In June I spent two days in West Bromwich as a writer in residence with the Black Country Creative Advantage. Some notes on the origins of this project, particularly thinking through  and around ideas and practices of INVESTIGATIVE POETICS can be seen here.

During the residency it was decided that I would write an issue of the BCCA CREATIVE REPORT newsletter, whose format comprises a 20 page A4 publication stapled into cardboard covers. 

My text has now been published as CREATIVE REPORT #2. It can be downloaded as a PDF here. If you are in West Bromwich then you can pick up a hard copy at the BCCA stall  (stall 42, New Market Hall, King’s Square) or at the following locations:

African Caribbean Resource Centre; Charlemont Community Centre, Beaconview Road; The Fox & Hounds; Guru Nanak Community Centre; Hill Top Library; Kenrick Park Community Centre, Glover Street; Lodge Road Community Centre, Lodge Road; Sandwell College Student Association; Stone Cross Library; The Vine; Yemeni Association; YMCA; Wood Lane Community Centre, Greets Green.

This project offered the chance to think through a whole set of questions about relationships of writing to site, and the role writers can play in urban regeneration projects. 

What kind of intervention could I usefully make in the time I had been given? What did it mean to focus on my own writing and poetics as a way to explore a location and issue with which I was unfamiliar? 

I decided to focus on the role of written language, encountered, both in the streets and in the array of printed documents on the BCCA stall in which the debates of urban regeneration are partially conducted. I read through this material – how exactly such documents are read or not  was one of the questions that interested me – and gathered material on a series of field trips throughout West Bromwich. 

The resultant 20 page document includes notes, micro-essays, one word poems, poems awaiting development, pages cleared like areas awaiting development, street notations, quotations, scripts for plays and an opera, along with resources/ quotations from a range of other art projects/ poets/ thinkers….  unfolding the intention of an object of use, provocation and entertainment….

Language in the urban environment, West Bromwich, June 4, 2010

BCCA have commissioned the actor/writer Suzan Spence to record her own one person version of the text. I’m interested how one voice could approach the polyvocality of the text, assembling and re-assembling its components in each read through. When Suzan contacted me by email about her project I replied:

…I think of the text as batch of material/ ideas for use. I think some bits of it are likely to be more suitable read aloud than others, and perhaps a structure for the recording can be found by moving backwards and forwards in the text, following your interest. 

One thing that interests me about this kind of script is that the normal categories get confused – so anything could be stage directions, dialogue, notes and so on. Anything could be read aloud or not. 

In projects since – such as the serial writing project I am doing for BEYOND THE DUSTHEAPS exhibition – I have continued to think through INVESTIGATIVE POETICS, both as a particular way of working with language and within a broader realm of performative gesture and forms of social relation. 

OTHER SOURCES: Sat in my room in the West Bromwich Premier Inn I also watched the video of Laura Elricks’s STALK  – see here – and read David Wolach’s essay on the project and its “poetics of spatial practice” in JACKET magazine here. Also valuable here was Elrick’s “Poetry,Ecology and the Re-Appropriation of Lived Space, published in Brooklyn Rail here. 

Finally, whilst all this reading relates to a distinct constellation of concerns, wanting last night to list the books that have recently informed my unfolding sense of what is at stake in an INVESTIGATIVE POETICS produced the following diverse range of titles:

Falke Pisano, FIGURES OF SPEECH (JRP Ringier, 2010).

Geof Huth, NTST: The Collected Pwoermds of Geof Huth (If P Then Q, 2010).

Raqs Media Collective, SEEPAGE (Sternberg Press, 2010).

Viktor Shklovsky, Knight’s Move (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005 [1923]).

Pierre Guyotat, COMA (Semiotext(e), 2010).

Sean  Reynolds and Robert Dewhurst, WILD ORCHIDS: HANNAH WEINER (Issue 2, 2010).

Thanks to the BCCA curator, Monika Vykoukal, for her help and support on the project. Each issue of the CREATIVE REPORT takes for its cover an element of the West Bromwich city emblem. The full set of newsletters, published throughout 2010, will offer a symbolic, methodological, and literal reconstruction of this emblem ,and the urban realm it both visibly and invisibly delineates.