Monday, March 30, 2015

On Writing #56 : Sarah Burgoyne



a series of permissions-givings
Sarah Burgoyne

i am a schooled poet. schooled by other poets.

in my schooling, i was given a set of plates. they were rules about what one could or could not do in a poem. you could eat off them (for your whole life if you wanted to). please oh please oh please, do not use clichés, was one. please do not start your poem with “i remember,” another. always and forevermore: show, don’t tell, please. please stop ogling the blackbirds. please make astute enjambments. please stop making enjambments. please avoid the words love, heart and—for frost’s sake—the moon. scratch thou and thee. and ye. and malagrugrous… these were helpful rules. i hung them on the walls. i admired them.

once, as a newborn writer, i came across a poet whose work i'd never felt stronger about. at the same time, i had never been at a greater loss as to how to talk or write about poetry before. it seemed this writer had pestled the rules. consequently, i couldn’t tell you the “theme” of the poems. i couldn’t tell you the “meaning.” i couldn’t tell you what a "hundred-tongued perjury poem" or a "noem" was. but somehow these poems deeply moved me in my house of rattly plates. so i wrote a thesis about it. and some plates fell off the wall.

years later in new york, i attended a poetry reading; the poet reading told us she was sad, and had written her latest book of poems during a four-year sadness-bout. this made me sad and reminded me of lots of other poets and their relationships to poetry (including myself, des fois). and i realized i was bored with gloom. so i broke a plate i didn’t realize i had, and decided to try and write happy poems. praise poems. psalms. poems with love and hearts and golden bones in them. and blueberries. (this is where my workshop drew the line).

since then, it’s been a series of permissions-givings. a plate-smashing jamboree. i was careful at first though, and didn’t wreck them all at once. soon, i abandoned syntax, punctuation, line breaks, but not always. in that way, i guess, i’m lying: i didn’t really smash the rules. the rules just transformed. it was like they became cats—the way vegetables become convincingly stately chariots sometimes—that float in and out as they please, depending on how they feel. and of course, like most cats, they like to stay in a lot and i never regret them.

i guess i've started making some of my own rules since, like never be boring. or stop writing poems that are supposed to be interpreted, and write poems that read the reader, instead. i try to keep these in-house, but, like all cat-summonings, it’s often a struggle.

i wasn’t raised in a bar, like many good poets of earlier times. whiskey hasn’t been my only teacher. sadness hasn’t been my only room. toronto has never been my home. i grew up in the suburbs and was told that school was a good place to learn things, so i went to school, and i was lucky enough to learn some things about writing. looking back, no poet ever taught me to stick to the rules. but they named them for me, and i arranged them how i thought best at the time. it just took me a while to learn about shape-shifting. and magic. and winged cats.  



Sarah Burgoyne lives and teaches in Montreal. Her latest chapbook Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes was published in November with Baseline Press. She has a forthcoming manuscript with Mansfield Press.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

