poet ● novelist ● arts collaborator ● teacher
This isn't a blog. It's a place where stray creative thoughts and possibilities, experiments and questions will emerge from my notebooks now and then to see if they grow better in the light of day.
Melt Line, one of my poems from a hugely productive exchange with American visual artist Kiera Faber...
https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq45-climate-overshoot/philip-gross-melt-line/
Use this page as a portal into Amsterdam Quarterly's new edition with its conversation about Climate Overshoot.
Always happy to speak up for the Poetry By Heart scheme, and happy now to see this poem of mine finding voices through them. A thirty-year old poem, with resonances forty years earlier than that, in the bombsites of post-war Plymouth – and still echoing now.
About to let go of an old, worn-out and problematic year... with this intention for the new one:
'The Wire, The Wild', with words by Philip Gross, is one of four poem-films by Ian Cottage.
Others have words by Helen Ivory, Miriam Gamble and Robyn Bolam. Only a minute or so each, they’re well worth watching as a set – a world of thought and feeling in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
Click here for 'The Wire, The Wild' by Philip Gross
https://recentworkpress.com/product/giant-steps/
Giant Steps: 50 poets reflect on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and beyond (Recent Work Press, Canberra, 2019) is a richly thoughtful anthology that goes beyond the historic occasion to explore our relationships with Space. Listen to my two poems, recorded as my way of being at the launch in Canberra, here:
Here's a timely exploration by this much respected magazine into the many languages of the United Kingdom - from Romani to Welsh; Shetlandic to BSL; Turkish to Ulster Scots – and features Owen Sheers, Zoe Brigley, Liz Berry, MacGillivray, David Morley, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi andMatthew Hollis. Cyril Jones and Philip Gross collaborate using the Welsh ‘englyn’ form, and Sophie Herxheimer writes in her Grandmother’s ‘Inklisch’.
http://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/once-again/?mc_cid=f16846cdce&mc_eid=c1a58f5d43
First, there was handwriting – my own, of which I am not proud.
Following a lead from artist friend/collaborator Tig Sutton - http://modern-artworks.com/- a clipping from a random diary extract...
... upended, zoomed-in, disclosed this...
... and again, clipped, magnified...
... the ghost of a glyph, from no known language.
Do we even know which way is up, in its world? So... interpret. Translate...
Here's a good record of a project with photographer Mike Perry and musician Pete Judge.
https://m-perry.com/sea-fever/
Mike’s images make an intriguing and unnerving formal beauty out of plastic detritus from the seashore. It "engages with significant and pressing environmental issues, in particular the tension between human activity and interventions in the natural environment, and the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems."
Sea-Fever took John Masefield's 1902 poem of that name – "I must go down to the seas again..." as its point of departure.
The exhibition took place in November-December 2016, De Queeste Art, Watou, Belgium, with contributions from Bruno Van Dijck, painter, Mike Perry, photographic artist, Philip Gross, poet, Pete Judge, musician and composer, and Jeroen Laureyns, art historian.
At the Voices of the Earth poetry-and-art workshop at Woodbrooke Quaker study centre last year, one thing led to another. First, finding/making some ephemeral art in the wooded gardens... One particular eucalyptus tree was offering shapes in its peeling bark.
I don't know very much about Chinese ideograms, but we seemed to be looking at one, which we could refine to this:
Now, imagine this as a character from an as-yet-undeciphered inscription. Or consider this as an I Ching kind of hexagram, waiting to be interpreted. There will always be different readings... which is of course the point. The group of us gathered together on the course gave one 'translation' each...
