How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
My Mum says that as a child I was always ‘chunnering on’. When I was four, on holiday on a beach in Italy, she recalls how I went up to a group of Italian women and simply started yattering to them in some kind of Italian-esque invented language. It wasn’t a language, of course – it was sounds, sounds being played with, and felt in the mouth. I’ve always loved the texture of words, the feelings words make as they pass across my tongue, past my teeth, over my lips. And what’s more, those touchable sounds also make visions, and moods ... and possibility ... so, I guess I became enthralled, and fell under the spell of words early on. Yes! – it is indeed the forms of sound, as spoken or even scratched out on paper as text, that really do resonate ... in the physical sense, but also in the sense of imagination’s reverberations ... echoes of meanings. I first came to poetry, then, by being in the cave of my mouth, and then going out from there ...
How does a poem begin?
I’m not always sure. Actually, I suppose it is through being unsure that a poem begins. Sometimes it is simply a set of sounds I feel my mouth wanting to turn and shape, and sometimes those sonic sparks synchronise with a crisp vision, an image rising ... and then there is that waiting place of an empty page, and the feeling that the sounds want to be seen as shapes there ... but often later I realise that that ‘rising’ was not the start, and was instead my body noticing a shape, and that in fact the crystalline flow of that feeling had been growing somewhere placed in me for quite a time. However, every now and again there are times when I know a poem as the snap of a twig ... it comes just as I’m treading ...
Between your text and sound work, do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
What a very nicely and interestingly phrased question. Actually, more and more over the years I’ve come to know that my practices as a climber, balancer and walker are entwined with my various practices as a poet ... and so, it also turns out that my sound work is just another of the threads that my body weaves with. Yes, ‘weave together to form something else’, that is just it! – everything my body does in the world weaves into and through everything else, and the disciplines of either climbing or sound-work or writing are more precise threads ... that transform one thing through another ...
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
My partner has just glanced over my shoulder and read this question. She is now laughing at me! No, there is no schedule. I have, as I’ve matured, become better at resisting the creative urge ... and by now I’ve actually learned to be able to simply stop, and not wear myself out ...
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
Tears in the Fence, Shearsman Magazine, Long Poem Magazine ... there are quite a few more too. I must say, I do have a preference for magazines that mix it up, that are just as comfortable with exquisitely made original mainstream poetry as they are with more far-out linguistically gymnastic and perhaps even transgressive poetries ... oh yeh, hah, talking of strawberries ... !
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
Here are three poets:
Succumbing to the temptation of Google Earth, I travel
manically from
place to place, whilst to my right, the view from the window
remains
unchanged apart from the flight of a chaffinch and the
trembling of a
bush.
–
Norman Jope,
from
Geo-Delirium, from The Rest of The World, Shearsman Books
lines \ annex & rive \ bracket \ paper landscape & /
lines of
humanity \ clayed & constructed \ called upon \ materials
of
tenure & term \ what is this space if not us ? \ [...]
–
Agnieszka Studzińska,
from
Architecture, from Branches of a House, Shearsman Books
Its
own composition: wind
heaves
off the ridge to set
wires
to whir, struts to rumble,
loose
signs to clatter and
spaces
between to whistle.
– Angus Carlyle,
from Mirrors,
self-published limited edition
Actually, of late, I’ve not been reading so much poetry, instead giving more time to place-philosophy and ideas about embodied mind. At the moment I’m reading Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place. Before that it was David Morris’s The Sense of Space, Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body, and Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience, A Philosophical Topography. I’ve come to a point where, having written creatively about place since I was sixteen years old, I’ve started ‘to think’ with a different kind of language, or rather, I should say, compare how I habitually feel-&-think through poetics with how phenomenologists & ontologists express their ideas and try to describe experience ...
At
this moment in our human existence – with there being so many places being
laid to waste, and so horribly – the concepts that place-philosophers uncover
and explore seem ever more poignant and important ...
Mark tweets poems from @kramawoodgin. Some of his sound-enhanced poetry is here: https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com
Mark,
on edge! Stannage Edge, Derbyshire, June 2021
photo:
Nikki Clayton
A selection of his poems appeared in the eighth issue.