On Writing #55 : Anne Fleming



Funny
Anne Fleming

There’s a point at which, when you’re funny, you think about stand-up. I mean, not me. Not seriously. Not for real.
This isn’t totally related, but there was a time in high school when the fourth or fifth person after antics or goofiness of mine said I should try out for the school play that I did. You had to sing. That was one thing. I had no imagination: all my troubles seemed so far away. Then you did a monologue. That was another. True, true, very nervous I have been and am. But why will you say I am mad?
The play that year was one of those school plays where the students make it up and it’s about, like, high school. So after I shrieked, Villains! Dissemble no more! ‘Tis the beating of his hideous heart! I had to improvise, Jesus Christ, improvise, a classroom scene. With me as the teacher. The students are acting up. What do I do? I don’t know how to improvise. I don’t know how to begin to improvise. Cheech and Chong is what I do. Cla-aass, through my nose.
I tanked. It scared me off the stage for years.
But a few years later, I had a friend who was funny, who wanted to do stand-up, who worked at the Olde Spaghetti Factory with some guys who performed at the open mic nights at Yuk-Yuks. We started work on a routine. “On a queer day, you can see forever.” That was the opening line. We liked Kate Clinton. We could recite all her routines. I thought the pope was on a catheter!
I forget my point.
Oh. I know.
To make my friends laugh. When I started writing it was to make my friends laugh.
I still think that’s a good reason.
It still pretty much is my reason, only now I hope to reach more people than just my friends, and I hope to make something happen that is more than just laughter. Although, “just laughter.” Why did I say that? See, that’s a problem. “Just laughter” is almost never “just laughter.” Because if you laugh at something because you recognize it, it’s about our common humanity, and if you laugh at something because it’s absurd, it’s a criticism or an observation about what we find meaningful or relevant, and if you laugh at it because you’re shocked and can’t believe a person would say that, it’s about what limits we set ourselves and why, and if you laugh because it’s clever, it’s about human ingenuity, and if you laugh and then can’t believe you just laughed, then it’s about how we use humour to deal with pain. And so on.
I struggle more and more with wondering if it matters, writing. Whether my writing matters. But I never question whether making people laugh matters. Weird, eh?
At the book launch for Gay Dwarves of America in Kelowna, I was lucky and happy to share the launch with Nancy Holmes, for her book, The Flicker Tree, which has its share of funny poems. So Nancy got the crowd laughing, and then it was my turn and they kept laughing. I stepped down from the mic and had that feeling: I killed.
Yeah. Those words: I killed. Comedy jargon. Stand-up jargon.
And then this little thought bubble. Hey. Maybe I could do stand-up. Maybe I’ve been thinking about it wrong all this time.  I thought you had to be funny, that that was the goal. But it’s not. The goal is something else. The goal is to tell a story. Make a point. Convey a character. Funniness is a side-effect.
We never finished that routine, my friend and I. We didn’t really know what we wanted to say. We didn’t have a point. We didn’t have a story. We didn’t have characters. We kept looking for good lines, for punchlines. We found some, sure, but they didn’t make up a routine. Not even five minutes. What we needed was a throughline.
I feel like I learn this same lesson over and over: don’t do it their way, do it your way.
Yesterday I heard a baby laugh. Kind of amazing when you think about it. It’s one of the first things babies do. They cry. And they laugh. And that’s pretty much it for the rest of our lives.
I don’t know.



Anne Fleming’s latest book is Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar 2012), whose stories netted some nice awards and nominations. Rumours of a poetry book are afoot, plus two novels with goats in them, one for children and one for adults. She divides her time between Vancouver and Kelowna, where she teaches at UBC’s Okanagan campus.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Serial Interview with Bruno Neiva ~ A entrevista de série com o Bruno Neiva

March 14, 2015 - February 12, 2016

Not so long ago, I came across the work of Portuguese artist Bruno Neiva, in particular the first part of his ongoing project, The museum of boughs, which Neiva has described as an “ongoing, itinerant museum where artificial environments are built through intermedia installations”. Both The museum of boughs (boughs: 1 room) and The museum of boughs (alt.version) can be viewed online. The museum started off as a one-room installation; the following rooms will be extensions of the first one. The museum alludes to Pound’s 'In a Station of the Metro’ and Marcel Broodthaers’ “Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”. In general, Bruno’s work is various, made up of installations/exhibitions, digital/text art, multi-media, sound, and print. He uses found materials, waste materials, asemic/averbal/literate writing, space. Versions. There is a sense of generous brevity; the extraneous could serve a different purpose, or none. There is a subtext of clarity without a drive to explain; reference points are implicit and remnants themselves.

Neiva’s recent work includes washing up (Zimzalla: 2014), dough (erbacce press: 2014) and averbaldraftsone&otherstories (Knives Forks and Spoons Press: 2013). His work can be found in multiple print journals intercontinentally (he's in ditch, too) and is featured in the The PO.EX Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry.  With graphic artist bárbara mesquita, he co-runs the artist's books and e-chapbooks faux publishing house umaestruturaassimsempudorreedições. He curates the visual poetry section of the Turkish experimental literature magazine mosmodern. A recent project is a collaborative poetry and performance work with Paul Hawkins (Britain), Servant Drone.


Over the next little while, this blog will feature a serial interview with Bruno. In the meantime, his work can be found through the links above, and primarily here: http://brunoneiva.weebly.com
____





  Videopoem based on “polar coordinates,” the 1st part of bruno neiva's text art e-chapbook 'polar
coordinates and N2OC10H12' (published in 2011 through cPress) 


____

I.


Q: Your site presents a variety of work - what sorts of writing/art/performance/acoustic/music do you gravitate toward for interest or jumping off points?

