Blue 4.0: a life-time’s work

I can point to a specific time at which my poetry writing shifted from early nonsense to something that I was proud of. I was working as a Community Artist at the time and the workshops we were delivering were inspiring my work into new areas. I was also experimenting with making small hand-made booklets. I produced one which I called “sharp blue / breath”. It was that moment where I was really clear that I had finally found my own voice. Anything written before that felt valueless.

I completed that sequence of poems in 1985. Time passed, and I found myself drawn to writing about the character in that early sequence, Blue, to identify some of the big issues that were going on in my life at that time. It was now 1995. I wrote a sequence of ‘cut-up’ poems called “foundlings”. The following year, 1996, I produced a further sequence of lyrical poems called “Blue’s Song of the Earth”.

Now, here I am in 2013 having come through 4 years of massive turbulent change in my life. And it looks like the perfect time for Blue 4.0.

So, I have started to jot down some early ideas for a new sequence to be written in the next few months. I don’t have a title for it yet. But I do have some ideas. To get me started, I wrote the following notes:

I’ve pulled out some lines from “Sharp Blue / Breath” which I particularly like. Here is an example

“blue sees a hawk in the sky
wings going crazy as it hunts out its prey,
people use so much energy just to stand still.”

For next section “foundlings” – this is a section of cut-up poems taking sources from newspapers and magazines. It might be helpful to take some great lines from these poems, but also look for new sources. Using technology that sits around me I could take the sources and drop in fragmented photos of them – snippets of the source material on one side of the page. And the poem on the other. There’s an interesting thought!

It might also be really good to experiment with different verse forms, including prose poems, lyrics, and fragmented techniques, plus word art. Really open out the work so that it pushes into completely new terrain.

Be open to ideas in anything that I am reading (or writing). I could apply simple exercises such as:

• Search through Google for “Blue” and perhaps for some of the word fragments I have set out above to see what I find and then use that as source material
• Prompt words and thoughts from music (cite the musical source) and from art work.
• A daily exercise to look for new source material 
• Bombard myself with source materials so that I always have more material than I can possibly use.
• Keep a file or envelope in my work bag to capture ideas/ be prepared to drop in this file things that I tear out, or keep, and have a small note book in it for ideas that need writing down. 

Not sophisticated ideas, I know, but the key is to apply and identify techniques that will loosen up my writing and encourage productivity.