beginning of new poem currently without title

First the poem so far then some background. Select the images to enlarge:

The poem so far is a result of dialogue, frustration, and wanting to make something while having no specific project. I do have specific projects in Long Lankin and the masks but they are currently paused.

While I'm happy with the Long Lankin piece I've finished I know it's not actually the Long Lankin piece that I want to make. That is to come. I will write about the piece that I have finished shortly.

The masks are currently at a standstill solely because I ordered some clay a while that hasn't been delivered yet and I can't afford to go and buy what I need from Fred Aldous at the moment.

The dialogue is several-fold. It's various dialogues between myself and friends. It's a dialogue between me now and at various points in the past. It's a dialogue between me and my various influences. It's a dialogue between my visual work and my text work - a synthesis I haven't been able to achieve previously. It's a dialogue between the personal and the accidental, the beautiful, the contingent, the reflective.

And the frustration is partly deliberate partly accidental.

Accidental frustration comes from a problem with my scanner which will usually only scan 2-4 items before it stops responding. Some of the problem seems to lie with my Mac since I generally need to restart before the scanner will work again. This meant that tonight it took close to an hour to scan the four images above in two sessions.

Deliberate frustration was built into the poem from the start. Last year I bought a stamp with five lines and a large set of moveable rubber letters. This enables you to create a customised text. Even with the plastic tweezers provided the task of arranging the letters and then putting them back in their rack is time-consuming and difficult.

I decided it would be interesting to put challenges between myself and the making of the poem. For this reason I decided that I would use the stamp to make spatially constrained stanzas using the characters available. Each stanza would then be printed on a blank postcard. I would make only two of each stanza. One copy of the poem will be left somewhere, or sent to someone I know, or perhaps submitted to a publication. I haven't yet decided.

Even so the poem wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for stumbling on a way to approach text poetry.

Either today or yesterday (or perhaps even Saturday) I was walking alongside a fence that was crudely painted in black with the top section in brown presumably in preparation for gold-coloured paint. I was thinking about my recent inability to write effective text poetry in the last couple of years. The solution that occurred to me was very simple. It was to treat text as material, as a physical object rather than as a system that signifies.

At the time I couldn't immediately see how I could act on that. When I saw the stamp this evening I suddenly saw a way to approach my solution.

The stanzas written so far took around two and a half hours to create. While a lot of that time was spent writing them the majority of time was taken up by setting the type, then resetting it.

There will be more of this at some point although it isn't a quick process. Next time I may even have a title for you.