B: Currently my website primarily presents text art, installation art, artist’s books and minimal poetry. As regards to text art and installation art, I’ve been working on:
   a) tensions between language registers, typography and image composition
   b) the interplay of artificial and natural elements within installation environments;
   c) found objects;
   d) intermedia;
   e) the materiality of the linguistic sign.

My poems are mostly built on language constraints and appropriation. They’re minimal, impersonal and sometimes extremely ambiguous. Also political, as I’ve been focusing on parodying human relations under late capitalism in work, school, family, entertainment, etc. I also explore these themes in my art...

Q: As in washing-up (zimZalla: 2014) or dough (erbacce-press: 2014). washing-up, bound/collected with the prominence of a binder clip, evoke considerations of random, sort of half thoughts as a person is occupied doing something repetitive or out of habit (like washing-up). The lines are murky, unsettled,“pared down to essentials”; there’s a disturbing sense of time wasted, continuous, soporific habits, including thinking: “used to stare at the soft, flickering blue light/sillhouetting the surrounding buildings”. I wouldn’t call them fragments nor lyric because of the page space of which they’re part; they’re sort of what remains at the bottom of the sink…In a way, a focus on waste, material uses/discards/remains and decontextualized appearance is also evident in averbaldraftsone&otherstories (KFS: 2013), a text-art book divided into two parts. The pieces in it were part of an exhibition in Spain in 2011 called “asemicdraftsone”. Why the shift to “averbaldraftsone”? Does the shift from asemic to "averbal" include a shift in exhibition practice?


B: The shift from “asemic” to “averbal” occurred in 2011, shortly after the aforementioned exhibition in Spain. I do find some asemic art quite interesting (Rosaire Appel, Tim Gaze, Jim Leftwich, etc.) but most if it is quite indulgent, mere scribbling and doodling devoid of a worthy program. So I felt the urge of distancing the sort of work I was developing back then from such practices (both theoretically and aesthetically) and came up with the word “averbal” that means something that you can’t read. I never belonged to an asemic group and I’ve never meant to create an averbal group. It was sheer provocation against orthodoxy.

But both “averbal” and “asemic” are quite misleading terms as they only refer to verbal and written language. This body of work is comprised of images and objects that have linguistic elements embedded in them. It may be that in some cases the linguistic features are the most noticeable, but in my opinion, in all of them we're dealing with abstract images with language qualities. As a result, a new semiotic approach to the connections/relations between abstract art and visual poetry is necessary. For that matter, so is a terminology that allows us to discuss cross-genre artistic practices such as this one.

____


Some very recent work...

_____

Q: What is “The museum of boughs”? You have said that it is an ongoing project, with additional 'rooms' emerging from the first.What draws you to extend your installation?  Is there an end to this project? What interested you about alluding to Pound and Broodthaers? 

B: “The museum of boughs” is an itinerant museum dedicated to boughs. The installation environments that comprise it are intermedia experiments on decontextualization, juxtaposition and appropriation. The “boughs” in Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” led me to start producing installation environments using boughs and all sorts of elements related to them. It started off with one room in 2014 and soon after came the idea of extending the project to various rooms, on an ongoing basis, as in Broodthaers’ The Museum of Modern Art: Department of Eagles". But, “The museum of boughs” is different in many aspects. First, it isn't sorted out into several sections. Second, it isn't focused on institutional critique. My objective is to produce sets of installations that might alter the audience’s perception of what they regard as natural, and what they do not, by deconstructing scientific discourse textually and using objects, films, pictures, found material, etc. Regarding the length of the project... to tell you the truth, I’m not sure when it will be completed. I guess I’ll be working on it until I get bored.

"The museum of boughs (boughs: room 2)" is here.

Q: Whose writing/artistic practices do you follow or have been important to you - either impacting your artistic work directly or giving you something to think about…?

B: Well, it’s not an easy task to enlist those whose work has, in one way or another, influenced my writing/artistic practices. So I’m not going to enumerate all of them as the list would be too long and utterly misleading to those interested in understanding a bit more my work. I’ll just stick to those whose practices/processes are directly linked to mine in many respects:

Marcel Broodthaers
Joseph Beuys
John Cage
Dick Higgins

Mira Schendel
Richard Kostelanetz

Kurt Schwitters

Aram Saroyan

William S. Burroughs
Raymond Queneau
Georges Perec

Álvaro Lapa
Ana Hatherly

Charles Bernstein
Charles Simic


Tom Jenks
Paul Hawkins

etc.

