Comments on: Sequence?

By: Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:40:01 +0000

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!

By: Naomi Wilds

Naomi Wilds — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:37:06 +0000

@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?

By: Rose Cook

Rose Cook — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:55:11 +0000

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.

By: Andy Darby

Andy Darby — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:23:05 +0000

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.

By: Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:22:07 +0000

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…

By: George Palmer

George Palmer — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:10:20 +0000

@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

By: Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:17:11 +0000

@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…

By: Angie Bual

Angie Bual — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:45:38 +0000

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

By: Geraldine Collinge

Geraldine Collinge — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:00:18 +0000

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

By: Naomi Wilds

Naomi Wilds — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:51:21 +0000

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 -