[Here is my take on today’s Finding Everyday Inspiration prompt https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/, on the space of writing.]

The Space of Writing

I will take today’s prompt as an opportunity to hold forth on a subject that has always interested me: namely the issue of surface and support in so far as it relates to poetry.

These twin terms come from art theory and refer to the relationship between the traditionally purely bureaucratic support (canvas, celluloid and so forth) and the traditionally ‘important’ content imprinted on it by way of paint, ink, photochemical processes or whatever.

Modern and contemporary artists have for a long time now liked to subvert and play with this distinction by making the support part of the content of the work. Poetry, as with other features of this art form, has tended be much more conservative in this regard.

Poetry still invariably takes the form of words on paper (and little has been made of the transition from physical to digital paper, as if this were a mere convenience). Of course, poetry still also has a strong association with oral performance, in which words are supported by the surrounding air they cause to vibrate and, to some extent, by the (usually muted) reaction of an audience.

Modern poetry, however, has tended to step back from oral presentation and concentrate more on page layout, replacing the flourishes of performance with a more puritanical interest in brevity and use of blank space akin to that of minimalist and geometric abstract art.

Concrete poetry has never really taken off, although there has been much interesting theorizing about it, especially in Brazil. This is perhaps because concrete poetry is still just words on a page: it is not concrete in the way a sculpture is.

Mail art (another Brazilian specialty)—developed as a way of obviating censorship during the military regime and arguably an early precursor of the Internet—was another very interesting movement but one that is usually seen as art rather than poetry and still restricts itself to written words on paper, albeit in an interestingly networked way and with the spatially innovative use of an envelope or post-card.

Attempts (usually populist in nature) to use the urban or rural environment as a support have tended to be uninteresting and naff, involving inscriptions or billboards, which are hardly novel media for relating content to support.

I wonder what a non-Euclidean kind of poetry would look like—one written on a sphere or a Mobius strip. I have tried to do this but there is always something unappealing and awkward and ultimately conservative about it. I have also experimented with wireless technology, trying to see whether, when I wrote using a wireless keyboard in a room different from that in which the computer was located, it would produce some interesting results. It didn’t. More recently, I have been working on a project involving corresponding with offenders serving long-term sentences in US jails. This is still an ongoing project in its very early stages and (obviously) one of a very complex ethical and bureaucratic nature.

The only time I have ever come upon a poem that truly and effectively plays with the relationship between surface and support was in an underground pedestrian walkway in Liverpool that I was (illegally) riding a bike through. Someone had chalked lines of a love poem on the pavement at intervals that could only be read comfortably by someone cycling through. I made a point of going back and traversing the same route by foot to see whether the poem still made sense at a pedestrian pace. It didn’t. This was a poem that derived its very meaning from being mounted on a radically different support. There was no point even in getting my ‘found poems’ notebook out and writing it down.

And this poem was presumably produced by a jilted amateur graffiti artist with no pretensions to be a poet.

This then would be my ideal space for writing: crouched down on the pavement in an underground walkway in an underprivileged city ‘vandalizing’ public property by temporarily inscribing a message on it and carefully calculating the distance between lines in such a way that it only makes sense to someone ‘illegally’ riding through the same space at the speed of a push-bike. This—not the libraries and the academies nor the universities nor the lake district nor a comfortable room of one’s own—is the kind of cramped yet ample space in which true creative genius is born.