______

Some reviews of Bruno's work:

http://brunoneiva.weebly.com/averbaldraftsoneotherstories.html

https://minxuslynxus2.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/incompleteness-and-duplicitous-reality-constructs-a-review-of-dough-by-bruno-neiva/

http://dbqp.blogspot.ca/2015/04/averbalasemicasemantic.html

http://www.sarah-james.co.uk/?p=4941

http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.es/2014/06/the-daily-glance-bruno-neivas.html

_____

Q: Your visual poetry contains asemic, cut up, collage, concrete techniques; some of your other writing is extended into forms like video or audio (soundcloud). How important are serial elements to your work, or presentations of 'draft' forms? What happens with the variant form?

B: I nearly always try to produce series instead of isolated pieces. I am able to go deeper into a subject and/or technique if I produce variations of one piece or present drafts and earlier versions — to lay bare the processes involved in the making. Currently, I’m totally focused on developing serial intermedia installations and have, for the time being, stopped making digital vispo and handmade text art pieces (especially on cardboard), as I don’t want my body of work to become redundant.

Up to now, I’ve only uploaded a couple of demo versions of readings of my poems. They’re very important records though. I regard these lo-fi registers as an extension of my poems. I never use background sound because I’m content with exploring the rhythms and phonemes that compose them, so there’s only my voice in all of them.



Well (1)
Well (2)
Well (3)



Yet (1)
Yet (2)
Yet (3)
Yet (4)












_____

II

Paul Hawkins will be joining the interview with Bruno as we talk about their collaboration, Servant Drone, which will be published in book form through Knives Forks & Spoons Press (KFS: 2015). Paul is based in Bristol; he’s working on his third collection, Place Waste Dissent, a book of avant-guard poetry/collage (Influx Press: 2015). Influx Press publishes provocative, site-specific literature. Paul's previous books are Claremont Road and Contumacy; he has been published in a variety of online and print formats.

Paul also co-edits Boscombe Revolution/Bosc:Rev and co-runs Hesterglock Press with poet Sarer Scotthorne. Paul and Sarer's writing and publishing is covered in a recent, comprehensive, interview by The News Agents: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/the-news-agents-21st-march-2015/ . You can find - and purchase - his work here:  http://hesterglock.com/

______

Q: How did your collaboration with Paul Hawkins come about?

B: Well, I’m a regular reader of Stride, an English experimental poetry e-zine. It's one of the best ones running on the web these days, actually. So, one day, I was scrolling through Stride and bumped into some of Paul’s poems; I read them over and over and realized they were really unique, true antidotes to boredom. The way he combines experimentalism and political activism is utterly mind-blowing. After that one day, I wished to collaborate with him.

I googled Paul and found out that he was co-running a magazine called Boscombe Revolution, so I bought the first issue, together with Paul’s book, Claremont Road. That’s when we started to get in touch regularly. I decided to send in some poems, but for some reason I didn’t do it.

A couple of days later, Paul emailed me to tell me he had bought my book averbaldraftsoneandotherstories. He also invited me to submit poetry and artwork to Boscombe Revolution, which I did. Later on he used one the poems I had submitted and also a digital piece I’d sent for the cover of the second issue.

A few days after that, he invited me to collaborate with him for an experimental poetry sort of blog. So we exchanged some ideas and he came up with a name: Servant Drone. When we finished the project (30 poems each) we sent it in to KFS and got accepted. It is expected to be published by the end of the year. 

Q: There’s an obvious, and in places more subtle, sense of acute, social commentary/observation in your poetry (early work/editions/literature). Reading your work is similar to being dropped into, or left out of, a conversation, to just miss a stated crucial element. In a framework of collaboration, how do you and Paul Hawkins work together? How do your pieces develop?


B: Since 2010, I've been bringing together seemingly meaningless bits of speech taken from newspapers, technical books, TV and radio programmes, the Web, etc., and editing them in order to develop a critique of social interaction under capitalism. But my first poems in English, shown to the public through e-zines, blogzines and such, were much simpler and a bit drawn to kitchen-sink imagery.

For our collaboration, Servant Drone, I would write one poem and Paul would answer to that poem, and vice versa, until we reached 30 poems, each. 

