#3 of 30 – Blue

A series of blog posts derived from randomly chosen words as titles.

Blue is my favourite colour. Maybe it’s because I have blue eyes, perhaps it’s because I am a supported of Leicester City football club and they play in blue and white.

For whatever reason, one day back in 1984 I began to write some new poems that would shift my writing from the hundreds of poems I had written up to that point, to something different. I could hear my own voice in what I was writing for the first time. Up to this point, everything I had written had been full of the echoes, styles and twitches of other writers. Their influences were working their way into my poetic veins as I worked out who I was and what I was here to write about.

This booklet, called “sharp blue / breath” was about a character called Blue. I wrote a dozen or so poems, most of them about this character. I took the poems and hand-wrote them into a booklet with a cover and stitched it together with cotton at its spine. It had a blue cover (of course) and a lino print design on the front. It was my first self-published book, completed in 1985 – an edition of one! I still have that booklet / chapbook. I have shown it to many people over the years. It was the beginning of my ongoing project about this character called Blue.

The second collection came to me 10 years later in 1996. This collection was called “foundlings” and comprised a series of poems about Blue, which were mainly developed from cut-ups, lines taken from existing texts, and re-mixed poems. This collection was published in part and in total by a couple of small press magazines (TOPS magazine from Liverpool, and New Hope International from Stockport). The following year I wrote “Blue’s Song of the Earth”, a sequence of sonnets about Blue. Again, this was published by New Hope International, on a CD-ROM (crikey, remember them! I’d struggle to find something that could read those now).

Time passed and I thought that the character of Blue was something that I had finished with, but then to my surprise a couple of years ago, he emerged again. A poem came through with Blue in it, followed in rapid succession over the following weeks by further poems until I had a full collection. Regular readers of this blog will know that this became a limited edition illustrated book published in 2017. Some of the poems also became audio pieces with musical settings on the album to accompany the book, both were called “Blue: experiments in sound”.

Am I done with Blue? I suspect not, his voice – the voice of the malcontent, of the Trickster – comes through from time to time, waiting for me to pick him up and express his voice again. And over the coming months, I intend to edit and re-released the earlier collections in book form. Watch out for an announcement about this in the future.