It is the last week of August and I am working on a performance which will take place an event called The Shag, 180 Lambeth Road, London in a set of artist studios. The place is tiny, it has a cooker and a yellow piano, both of which I am going to make use of.
I been developing what originally became Kernel at The Betsey Trotwood in the beginning of August. However I have been researching more performance work and poetry. When seeing Emma Bennett’s work, I became aware that a voice, and the words spoken could be enough. I kept the print out of my Pantoum used for Kernel and broke it up with highlighters, taking lists I titled ‘edges’ – to describe the atmospherical devices I had picked up in the poem and ‘spaces’ – descriptions of locations in the Pantoum. I then played around with free verse, envisioning several friends reciting different parts in a cloudy Jazz bar. I have been looking at The Waste Land, specifically part III ‘The Fire Sermon’ and the different cadences of words thereof.
To top it off, I have been in the mood of hunting down Joyce’s last book, Finnigan’s Wake. While sojourning Skoob’s in London (it closes at 8pm, how good is that?) I picked up a free book they couldn’t sell as the cover had been torn off. What I acquired was W.E. Williams’ A Book of English Essays. Aldous Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Francis Bacon: they were all there. So I came to annotate, taking upon Edward Thomas’ Broken Memories which describes the deforestation of rural England and the building of the Suburbs interring the natural decaying processes of fallen trees with the secret places of the hidden mind:
‘cobwebs and wholesome dust – we needed some of both in the corners of our minds’.
and my work went from four line verse to this:
‘the legs of the table were wooden, ribbon, silken, shrunken, sullen, fallen, common, octahedron, crimson.’
in a single line.
What I am becoming interested in, or focusing on are the edges of things. Kernel Essays, is a testing ground for this. What I noticed upon reading the notes of The Waste Land is that so much is unsaid, it is not so much what is written, as the non-site of the underlayers of reference.
Pouring though The Waste Land notes I came up with a rough list of references:
Book of Ezekiel
Book of Ecclesiastes
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Dante’s Inferno
The Golden Bough
Baudelaire
Miss Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
Anthony and Cleopatra
The Tempest
Parliament of Bees
St Augustine’s Confessions
the complete Fire Sermon from Buddhism in Translation.
The list goes on.
I am reading Ian Brinton’s Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990, Mike Pearson Site-Specific Performance, Ulysses, A Book of English Essays. I might need to locate a residency to undertake this work, there is a lot to discover and make.
So I am performing a try out of Kernel Essays with some friends at The Shag, 180 Lambeth Road, London on the 6th Sept. it starts at 7pm. I hope I can get enough of this down on paper.