From Servant Drone:

#11 (hawkins)

Caught short in Dream Doors,
a noodle-speciality-cum-guarana bar,
she made an excuse for
her lacking liquidity;
something about her boyfriend’s
2CV obsession,
the politics
of cash vs plastic
(not being what it used to be)
and agreed with the intern
that, damn right,
black coffee in bed
was better than
Chamomile tea…
In this humidity,
lardy breakfast sweat
soaked through
the armpits
of her
Joan Jett t-shirt.
The jukebox played
I Can’t Stand The Rain
by Ann Peebles,
as she tried to recall
her PIN.

#11 (neiva)

a: over cuppa leafing through situations vacant
b: rolling eyes, hair dying tips, pipe dreaming
c: little we know let alone borrowed ideas at five quid each
a: the valves of the heart put under the microscope are but a foil to the best choric scenes
b: as we speak, the canine affection to the martyrs along the brick floor
c: one has not merely to pay for oneself but to yield a certain profit
d: cinema’s equivocal position between art and industry accounts for the relations between author and public
e: you see I once married the Oban girl I did
f: something is wrong with the silence but it often proves pointless trying to assign precise meaning to details
g: he forgot his second pint of brown ale before he was sent on his journey; I brusquely took it, left the field of operations and made my way out
/ / / / / / / / / /

_______

Q: There’s about 30 pages each of Servant Drone -- did Servant Drone have a form that you both worked out, or was it more organic, leaving each of you to your own styles, inclinations, craft?

B: We had total freedom and never interfered with the other’s work. In all collaborations, you know, things do work or they don’t work at all, there’s no middle term really. So we didn’t impose anything on the other. When we showed each other the very first poems of Servant Drone we instinctively knew that it could work that way. So we kept writing until the book was completed.

Form/Structure? As I said before, I would write one poem and Paul would answer to that poem, and vice versa, until we reached 30 poems each.

P: I would write in response to Bruno's text, and then write a fresh piece for Bruno to respond to; there were no fixed form(s) at all, then he would do the same. That was how we shaped the project; it allowed opportunities to experiment, there were no rules. I found collaborating with Bruno as SD (Servant Drone) really helped me hone and sharpen an ongoing personal project: my own definition of poetry; one that reflects the 21st century we live in (uncertainty vs endless possibility, unpredictability, confusion; a vast richness ) rather than surfing in the chemtrail of conservative mainstream poetry traditions; being stuck in a time-warp. 

Q: Servant Drone is socially agile; you both point to/protest injustices, contradictions, stratifications within perceptions of social ‘conditions’ and systems, offer wry to biting commentary on place/situations and the self in them. Does collaboration strengthen social commentary? What sorts of alignments did you discover in your writing? View of things? 

B:  With Servant Drone, Paul and I worked on ways of deconstructing the discourse of cultural status quo and also built narratives out of our own experiences, focusing on places, situations and memory within a political context. For that effect we followed a number of textual strategies, such as appropriation, parody and the use of a direct, prosaic and sometimes harsh language, exploring most uncommon situations at work places, supermarkets, restaurants, streets, etc.

I don't think any collaboration per se strengthens social commentary. I mean, there are many possible outcomes out of collaborative work.  Things between Paul and I just happened to work well. Despite the fact that we come from different countries, we were able to easily find a common ground.

As Servant Drone progressed I think we became more aware that seemingly unimportant details do matter. Especially Paul. For instance, he used references of local snacks, junk food items, food brands, etc. We can't really forget that this feature is all over Servant Drone. The omnipresent imagery of food industry defines capitalist lifestyle. But food is also inextricably related to memory, to the places we've been and the people we've met, to the amount of money we have.


P: I think collaborative work certainly stretches the focus across each persons geo-politics, experience(s) and creativity. In the case of Servant Drone, I know that Bruno's writing strengthened and added to what I was trying to do with the experiment of exploratory text on place and those areas you mentioned, Chris. I could conclude that we have both lived in many zones/places in our lives to date; lived in different countries, cities and spaces. I learn't we both have a feverish curiousity and an inability to accept what is apparent on the surface of things, experiences, people; that we share a dark cynicism as well as an impetuously experimental streak; to smash-up/un-make/re-hash/embolden. With humour. And protest. I'd hazard a guess that this, in part, comes from Project: life in the 21st century; a need to make some kind of (temporary) sense//non-sense. And that is all intrinsically political.

Q: How has living in other regions physically affected your writing? What choices have you made, writing wise, as an effect of moving/displacement/returns? Did you move while working on Servant Drone? Do you, looking back, see a shift of some sort in your writing/collaboration? 

