level stare… Ha, I’m getting carried away, but perhaps you see my point.

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   Charlie Reply:
   January 22nd, 2009 at 1:15 pm

   @Jay Bernard,
   Yes same with music as well. I was in a shop in London yesterday and heard the last half of the new U2 single….straight away you know it’s them:) It can be a good or bad thing ofcourse…..

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6. 
   Anna-Marie
   February 1st, 2009
   

   Hello jay, think this is the right page to comment on your work as requested by Katherine.
   lots of fabulous imagery as mentioned by others..think i mentioned before, some lines sing out to me..
   “Songs of a fitful bird.” and “sensing rain, the land parts a little”..
   i wondered about “London is not a flower bed”..it’s not in the obviiuos sense, but nature has a way of makng its presence felt, pushing through concrete, almost like a restistance movement…gorllia plants.
   i don’t know which way you are going yet, but i would love to hear some of the human stories, imagined or real of the people who work their allotments.
   lovely stuff.
   annamaria

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7. 
   Tony Walsh
   February 10th, 2009
   

   Hi Jay

   My first visit to the site. Looking forward to a good look around.

   There’s a guy gaining some press around the NW for his allotment art. Maybe a hook-up for you? Check him out at http://www.allotmentart.com/#/gallery/4526715240

   Cheers

   Tony

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8. 
   Angie Bual
   February 15th, 2009
   

   You’ve been busy! I love the cracked lips and snow pieces. I really enjoying reading your work alongside your animations. Do you think you’ll bring your visual work to the stage? I’m really excited about all that. Did you see 1927/ Susan Andrade’s work? Your style reminds me of that, and the live element will be really exciting if you get your gorgeous little sketches involved. Just a thought. Angie x

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   Jay Bernard Reply:
   February 23rd, 2009 at 10:17 pm

   @Angie Bual,

   1927 / Susan Andrade? I will check her out. But yes, I’m considering images. I’m considering one massive slide-show-allotment-extravaganza. The question is whether it will be photographs or drawings. I have taken quite a few pictures which will be up later…

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   George Palmer Reply:
   February 27th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

   @Jay Bernard,

   how about photos and drawings?

   Susan Andrade is fab. I just upload to youtube her performance at Apples & Snakes / Poet in the City in June 07 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEFAuMF2-PI

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9. 
   Jay Bernard
   March 3rd, 2009
   

   Yes, Susan Andrade! I know her. She’s fantastic. I saw her do a performance at One Taste and nearly dissolved with pleasure. Well, there’s an idea for the final show…

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10. 
    Andy Darby
    March 8th, 2009
    

    Hi Jay

    Some scattered thoughts and responses to a page, I hope you find them of use in your writing process.

    My favourite line in the first journal scan Jan.08. The city looks… is one of quietude “unlatching spores from the shadowy trees” It gives me at once a glimpse of the precision and beauty you are capable of producing in just half a phrase and yet it also betrays, perhaps, an unwillingness or inability to be specific, to offer the reader the names of those very trees – so little on this page is given identity beyond the generic. But all poetry is not detail and there is much to enjoy in the broadstrokes.

    I’ve spent more time considering and returning to just one line than any other on the page.So much time that I’ve almost begun to consider it a complete poem, with its own knotty problems.

    The lights are butter-white in the Georgian skulls of large house; the wealth glows from behind the teeth.

    “the lights are butter-white in the Georgian” reads like a kind of rose-tinting, a gentle candlelight with which to soften the grittier realities of the period and it’s probably heightened by the accidental enjambement, but still it’s there.

    Does “butter- white” refer to the complexions of current or historical the inhabitants?

    When you mention “Georgian skulls” do you mean the skulls of the historical inhabitants or those of the enslaved on whose exploitation Georgian wealth was built? That’s maybe my biggest stretch – I’m from Lancaster the 4th largest trading port and a predominantly Georgian city.

    I’m not going to continue giving alternate readings to phrases in this one line, but I probably could.

    You get the idea how this one line has been for me both a source of interest and enjoyment and a huge distraction from the broader pathway.

    Endnote: I’d like to echo the praises offered you regarding your openness to this process.

    More thoughts as they appear – this is supposed to be a comment.

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    Naomi Wilds Reply:
    March 18th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    @Andy Darby, what this comment did for me was encourage me back to the original work, to read it a couple more times, read it outloud and then re-read this comment and then back to the work, each time encouraging me deeper into the poem and to the music and beauty of the way the words and rhythms build upon each other. That’s one of the reasons opening writing to this sort of process online seems so positive and enriching for readers and audiences as well as writers. I wonder if there’s an inherent tension between the idea of web 2.0 and the fast streaming movement of the internet and the slow, steady, repetition and absorption which seems very fruitful for poetry…? Has there ever been a slow internet movement, the way slow food and slow cities so on have taken off? Does online necessarily mean it has to all go at super speeds?

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11. 
    Rose Cook
    March 13th, 2009
    

    Hi Jay, I am so enjoying your writing on this project. There is something special about allotments, something sacred in an everyday sense. Your use of a hand written journal really works for me…reaches out and touches, connects in a way that typeface does not. It makes me think of the old master gardener Percy Thrower, gardening in an old suit, his soil notebook always to hand. Your subject and presentation are all about close observation with growing, living things – quickened lively growth – very exciting.

    In the same way, I too experience how quickening a sequence can be. For me, it can grow organically, take on a life of its own. Novelists tell me that is their experience too, the writing takes off on its own. With poetry or poetic writing I guess the sequence allows a greater space and the energy builds.

    Anyhow, thank you for your writings, grounded and beautiful too, tender, tough, touching. Hurray for allotment.

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12. 
    Patience Agbabi
    April 20th, 2009
    

    Some fabulous work, Jay. Love all the visuals like everyone else. (Have just written a children’s picture book so am thinking in images.) Really relate to the recurrence of imagery, words, word cycles in writing. Have you thought of working more consciously with form e.g. the sestina repeating end-words; the corona – a sonnet sequence where the last line one sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the very last line is an exact echo of the the very first line – a snake eating its own tail? All art feeds on repetition, a way of working out our obsessions. Good luck with Oxford. I’m really fascinated to see how you get on with the allotment and the degree!

    Reply

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