How did you first come to visual poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I came about it through a roundabout fashion. I did my undergraduate degree in Drama, combined with English literature. I eventually did my dissertation in Poetic Text as Score or Script, combining the two disciplines. It was here that I was introduced to visual poetry, as a score for performance, through people like bpNichol and, by extension, The Four Horsemen. I think that the performance element is still important to me, and I think that’s why it resonates. It’s about the multi-disciplinary, the material, the noise in the channel.
How does a poem begin?
Mine often start off as fragments, something I’ve overheard, read, or rediscovered in an old notebook or text file. ‘banana ga nana’, which you kindly published, actually started as a kind of joke. I’m part of a poetry group and we were discussing bananas, and their relative usefulness. One of the various uses we came upon was, of course, as a poem. I’ve been learning Japanese on and off since lockdown happened here in the UK, and one of the example phrases on the app I’m learning from is バナナが七本あります。, which romanised is ‘banana ga nana hon arimasu’ . Translated, it means ‘there are seven bananas’. Whoever wrote that sentence as a learning aid knew it was satisfying sound-patterning and delightful to put your vocal cords through.
I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I thought it would make the perfect bits of language to go onto a banana, so that’s what I did. The process began there, culminating in me hunched over a scanner, trying to find the best way to scan an inked banana without getting its innards everywhere.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
I don’t think I have a single, extended, project, other than that my thinking, I hope, is always developing. I suppose the way I create work, partly by necessity right now, is quite fragmented and sporadic. I like the weaving idea, I think it speaks to how certain words and phrases re-emerge in my work. There are some things I can’t seem to help writing down again and again and putting in different things, changing its context, adding it as a recurring shade in different pieces.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I wish I had a daily schedule for my creative writing, but no. I’m currently fitting it around/beside/on top of a few other things. Mainly working toward a PhD, looking at the sound and visual poetry of Bob Cobbing and Steve McCaffery, as well as working in the archives here. Fortunately, both things bring me into contact with a lot of visual poetry, and I’ve found that I’m at my most creatively prolific when I should definitely be doing something else (like writing a thesis).
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
Anywhere that welcomes the more visual side of poetry. I’ve always loved streetcake, they always put great stuff out, petrichor is another one, I like that they welcome gifs and the like, and, of course, talking about strawberries, which I came across after looking for bpNichol related things. I was in the first issue of a new magazine called Mistranslations, from Sparkling Tongue Press, and they seemed really keen to get new visual poetry out to people, I hope they manage to continue, it’s tough out there right now.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I’ve just finished co-editing the latest edition of Poetry & Audience magazine (shameless plug) so I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the poetry submissions for that. We have a lot of work in there from undergraduates at the University and, it may be a bit of a cop-out, but reading that stuff is really exciting, seeing new writers emerge and gain confidence. I can’t wait to see some of their names about in the future and say to someone ‘we were the first to publish them’. That’s exciting.
Anything/everything that Nathan Walker does is
fantastic (The performance art, video, and poetry practitioner, not the
Welsh-born Australian professional ice hockey forward who is currently playing
for the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League).
Jon Gilbert is a poet, based in Leeds, UK. His work is interested in the resistive qualities of text. He is currently working in the archives at the Brotherton Library, alongside teaching and completing a PhD.
A selection of his visual poems appear in the ninth issue.