B: I didn’t move as many times as Paul. So far, I lived in the North and Centre of Portugal, Switzerland and in the North of Spain. I’m back to Portugal now, after quite some years away.

Servant Drone was written when I was still living in Spain. I used to give in-company Business English classes during that period and it gave me a lot of material to work on. It’s true that every time I move home I instantly start working on new stuff. Maybe it’s the effect of new surroundings, I can’t really tell. And then there’s the memory I retain of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met, which is sometimes presented in my work, especially in my poems, in a rather direct fashion. Memory’s a valuable tool indeed.


P: I’ve moved on average every 11 months to date, sometimes through choice, other times through having no choice; where political, economic or personal situations have dictated me packing a bag. I've lived the life of, at times, an itinerant traveller, mainly in the south of the UK and the south of Spain, and to a lesser degree in France and the USA. Looking back there has been nothing remotely romantic about this state of affairs; it's been painful, exciting, depressing and baffling. I am in no doubt that it has influenced my writing; certainly in my two books, Claremont Road and in Contumacy, as well as in diaries, journals and in other creative non-fiction, as well as in Place Waste Dissent and Servant Drone. I've been obsessively compelled to write in order to try and make (non)sense of the twenty-first century world I/we inhabit.

One of my earliest memories is falling asleep whilst studying a large map of London that was selotaped on the bedroom wall around the age of nine; the contour lines, road markings, train stations, place names, rivers etc. etc. filled my imagination and dreams, and place has personally always been the site where many frameworks of interrogation/imagination have been constructed; be they linked to memories of friends, family, events, or of politics, relationships, experience, to the huge opening up of the planet that the internet has brought about etc. A psychological/geographical terrain retains its lineage, its echo and resonance long after the lived experiences in real-time have taken place. Areas in east London I learn't from the bedside map, travelling through them en route to other places, then squatting and living in them, and of course what photos/films/media/music I watch, listen to, read, the personal memories exist often by what is absent, what is written out of the grand narrative, of the (his) story of newspapers, journals, documentaries, books, of walks, of politics. The culturally contested sites. When I physically inhabit these places (Leyton, Leytonstone, Hackney); walk or cycle, travel by bus, train or car, the accompanying rush, or drip-drip of conscious/subconscious psycho-geography begins to leak through into my writing. This has directly influenced the multiple perspectives that are often transgressing, crossing-over, confronting each other in my work. For example;

#24 (hawkins)
Shooting Location: Airport Lounge (or privately-funded hospital foyer)
Director(s): Donna Bale
Actor(s); Charlie Uncle, Kid Tango, Dog 
Editor(s): Sal Barchmann, Roger Lazerbee 
Login: TTYI4545@nasr ____
Dog’s gotta booklet. Scoop salmon from the tin onto sideplated white bread. Masticate. Gums, roof of mouth, teeth popping fish spine beads. Clench-ripple throat muscles, squeeze the paste past turnstile of tonsils. Dog’s gotta bowl. Passively smoke: the sun shines tuneless blue air. I stopped, listened, repaired the cistern. Dog’s gotta boss. The washing machine? It’s full of rust. Dog’s gotta boundary.

Whilst working on Servant Drone I moved from Bournemouth to live in Bristol with my partner Sarer. On a very basic level the unfamiliarity of a new city, and a lack of personal connections there fed directly into the collaboration. A sense of movement, alienation, lack of familiarity, a physical and psychological disruption, the uncertainties, the love and joy of a new phase in a relationship, the endless possibilities seemingly squeezed in the vice of a tired, corrupt and biased political system . . .  that said, I'm not too sure specifically what shift occurred. We completed the sixty poems in Servant Drone not long afterwards and then moved onto the process of manuscript editing, which, for me, was thankfully a short and sweet experience. 
_____


Paul Hawkins reading at SJ Fowler's Mahu residency at The Hardy Tree Gallery, Kings Cross London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2R1CJWESbI

Section 1 of Hawkins' "Tell Me" from Contumacy (erbacce-press: 2014) 

Tell Me...

1.

LOW
HEADROOM
HAZ CHEM

DO
NOT

NON
C O N F O R M I N G 
FUTURE

NO ADMIT TAN CE
PAST THIS 

DO NOT
POINT

ALL PERSONNEL
MUST

TRIP
HAZARD
BE WARE

SHALL OW
SUB STANCES

RAGING
DANGER

LOW QUAL ITY 
HIGH CON TROL

b e p r o u d o f t h e j o b y o u d o

DO N  O T
OI L

WHE N IN USE

_____

Q: Is Servant Drone entirely text based?

