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.