murmurings of future poetry

Before the last couple of posts there had been no posts here for several days. There is a good reason for this - my connection problems at home are becoming a real nuisance. Since the first week of February when I had a few days uninterrupted online the situation has if anything got worse. The only way to (sometimes) get online is to run through the diagnostics and restart the router. Since the reset button appears to have no effect this means switching it off at the wall, which I don't want to keep doing. In fact living in a shared flat with someone who uses their laptop a lot I simply can't switch it off that frequently anyway. Or at least that's how the situation was. Now when I do eventually get online, which can take several switchings off and on and has been known to take an hour, I may have as little as a minute before the connection fails again.

This is irritating particularly because I often use my blog as a kind of notepad. Sheer annoyance has however possibly accelerated a development in my poetry. I've been driven back to working with notebooks in a way that I'd neglected for a few years. Walking around the other day I decided to collect a variety of text and speech from my environment. This is in fact reviving something I did around 10-14 years ago only this time with greater self-confidence, greater knowledge of similar practices by other writers, and with a clearer idea of some of the things I want to achieve.

There are four main ideas I think I can explore when I come to use these notes and non-alphabetic symbols: first the unreliability, instability and decay of memory and text; second, and feeding back into the first by the fragmentation and instability that arises, ways of reflecting the world without becoming over-reliant on description, self-reference or meaning; third reclamation of mental and physical space by appropriating public text; and fourth, and feeding back into the third by their misuse, the functions of language and symbols for specific groups. In fact I'm pretty sure there was a fifth, but I can't remember what it was.

My aim at the moment is to gather an amount of material and think about ways of presenting it, and incorporating it with more 'conventional' poetic elements. The most problematic of these in my experience is presentation, especially with regard to incorporating text and non-linguistic symbols within whatever font you're using with non-linguistic symbols you can't source to any font. Do you try to track down templates, do you try to create a version from a photograph, or use a copy of a photograph, do you rely on hand-drawn renderings, and what effect does incorporating these have on line spacing for instance?