B: Sort of.


P: Yes. 
     And. 
     No.

Q: What sorts of performance possibilities do you see for Servant Drone? How do the text version and performance possibilities shift elements of your collaboration and Servant Drone as a  “place-specific zone enquiry”? Will you launch the book in both Portugal and the UK?

B: Well, we do have a performance plan for Servant Drone, but I’m afraid you’ll have to see it live…

As to book launches, we’re still working on it. It would be superb to launch it both in Portugal and the UK. We’re having a go at that.

P: As Bruno says, weve some plans hatching regarding performing Servant Drone; theyre under incubation lights in Portugal and the UK. Launch news will be forthcoming closer to publication, which were working on with our publishers.
_____

Servant Drone's #29 (Hawkins) was published in the International Times as "Cameron Meets/Greets" with an image by Claire Palmerthe.

_______


...& a final round of questions for Paul and Bruno:

Q: I'm curious about how some of these pieces were written. Bruno has said he's worked from other pieces out of newspapers, other media, etc.; Paul, you've pointed to multiple forms of media informing your writing. When you write, do you read the poem before it's "finalized" to hear it and/or do you write it visually, without ever potentially having read it out loud before you "finalize" it?

B: In the making of all my poems reading the bits is an important part of the editing process.

P: I didn’t have a strict rule for these poems; they were mainly written in direct response to Bruno’s prompt(s), or off the cuff. When we were putting the manuscript together for publication I did check for typo’s and made some very minor edits to the poems. I wanted my contributions to our collaborative text, Servant Drone, to be as improvised and responsive as possible, to have an urgency that reflected our intensive method of working.  

Q: Have you ever listened to anyone else read from Servant Drone or your poetry generally? How'd that work out? 

B: Apart from me and Paul, I’ve never listened to anyone read a poem from Servant Drone.
It would be quite interesting if that happened.

P: I haven’t heard anyone else, other than Bruno or myself read any of the Servant Drone texts. When I launched my pamphlet collection Claremont Road, early last year, I did ask the three other poets (Sarer Scotthorne, Markie Burnhope and Steve Rushton) who performed that night to each read a poem from the pamphlet. It was exciting and powerful experience to hear a different voice, with different inflection, tone, emphasis and rhythm reading the poems. It gave them a new ‘life’. It was a real honour to have these three poets read my work.

Q: Is this the end of Servant Drone? Or is it possible that it would continue, down the road, another collaboration? Another version?

B: I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that question. Paul and I are definitely going to work together again soon but, for the time being, not on a follow-up to Servant Drone.

P: We’ve asked ourselves similar questions of late. Given the way this collaboration worked I would very much like to work with Bruno in another experimental text project. However, we are both up to our necks in various other artistic endeavours for the remainder of 2015. I’d like to hope we’d be folding dough in 2016.

Q: Whose artwork is on your website? In what ways does it illustrate Servant Drone for you? How does it contribute to your collaboration?

B: The author of Servant Drone’s cover art is Bárbara Mesquita, a Portuguese architect and graphic artist. The artwork is taken from a series called “privados” (stands for “privates” in English). Its grainy texture, hard, minimal lines and dark tones positively embody a critique of architecture and urbanism as it voices today’s disenchantment and ennui in contemporary cities. It definitely fits well in our book. You can find more of here work here: http://brrm.tumblr.com/.

P: It’s the artwork of Bárbara Mesquita, whose work I admire hugely for the sense of discordant purpose, the measuring off and pacing out of the corridors of uncertainty I sometimes run down trying to make some sort of order and sense of the 21st century. I conclude that I never will; there is, in the main, endless discordance, with moments of experimental serenity. 

Q: Anything you'd like to add to this interview?

B: Thanks for interviewing me and Paul. And for your patience. You’ve conducted this interview quite well and you’ve also been very supportive.

P: Thank you, Chris, for asking me to take part in this interview. And thanks to rob mclennan and Ottawa Poetry Newsletter for enabling others to read it. It’s an honour and a humbling experience to be asked about my poetry, more specifically about Servant Drone, a collaborative text project with Bruno that I’m particularly proud of.