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.
'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...
[What truer tribute to a book than to want, as here with Italo Calvino's endlessly hospitable-unsettling Invisible Cities, to walk around it and to add a glimpse of your own?]
There's no end to the travellers who have set out in search of the city of Agnosia. No one has reached it, or if they have, they have never returned. There is a whole department at the university whose job is to prove that it cannot exist... which lends a certain frisson to the tale of Professor Z, who packed his books and took the homeward tram one evening to find that his garden gate, by some accident of streetlight, seemed to open inwards onto a vast square, with formal gardens of silvery-white bushes round an ornate fountain gushing jets of pure dark. It was just a moment, long enough for him to recognise Agnosia, and the choice: to step in, now or never, for once and for all. Which he did.
.... sucking his favourite colour of pear drop till it was transparent, almost colourless ... holding the sticky brittle disc up to his eye, a monocle – seeing the world through it: a sweeter and sunnier place ...
... now, there's a guilty pleasure – creeping into his mother's room to filch her nail varnish – yes, that shade she never dared to wear – to paint his Matchbox Toy racing car .... a Maserati, he recalls...
... trying to Tippex out the red ink mark, the See Me - in his exercise book – the only one, but inexcusable – he dabbed and dabbed, until it turned to thick blancmange – but never, ever, blameless white ...
*
... the new tree, that the garden centre swore was it, blossomed at last… and was wrong – too fleshy-plush, a crude brash imitation of the one that had shadowed his childhood’s window, wrapping him up in its scent that was almost too much… until the day his father gave in to grandmother’s grumbles – it’s like a forest in here, she said – and chopped it down...
... the page he always turned to in his Observer’s Book of Butterflies – the one he never saw – half way to moth, as much Queen of the Night as Emperor – a colour shading to and glancing off the black as if the thing itself had fluttered close enough to feel, glanced off the moment, to its dark side, always almost or just gone...
... you couldn’t take the taste of me, unsweetened – or, having spilled me, ever get me out of your clothes – blunt my edge (please), mollify me with the custard, stir lashings of cream till I sit on your tongue with a sting that’s (only) half a pleasure, dressed like royalty: the king himself, or his velvet-clad Fool...
[The pleasure of this, of course, is writing your own. First that and then, if there are several of you, asking each other to guess. If you're like me, you will have colour-memories from way back, maybe before I had any words for them. Which is, incidentally, my riposte to the language-theorist's proposition that language, just language, is what creates our experience of the world.]
