What is it? Visual poetry, unidentified poetic object / I am not as good as Miles Davis

What's The Name Of This Game?, RTomens, 2025

'Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”'

I don't even like the term 'visual poetry' but a label that differentiates what I do from Fine Art is needed and you know how broad the Church of Visual Poetry is - so it can take one more member. 

Aside from more text-heavy pieces which bare obvious comparison to historical examples I do go elsewhere, visually. The piece above is one example. I made it this afternoon having tried another and abandoned it. The inked shapes came first, of course, then the question: What's the name of this game? It seemed apt. I found it randomly in a short story.

I'll tell you this but please keep it to yourself: none of the text I use is 'original'. I like chance encounters with sentences, dialogue or phrases. In that respect, perhaps it is 'found poetry'. Ask John Cage. I ask you to keep this secret because some people may be under the impression that I think up texts and base the visuals around them. Whether that would be considered more admirable, I don't know. I'm a literary magpie. 

Once upon a time I aspired to make up my own sentences and put loads of them together. I still have them, in batches of around 70,000 words, each trying to be a novel; a good novel. They failed. That was about 30 years ago. I found writing poetry easier, which is not to say the poems were better than those novels. I even read them in public and survived. The poetry audience is very polite. I think if I'd simply read out 'You lot are a bunch of cunts!' over and over, they still would have applauded. Someone once suggested I read my visual poetry, but it would have sounded a) terrible and b) like sound poetry, which I don't like.

I don't even know if I like the piece above. I don't know what it is or where it came from. Making art is an invasion in reverse. It doesn't enter, it leaves. But like a virus, or actual invader, it can be quite unpleasant. It can be unnerving. I don't mind not knowing. There's too much knowing amongst artists. They get too cosy with their creativity, to the point where it's more like craft. Each thing they make is neat, tidy, and made from their formula. At least craft workshops are unpretentious.

Last time out I denied any comparison in terms of greatness to the dub producer King Tubby. Today I deny any likeness to Miles Davis whilst thinking about 'grey areas' in art and creativity 'outside' boxes. Davis made some messy sounds during his 'electric' period, didn't he? Did he know what it was, that sound he cultivated by enlisting great musicians and prompting them to play beyond their comfort zones? It was no longer Jazz, was it? It was never straight Funk, or Noise. His bands created some ugly, misshapen, awkward things. 

Miles Davis: 'If you understood everything I said, you'd be me.' But did he understand everything his music 'said'? Perhaps. Many didn't understand it, that's for sure. I can't claim to understand a lot of what I make under the name of 'visual poetry'. Like an impulsive run of notes during free improvisation, the pieces appear, recorded on paper. You, the audience, will decide how 'good' or 'bad' they sound.

TTFN