....think Wordsworth and Kerouac through the eyes of Anthony Gormley, whose latest installations have just been spray-painted by Banski, then photographed on an i-phone by a slim, attractive girl from Naples who is taking a short walk in the sunshine, having hit writers block with a chapter for the thesis she writing about Wallace Stevens....
So, what is Voceti? - part agitation, part contemplation, a valedictory gesture, sometimes angry, sometimes resigned and reticent, a nostalgic yearning for a past that never was; englishness voiced within in a landscape; a 'quiet desperation', as the song says, spoken in disregarded, mundane places.
Well I know what I'm trying to to, I know how I want to do it - but I'm nervous about discussing it, is it just plain silly, or embarrassingly grandios -, those were my fears last Thursday. I had a problem; it was 10:30am and at 4:10pm I had my first meeting with my dissertation supervisor and I had nothing sensible on paper. Somehow I needed to find a way to articulate what I wanted to do. So, since I was using Powerpoint anyway to complete a presentation on Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, I clicked to open a new file and then tried to sketch in diagrammatic form ideas for my 'creative project' to see where that might get me.
I've been thinking about this project for a long time, the first ideas were the outcome of holiday reading back in 2005 when I took a couple of Kerouac books with me on our road trip to Estartit on the Costa Brava. I got to thinking about the differences between road travel in Europe as opposed to the USA and on return exchanged emails with some American writers about it, ending up with some speculation around re-locating Jack to Droitwich Spa. The whole matter around literature created landscape began to interest me. Remembering Auden's great line about refusing to see 'The Lake District as another bourgeois invention like the piano.' I re-read Wordsworth's 'The Duddon Sonnets' - first of all in squint-worthy, biblical sized text in my battered copy of Selincourt's mammoth Complete Works, then later in an on-line facsimile of the original 1820 text, re-united with the prose 'Topographical Guide to the Lakes of Northern England'. It is astonishing just how much of the 'National Trust' view of heritage is a Romantic (and romantic) invention.
Last autumn we visited Anthony Gormley's instalation 'Another Place' at Crosby near Liverpool. The artist purloined an entire shoreline by scattering one hundred. life-sized effigies of his naked body across the mud-flats. The effect hovers in an ambiguous zone between the sublime and ridiculous, I began to wonder if something similar might be acheived using poetry, but I could not see how.
A possible way forward was suggested during our trip this Easter to Naples. The work of graffiti artists is astonishing, at times working on a monumental scale their figures and slogans bury any sense of civic decorum under an avalanche of slang art. It's great, but even though city takes on a scrawled existence, its populist spirit can only be read, rather than voiced,. The germ of an idea of how to give voice to place occurred to me when we were returning to our apartment in Pozzuoli. As we passed a garish, monster-sized graffiti which had been further 'annotated' by spectators who had scrawled additional comments in felt-tip on the original art-work, I noted two girls taking photos on their smart phones. One posed in front of the wall and pointed to a comment she must have particularly liked (I don't know what it was, I cannot read Italian). Her friend recorded the moment and I suppose the statement was then shared on Twitter or Facebook. So the art the Graffiti artist, which is both literally and figuratively, set in stone took on a secondary existence on the internet. I was struck by the thought that smart-phones have audio capacity as well as a camera, and I began to think of how poetry might be places within a landscape, using new technology, on the kind of scale that Anthony Gormley had achieved with 'Another Place'.
Once sketched out as a diagram, then I felt able to write down the various ideas I have had about the practicalities of bringing the project to fruition.
So, by lunch-time, with a couple hours to go, I had managed to begin to get my main ideas on paper. I mused, however, as I stabbed a cube of feta cheese then glared somewhat balefully at the bowl of healthful rocket in front of me, that having creative ideas was not the real issue; my real challenge was how to adapt the development of the idea in a way that would fit with the requirements of the Humanities MA that I'd recently signed up for. The main reason why I had chosen the University of Derby's postgraduate programme was its promise that research could link with a creative project. The research component of the degree, if you pursued a conventional academic dissertation amounted to 20,000 words; what I needed to do was frame my proposed project within a research process that would be equivalant to a substantial dissertation, and persuade my supervisor of this. So, I began to define just what might be the product of my work, what the practical outcomes would be. That way, I felt, I would have a better chance of gaining support of the university staff.
Armed with a print-out of the slides I set off to my meeting with Jason Lee somewhat in trepidation. Pehaps the whole idea was slightly preposterous, maybe my proposals around the relationship of the creative and theoretical aspects of the project might not stand up to scrutiny, perhaps I should have developed something much more recognisably academic.
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| Voceti plaque - mock-up |
In the event, the meeting went well. Jason is someone who listens and is easy to communicate with. He 'got' my main idea quickly and we had a productive half hour meeting. I have just set myself a huge challenge, let's hope I'm up to it.
