I bought this book last year from a residency Charlotte Ager did at Knuts/Extrapool in the Netherlands. Charlotte Ager is an avid reader and this shines through and feeds her work I think - she has an innate need to tell stories and she does it so beautifully and so human (if that makes sense)? This book is really interesting for a number of reasons - the text being one of them - its been seemingly cut up by hand and pasted and then photocopied to form snaking sentences of delicious words
Max Porter - Lanny
I recently finished this book and I loved it. Firstly for the obvious love for words and language that Max Porter has and the way he describes nature so viscerally and with childlike naivety and wonder it really made me feel comforted and like I needed to go and walk around a wood right now.
Secondly for the Dead Papa Toothwort character and the way his parts are designed in the book. His character listens to the village and their conversations and this is shown by the words winding and swirling over the page, crossing over each other - something I've been playing with how I can use to mimic the wind in my wind section of my story.
John Cooper Clark -
he's a bloody genius. the rhythm, they come alive when he speaks them - his voice both in speech and in writing is so recognisably and loveably his. (Theres something so comforting about a voice that sounds like home reading a poem and not the voice of a swanky Oxbridge poet you know?)
Anyway I think the rhythm and the humour and rawness and energy with which he writes his poems almost asks for them to be read aloud . its almost like being invited into his stream of consciousness and I think he's great
"you've got this slippery quality it makes me think of phlegm"
Seamus Heaney
Northern Irish poet who's quite important in my family (""Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen,") my dads uncle went to school with him and my mum studied him for a level and went to see him at NCM so we have quite a few books, this ones my mums favourite:
he was born on a farm like a lot of my dads family back in Ireland - and the connection of man to land in his poems is beautiful - childhood fascination with nature that is always fed and is never let to dwindle in adulthood. Really important
Pome a day - Email
I'm subscribed to this free email subscription that sends a poem through every day of all different types and subjects. Its a nice little wordy present. I'm keen to get into poetry much more and this feeds the fire in a small easy way every day:
Cut-up Technique (Dada, William Burroughs, David Bowie, Thom Yorke)
"igniting anything that might be in my imagination"
"awkward relationships"
"disassociated ideas together"
"unconscious intelligence that comes from that"
Public Service Broadcasting
"Two very small men cutting steps in the roof of the world"
Public Service Broadcasting are a band I love from London who collage with archive soundbites and historical recordings instead of singing. Sound ephemera pasted and twisted and stitched together to accompany music. I think its really fascinating - especially together with their music videos which similarly paste collections of videos to accompany the sound and tell the story.
Words to rhythm. Rhythm to words. Speech as song!!
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