James Knight : part five

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is language freed from utilitarian constraints. It is important because of its playfulness, its unproductiveness. We all dream and day-dream. Whimsical notions occur to us in our idle moments. Those irrational ideas need expression if we are to be healthy and happy, and poetry is one way in which they can be given life. I honestly believe that if everyone read poetry now and then we would be a less tormented, destructive species. And, of course, everyone can write poetry - it would be wonderful if they did.

James Knight : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I read a lot of contemporary poetry, and have been binge-reading Aase Berg recently (in Johannes Göransson’s translations). I discovered her work only a couple of months ago, and it has been a revelation. Her poems are surrealistic in their construction, juxtaposing unstable blocks of meaning and imagery in ever-shifting patterns, and there is an exciting ungainliness about clauses and sentences, a sort of violence on a grammatical level. There is such an abundance of good, well-written, polished poetry out there, poetry that feels too “right” to the reader, poetry that has perhaps been sanitised and rendered toothless. Berg’s poetry is the opposite: she does not give the reader the smooth ride of the perfectly-turned phrase. Instead, we are constantly challenged by poetry that demands to be read on its own terms, not ours. And she deals with big topics: nature and nurture; the complex relationship between words and things; the intractability of language; what it is to be human.

James Knight : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

There are too many to mention, so I’ll just concentrate on one. Henri Michaux had a huge impact on my thinking about what a poem is and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. Michaux jettisoned the notion of the “poetic” (which even his contemporaries, the Surrealists, still clung to), allowing language free reign into new territories of thought and experience. His asemic writing bristles with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, returning written language to a state of pictographic innocence in which the mark on the page exerts its fierce life, its resistance to straitjackets of meaning imposed by writer and reader. Much of what we regard as most cutting-edge in contemporary poetry was prefigured by Michaux several decades ago.

James Knight : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

After initial, experimental exploration of an image or cluster of images, comes the graft. The process of refining, shaping, rearranging, etc, is time consuming and hard. I have to think about the poem differently, critically. The process of challenging myself, being really tough on myself, can be exhausting. I often feel as if a poem can never be finished satisfactorily. Its faults and foolishness obscure everything else about it. The solution comes through leaving a poem alone for a few days, or even longer. Going back to it, I’ll often see it differently and realise what I need to do to complete it. Thereafter, the challenge is to not constantly tinker. My visual poems in particular are subjected to endless tinkering, and sometimes small adjustments add up to big changes, so that the revised visual poem is radically different from the original: effectively a different poem.

James Knight : part one

James Knight is an experimental poet and digital artist. His books include Void Voices (Hesterglock Press), Self Portrait by Night (Sampson Low) and Chimera (Penteract Press). Website: thebirdking.com. Twitter: twitter.com/badbadpoet

How does a poem begin?

For me, a poem almost always begins as an image in my mind, which I then explore on the page through free association, until a cluster of strong images emerges. Those images then form the basis for the poem or, more frequently, a series of poems; I rarely work on one poem at a time, and usually find that an image is so insistent as to demand several poems in which to play itself out. For example, an image that came to me earlier this year was that of a metallic figure like a massive antenna that resembled Christ on the cross, but also suggested some sort of hieroglyph, a sign to be read. That image recurred in a number of poems I wrote.

When I’m making a visual poem the starting point may be a mental image, but more often it is a photograph. I might be struck by some aspect of the photo, something in it that seems half-hidden. I use a range of processes to deform and transform the photograph into something that bears no obvious resemblance to the original image; something hidden emerges. I work experimentally, with no fixed idea in my mind of how the visual poem should end up. The core image that forms the basis of the visual poem has often been arrived at accidentally.