Taropoetics

Great news! The Knives, Forks and Spoons press has agreed (very enthusiastically) to publish my poetic project Taropoetics.

Taropoetics is an investigation of the creation of poetic language utilising the techniques of automatic writing and trance. This was a durational work, lasting a year, which produced a collection of 52 poems, with one written a week between February 2009 and February 2010. Each poem was created as a trance-written response to five tarot cards shuffled and dealt at random. The free-written text was collated over a year and then edited to produce the poems in this book.

For the curious, an index of cards “read” in each poem is given at the end of the book. It is not necessary to understand the given meanings of tarot cards to read this work; merely to understand that the tarot is a series of 78 intensely-imaged pictures that are made to inspire original and creative imaginative and/or intuitive connections.

My hope with Taropoetics was to express an ongoing psychopoetic landscape, with an element of possible prophecy - a text that captured the weekly development of my own oblique and symbolic unconscious.

Taropoetics refers to the stream-of-consciousness methods employed in Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, and the aleatoric processes used in the compositions of John Cage or works such as Jackson MacLow’s The Marrying Maiden: A Play of Changes, which utilized a tarot-like "action pack" of 1,400 playing cards with a series of "commands", structured on the principle of the I Ching. It aimed to disassemble language and reassemble it in ways that would surprise both MacLow and his listeners or readers.

Taropoetics works on the principle that not only are there a vast number of possible combinations of 78 tarot cards that can be the basis of poetic inspiration, but that also, meaning is as dependent on the moment of dealing as the cards themselves; the moment of the psychic state and its bearing on interpretation is as important as the cards themselves.

Taropoetics takes a holistic approach both to the creation of text and the inclusion of the artist within the work. Like Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, there is a direct connection between the personal and the work. Recognising the tarot as a valid and rich system of signs that can be used to generate an avant-garde text that speaks to prophecy and the individual, personal (postmodern and fractured) “narrative” also seems relevant in today’s newly-revived new age culture, which is seeking answers to modern life in ancient traditions. I think there is also a close relationship between psychic/seer/sibyl and artist/writer/poet that this kind of work reminds us of – both are tasked with decoding the “truth”, if it exists, for society and self.

So that's what it is: copies available in a month or so; I will post links. Hurrah!

Updates

Here's a pic of me reading at the Storytails event at the end of Feb - yes, that really is me!

My second book is done and currently waiting for a decision from Flambard as to whether they'd like to publish it. My editor likes it, which is good news.

I've been working on a fairy tale-inspired project with my illustrator friend Laura Daligan so watch this space for more about that. I hope to do some more work on it next week in Glastonbury when I spend a little creative/reflective time there. Can't wait! Very, very excited, and of course have to make a supreme effort to resist the retail opportunities there. I might re-read Dion Fortune's Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart.

Lunar Baedeker

Lunar Baedeker
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris is livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

Stellectric signs

WING SHOWS ON STARWAY
ZODIAC CAROUSEL

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews
in the museums of the moon

NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS
CRYSTAL CONCUBINE

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

- Mina Loy

Wham! Bam! Story! Slam!

Continuing my recent run of literary activity, this Wednesday 10th March I am reading at Nikesh Shukla's excellent short story event, Wham! Bam! Story! Slam! at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon. Come along! Also reading are Stuart Evers, Nirpal Singh Daliwal, Sophie Cameron and Nimer Rashed.

THEN after that, and looking ahead a bit, I am appearing at the Troubadour Cafe on Monday 10th May as part of the Coffee House Poetry at the Troubadour series of events (who wants to go out on a Monday night? But still...) along with several of my fellow Flambard authors for a lovely evening of err.....poetry reading. As well as me will be the lovely Kelley Swain, Rebecca Goss, Ellen Phethean, Cynthia Fuller, Nancy Mattson, Jackie Litherland and Wanda Barford.

Top Writing Tips in Woman's Own

Yes - the womens' glossy mag is mine today with the triumph of a small entry and photo of me in this week's Woman's Own. Page 21. In the interests of megalomania I am reproducing the page here.

Storytails

So the Storytails event went really well on Sunday and you can hear a podcast of the stories read as well as read the stories for yourself on the Storytails website. You can also download me reading my story "The True Story of Betty Rizzo" from iTunes - that Gabriella - she's a clever one. If you do listen, apologies for probably: mumbling, falling over my own sentences; breathing too hard. I was dealing with sitting on a twirly stool that wanted to go the opposite way to me for most of the reading.

The venue for Storytails, the Pangea Project in Stoke Newington, is really homey and warm: they also deliver breakfast in bed on the weekends to those lucky Stokey inhabitants that are nearby enough. Stories and breakfast all in one place! It's kind of amazing. My better half and I discussed reasons why there aren't similar establishments in Surrey. We came to no good conclusions.

I have also been in touch with the amazing illustrator Faye Durston who works on New Fairy Tales alongside Andy, Claire and me. Have a look at her beautiful drawings and paintings on her blog. Faye has her first book coming out with Macmillan soon.

New Fairy Tales

I am delighted to announce that I am now the Associate Poetry Editor for New Fairy Tales magazine - www.newfairytales.co.uk and excited to be working with Editor Claire Massey and fellow Associate Editor Andy Hedgecock, who also currently works on seminal British Sci-Fi mag Interzone. Check out Claire's blog The Fairy Tale Cupboard which is chock full of brilliant links, articles and thoughts on all things fairytaley.

I also attended Prof Ronald Hutton's talk on the history of the fairy tale in Britain last week at the Barbican which was a useful reminder of the social functions of fairy tales (to stop people from doing dangerous things or meeting dangerous people; to provide a framework that describes psychological and cultural events such as postnatal depression, or as a structure to frame the treatment of disablement, for instance) as well as the more supernatural explanations. The tone of his talk was very open and he at no point rubbished the idea of the faery as mere fantasy, acceding that there is too large a bank of strange experiences on the part of to many people for it to be dismissed out of hand. He made the interesting observation that we are the first culture not to have an explanation of fairy sightings / disturbances, regardless of what that theory might be: our common cultural approach seems to be dismissal. Like Dana Scully, I take the view that phenomenon exist, so dismissal is not an option. Most of the time there is probably an explanation - we just don't have the right frame of reference to address it properly. What we think of as science will doubtless catch up one day.

New Fairy Tales is now also accepting submissions of fiction, artwork and poetry, so if you would like your work to be considered for the May 2010 issue please visit the Submissions page of the New Fairy Tales site for more details.