poetry
Facing is an example of one of the poems.
Each of the poems in this collection has, as its source, the headlines of a single paper from the day of the poem’s inception. The aim of this was to give to the chaotic a unity of time and space and to capture a particular spirit. Headlines that catch my eye are cut out quickly form the newspaper and then laid out on a sheet of black paper approximately the size of a double spread page of the newspaper itself. The writing is then a process in which these headlines magnetise around each other. Some are discarded, some cut up further. The element of chance is combined with design. This continues until a final constellation is created. For this book the originals have been reduced to a more manageable size while at the same time allowing some of the smaller print to be legible. There is no prefiguring of subject matter; this emerges out of the interaction between myself and the words of the newspaper.
The daily newspaper is endlessly fascinating to me. No matter that each paper is biased both its politics and choice of material, it is still the most immediate and diverse organ of daily drama – local, national and global. It forms part of the day’s ritual throughout the world. It is cheap and enters everywhere – places public and private – the bedroom and the toilet; the street and the train. It is sufficient unto the day and thereafter is used mostly to light the fire, wrap up fish and chips, lay on the floor under the carpet or be moulded into papier mache. It is re-usable and re-cyclable. What I have collated here is an experimental re-cycling of what is to become yesterday’s news.
To open up a newspaper is to be open to stories form around the world and yet, at the same time, the very size of the newspaper means that it is liable to shut out the immediate environment in a way that a book never quite does. The person at the breakfast table, on the train or in the café who opens up the newspaper blocks out almost everything but the mosaic of printed typefaces. The newspaper, like film is a collage. Its material comes at different times, from different people, in different places and is then edited, cut and pasted to the final product. Film however has a greater illusion of continuity. In reading the newspaper we flit from article to article and skip pages and sections. The reader selects and discards. No-one is likely to read everything in a paper, any more that a city-dweller is likely to be familiar with every sector of a large city. Articles must jostle for attention and, in this arena, the headline is the hooker. It can be brash, absurd, shocking, exclamatory; playful, flirtatious, witty, puzzling, punning, questioning and paradoxical. Like a mini-skirt, it should brief and never dull.
This book is dedicated to the memory of an uncle of mine – Ted Hall – who was killed in the Second World War. Though he died before I was born, there was a photograph of him in uniform in our sitting room and as a child I felt a strong connection to the spirit I saw in him. Though he was never spoken about in our family, I discovered some years later that, while at university, he was a conscientious objector and then joined the ambulance corps before finally being killed while serving as a regular army officer. I suspect he was happy neither to enter the conflict nor to avoid it. One day he emerged from some woods in Northern France and was killed by a sniper. Here one minute, gone the next. Yesterday’s news?
I would like to thank Luciano Figeiredo whose shared interest, as an artist, with newspaper material has been continuously stimulating. It was he who first suggested bringing these poems together in book form. My initial idea was that photocopies of the originals would be exhibited in a blacked-out room with just a pencil of light illuminating each poem, so as to create a sense of fumbling in the dark for the words. In the short term this seemed too ambitious and I am grateful to him for this ‘interim’ suggestion which has proved to be equally interesting.
I would like to thank Derek Shiel, an artist and friend for many years, whose support, encouragement and conversation have been invaluable. He assisted me with the overall layout.
Finally I would to express my gratitude to Arny Mindell who, in many different ways, has encouraged me to go beyond my own hesitations. I am also indebted to his writings about the dreaming relationship between the individual and the collective field of which s/he is a part. In his person, through his writings and as a figure in my dreams he has turned my perceptions inside out, upside down and back to front. The form of this book attempts to reflect that.
Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire:
“… it is the phantom crowd of the words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic beauty.”
Samuel Beckett:
“… to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
Ezra Pound:
“Literature is news that stays news.”
Below are two poems that have been transcribed. I have kept the letter-size but not the exact layout and fonts.
Contact details:
David Clark
Email: david@activityzero.com
Mobile: 07711 939 469