I’m a Creative Director and poet. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. I work with exciting organisations to invent worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I release new poetic objects every four months. I was the world’s second most awarded studio in the 2020 D&AD awards. This is a regular letter about my thinking and my work in progress.
Read on Substack.
André Breton founded Surrealism. In his Second Manifesto, published in 1929, he introduces the principle of ‘the supreme point’, explaining, in translation, ‘according to all indications, a certain point exists in the mind where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictions.’
Literature is only literature because someone on a platform has deemed it such. Writing funded by brands is only advertising until it seeps into culture.
It’s all just experiments in language adding to the vast network of symbols called reality.
Why is Shakespeare’s Macbeth so creepy? The literary scholar George Walton Williams talked about the ‘continuous sense of menace’ and ‘horror’ that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes. People have wondered for years why it has this effect.
A 2014 piece of textual analysis found a reason. Shakespeare uses the word ‘the’ far more in Macbeth than he does in any of his other plays.
LADY MACBETH: It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night.
Hope and Witmore, the authors of the textual analysis paper, explain ‘So why does Lady Macbeth use ‘the’ here? The effect is to present the owl, not as an actual, specific owl, but as a generalised, mythical or proverbial owl.’
(Michael Witmore is the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, an institution I first discovered when they did a ‘cover’ version of one of my British Library pieces. An odd moment in my writing life, but having been made aware of the library I now obsessively listen to their Shakespeare podcast, so all good.)
Again,
MACBETH: Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Hope and Witmore: ‘we would suggest that this is the beginning of the dissociation between desire, act, and guilt which wracks him throughout the play … [B]ody parts take on an identity of their own; unclaimed, and so perhaps un-owned, by the person to which they belong.’
So, not witches or murder. The.
Have you heard about the time William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible, closed down London’s first coffee bar with cut-up sound and language magic?
Click through to my Instagram for the story.
‘Language is a virus from outer space’ as Burroughs once said.
Ah, the company 'About Us'. That awkward, self-conscious cousin of the glamorous, preening brand advert. The hardworking, unhandsome character actor giving a solid performance in every scene whilst the gorgeous campaign *star* is off getting awards in Cannes.
Writing a commercial About Us is the challenge of fitting in a history, boasting about clients, casually mentioning awards AND giving off good vibrations your chosen customers will resonate to. Below is a recent one I did for Park Village studios, it's on their website and in their lobby. Typography by Matthew Appleton.
I wanted to write something that felt filmic and cut up in its jumps between scenes. Film has often been called the *perfect* surrealist medium. You’ll spot the reference in the following I’m sure.
I release poetic things every four months. I swing chaotically between charging for them like I’m a professional writer and growing BORED of trying to be a bookseller, and so offering them for free. I think I’m gradually moving towards delighting in amateurism and decoupling my artistic work from money. Which means eventually giving all pieces away.
New release is His Own Invented Torments. It’s a small poetry collection based loosely on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Totally free, just email me. Limited run of 100. I’ve got about ten left. I’ll post anywhere.
There’s a poem, Totems, at the centre of the collection which describes a future culture. In it I decided to not use the word ‘the’. The introduction to the collection explains …
Our contemporary fall is the climate crisis. Totems is a vision of a solarpunk, regenerative future. The language is an imagining of how a post ecological-disaster culture might speak. Their horror words relate to climate change, ‘floodolence’, ‘gaiashakes’, ‘bergmelt’, ‘hurricursed’. They don’t use the word ’the’ to refer to other aspects of nature, if they did it would imply a remove, which led to the disaster. So ‘us’ replaces ‘the’.
A couple of verses to demonstrate …
Seasonmiddle so us daysky variates
a ripe citrus swatch effected by
an everever of elleedee particle-drones
colouring The Great Heavy.
Around me us trees,
megahanced by chlorophyll steroids,
thrive under limed air.
I’ve been partnering with Cubitts this year. Modernist influenced spectacles, elegantly designed stores and an ethos that emphasises repair rather than unrestrained buying. They are worn by more celebrities than you realise.
There’ll be brand tone and language work emerging in 2022, but some stuff you can see right now is on their Instagram. I’ve never written for a brand’s social media before.
I’ll talk about the overall writing strategy in a later letter, but for now here are three examples of an element I’ve been playing with. Hyper-specificity and surrealism.
(Click through to see larger versions.)
The first Surrealist manifesto had ‘psychic automatism’ as one of its core ideas.
‘Pure psychic automatism by which we propose to express – either verbally or in writing or in some other manner – the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations.’
Breton and cohorts had been inspired by the automatic writing of spiritualist mediums during the late Victorian séance craze and redirected the practice towards art. Here are Breton’s instructions.
Situate yourself in a place that is as propitious as possible to the concentration of the spirit
Enter the most passive, or receptive state, of which we are capable
To dispense with the genius, talent, and the genius and talent of others
Repeatedly say that literature is one of the saddest paths that lead everywhere
Write quickly, without a preconceived topic, write fast enough not to be able to brake and not to be tempted to read what is written
Let the first sentence come to mind and so succinctly
Keep writing. Trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur
If silence threatens, due to a lack, we need to call "lack of inattention", here, interrupt
Following the word put any letter and thus return to the state of arbitrariness.
A second piece of Cubitts work. This from a Cubitts x Northern Monk collaboration. A limited edition beer, released to mark Cubitts opening a Leeds store. Cubitts design is Modernist influenced so this is a nod to the streams-of-consciousness you find in Modernist literature. Which in turn drew from the Surrealist’s automatic writing.
After I wrote / received the piece, the brewery decided to create the beer in an avant-garde manner too, instinctively reaching for ingredients without any conscious control. André Breton would be proud.
Amongst other things, the stream of consciousness references the oldest surviving film footage and the staggeringly brilliant poem V by Tony Harrison. You can hear that in two parts here and here. It’s full of industrial language so turn away if you’re a delicate.
Language is a virus from outer space. If you like blowing your mind then you should read High Weirdness by Erik Davis. Ostensibly a book about the respective bizarrorama visions of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick around the same time in California in the 1970s, it’s *actually* about how today was born.
There’s a story in the dazzlingly written conclusion. It’s about ARPANET, the seed the internet grew from …
‘The first electronic switch came out of Bell Labs in 1969, the same year that the first message was sent on the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. The text of that first message, which winged its packet-switched way between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute around Halloween, was ‘login’. Because of a network failure, the only thing that arrived at SRI was the curious syllable ‘lo’. If we recall the first message that Samuel Morse sent through the telegraph in 1844 – ‘What hath God wrought’ – we might say that the first message of the ARPANET was a similarly amazed but confused annunciation. ‘Lo and behold!’: something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is.’
(Note ‘the’ ARPANET … )
Excellent stuff Tom – I'll have to read it another three times to absorb it all. Might have a Stream of Consciousness IPA first.