refocussing

Recently, in particular meeting with friends last week to talk about our practices, I've begun to feel that my work isn't especially going anywhere. In part this is due to not spending enough time creating work, it is also due to quickly losing interest in any given piece of work. Something that seems amazing this week will be forgotten next week. I have failed to capitalise on the last year spent concentrating on a single sequence of poems for the MA. Instead my energies have been diverted in dozens of different directions.

But following that meeting last week it became apparent I needed to get my practice under more control (not to mention other aspects of my life). That refocussing on my practice started by identifying a number of postulated, or already started, projects that had been neglected over the last nine months. There were a total of seven. Three of those are potentially longterm projects and also immediately interesting to work on.

They are:

1. Boxing up street cutlery. This has already been done once, unsatisfactorily, and needs to be done differently and better.
2. Junk sculpture. This has been neglected for some time, but many of the forms originally produced were close to those subsequently investigated through visual poetry. It would be interesting to revisit these experiments.
3. Sound of physical actions. That sentence fragment probably means nothing to most people. Last year a number of sound poetry pieces were unedited recordings of physical exertions - sometimes while making vocal noises. There was a plan to expand on these, which I think was explained at the time, but is revisited below.

Having identified a number of projects, including two others which are ongoing at the moment and have relatively short deadlines, it was then decided to draw up realistic plans on how to tackle them, starting with the most challenging. The most challenging appeared to be the third item listed above, the sound of physical actions. Before identifying the challenge it's probably necessary to outline the plan as originally conceived:

Having carried out and recorded a number of physical actions there was, as mentioned, a plan to expand on them. The motivation was my imminent fortieth birthday - something that had once been a terrifying prospect but which no longer seemed so significant. I still, however, have a fear of ageing and death. Out of this came the idea of sound poetry pieces based on physically demanding actions that could be performed and recorded, then revisited in five years to trace any decline in physical capabilities, and again in five years after that, and so on.

The challenge was simple and silly - what physically demanding actions that might produce interesting sounds could I come up with? Rather than make the effort to think about this problem it was just put off again and again. Because of this the project was the first to be looked at in-depth. While many people will work in a similar way it is, embarrassingly, a novelty for me:

1. It began by identifying and setting out the problems that had prevented previous planning getting beyond the stage of 'Hey, that's a good idea!'
2. With the problems identified, solutions in outline could be proposed. For example, the first problem identified was the unresolved question of whether to articulate specific phonemes or words/make specific vocal noises, or to record only those sounds that arise naturally from the action. The solution in outline was: My immediate preference is for sounds arising naturally. There is less weight of signification on them + less to think about. Removing them from composition or plan emphasises the distance from music.
3. With a series of six problems identified and addressed it was then possible to draw up more concrete proposals for specific 'sound actions' as I'm currently calling them. This has led to the conception of four broad projects of sound actions: extended sounds, acoustic effects of the environment, vigorous physical exertions, reading the street.
4. In this process the outline solution to the question of whether to articulate specific phonemes etc. has already been modified to include non-linguistic vocal sounds to be carried out throughout certain physical actions within the first three broad projects.
5. Currently, brief outline proposals for the four broad projects are being completed. These detail the sounds to be made, the physical actions to be carried out, the locations where the performances will be executed and recorded, and any obvious practicalities needed. From these, more detailed plans can be drawn up where necessary.

This particular set of ideas is unusual in requiring such detailed planning, but the basic approach is likely to help a lot with some of my vaguer ideas.