Tuesday 16 July 2019

Chris Warren : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I truly think that, within this ever expanding and indefinable creative spectrum we find ourselves, poetry has the capability to do, and be, anything we wish. I feel that poetry has an ability to take and remould language in a way other forms find a little more difficult. You only have to look at works like Derek Beaulieu’s recent book Aperture, or Christian Bok’s Xenotext, or Barrie Tullet’s current exhibition The Typographic Dante to see what is possible. Excitingly, I still think we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg. The first example I ever saw of world moving concrete poetry was Ottar Ormstad’s Bokstavteppekatalogen, and it completely stopped me in my tracks. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I didn’t really know for some time what to do with it, conceptually, but I did know I’d never write in the same way again. That’s what poetry can do. So, I guess, to answer the question, I feel poetry still has the ability to turn a writers concept(s) of what is possible completely on their head, to spark a complete psychic and creative reevaluation of reality, and personally no other form has ever fully managed that.

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