Allergy warning: this week I am talking about another side of my thinking practice: poetry.
I was pleased to be amongst the contributors to Stellar Projects’ Nightfall light event in Stewart Park last week. This is the third year I’ve created text work that became part of the trail for visitors, and this year I set myself what I thought would be a serious-fun challenge.
My contribution was a video-poem “Skies Above Dream”, a poem in the form of 12 games of Wordle. So every word has five letters, and every stanza is a Wordle as well as a poem. One of the words, of course, is STARS.
The poem is an exercise in the liberating power of constraint, inspired by the playful approach of Oulipo poets such as Raymond Queneau . As he said about the approach, such poets are "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."
The theme of the event was ‘play among the stars’ so I wanted to create something that was playful, which ideally people could actually play along with - in the film the letters and words appear one by one, as if someone unseen is playing Wordle. It was great to hear families joining in the with guessing at the event, and then saying the whole verse outloud to see how the words connected to each other.
It was also something that was visual as well as textual - after some playing with a verse version we have kept that for online - although not as beautiful as the other installations at Nightfall. (These included more poetry from Tees Women Poets who gave voice to some of the trees in the park.) You can read it in verse form below.
Any poem, even that which seems ‘free’, is of course the result of working with or within some form of constraint - line, voice, sound, rhythm, metre, rhyme, idea, image, or the refusal of these. This was a pretty extreme version, and it took me days and days of slow playing and tinkering to reach the final poem.
I loved the process, partly because it was the opposite of romantic images of inspiration, and more like work. The closest I’d experienced before, even when working with rhyme, was when translating, which I’ve described previously as slow motion composition. This was that and then some: a six word stanza might take me three hours. As in some of the other things I’ve written in recent years, the paradoxical freedom of the not-really-arbitrary form was enabling for me. (It strikes me as I write this might be a lingering lesson of 2020?)
Did I become obsessed with five letter words and the variations of them? Reader, I did. Are there 12 stanzas to mirror the zodiac? Well, you judge.
The pleasurable struggle of making something to carry meaning whilst also giving pleasure to a family audience, and working with the format, is reflected, I think, in the what the poem came to say, alongside the implicit in-situ twinning of Teesside and the heavens*. What countless choices or chances result in a starry night and the people and places that look up at it? What battles between order and chaos, plans and chance, are needed so that stars align? What pleasure lies in a guess?
Here’s the poem in verse form. Many thanks to Rachel and Lyndsey from Stellar Projects for the invitation. I would, to state the bleeding obvious, be very up for talking to anyone who might commission other new works.
Skies Above Dream
Coded stars
Amass plans.
Stars’ lives? Poems,
Jokes, boxes, bones.
Tough night?
Fight might sight light.
Faint waves
Carry parmo karma.
Super novas tipsy
Midst first kissy.
Radio stars brawl –
Craft crazy crack.
Rigid rules
= ruins.
Noval curio
Seeks geeks.
Gamma. Think. Woops!
Slops, flops, plops!
Stars stomp, sting–
Stuck, steel-style.
Stars align.
Cameo. Decay.
Credo:
Guess, guest.
*Although written a while ago, stanza four came to be dedicated, in my head at least, to James Cleverley for his comments on Stockton. I live in the next constituency, for international readers. I don’t believe he was talking about Alec Cunningham, who I knew well in his time as an Arts Council England North East council member, before he became an MP - he is a good man and has been a good MP. But don’t worry: parmo karma will catch up with Cleverly and his shameless ilk.