alice reimagined

Back in 2004 I wrote a booklet of poems called “the alice conversations“. 13 poems in a short booklet, it was a set of dialogues and conversations with Alice. When I first began working with Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes and active imagination, I developed a set of characters that would reappear frequently in my written work. The character of Alice was my anima, the inner feminine within the man. She appears in a lot of my written work. Other characters include Peter, Lou Meera and Aslan (yes, I know that name has been used before!)

The set of poems that I wrote back in 2004 were fun to write, had plenty of insight into the personality of this character, and were produced at a time when I was looking to make sense of archetypes and find ways to work with them.

A few weeks ago, I was looking through this booklet again. That prompted a new idea – to take each poem of the original 13 and use that as source material for a new section with 5 or so poems. I’m aiming for a complete manuscript of up to 100 poems.

Each poem in the original sequence is the beginning place for the reimagination…

I am aiming to get into the mode and mind of Alice – take a poem, break it up. Print it out and cut it up – look for narratives and threads that are there but not used in the original.

Use the conversation idea in much more depth! Dialogues – exploring the original material and adding in a lot of new material.

alice reimagined 2017

I will write in many different styles – Ferlinghetti, Eliot, Auden, Hughes, Heaney. I am going to draw on other approaches too. This will be an opportunity to stretch and expand my techniques. Sometimes we just become somewhat stuck in a rut of writing. The other collection I am working on at the moment “Hang Fire” has become stuck – diving into “alice reimagined” is my way of unblocking, creating a free space to write and open out the creative approach.

What about visuals? I have been looking for 13 black and white photos from the many pictures I have taken in the last few months, to place these at the beginning of each section. I have 6 already – photos that evoke the mood that I am aiming for in the poems. More posts will appear here as the book develops.

#workingoutloud

Also published on Medium.