'Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.'
Ordinary people. A Happening. A film. The blues. Endless Vital Activity. Robert Graves.
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.
I love watching the use of language in hyperquick evolution. In the UK there’s an off-shoot of Extinction Rebellion called Insulate Britain. They are regularly blocking the main motorway that circles London. They’re demanding the UK government accelerates funding to insulate the country’s homes as a rapid way to move towards a net zero goal.
Two points of language I find fascinating. They launched with the call to the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to ‘get on with the job’. It’s a great, brusque, matter-of-fact phrase. It reduces a complex issue of policy and intervention to the kind of thing a gaffer shouts at an apprentice across a workplace.
And it’s one that Insulate Britain have nicked from Johnson himself, his (successful) 2019 general election campaign led with the call to ‘Get Brexit Done’. A slogan designed to irritate enemies and delight allies in equal measure, degrading an intricate and highly-emotive issue of trade deals and international relations into something you can shout out in a crowd.
It’s a clever appropriation by Insulate Britain.
And then there’s their use of ‘ordinary people’.
When they first began their action they didn’t use the phrase ‘ordinary people’ at all. But over the weeks as furious motorists piled into their comments complaining that they were ‘middle-class layabouts’ disrupting the life of ‘ordinary people’, they turned this phrase back against their critics. I’ve always loved how language can’t be owned.
Game Six is about language. Language in the service of post-truth puppeteers. It’s a project I created last year with Studio Sutherl& and Mario Epsley.
In September we staged a Game Six Happening in Park Village studios in Camden. A 128-minute experience never to be repeated, 100 people were surrounded by post-truth projections, chess and poetry. A further experiment in how writing can be experienced. In the picture above I’m towards the right, near the camera. Taken in the very middle of the work and a deeply uncomfortable moment for me … there was no escape should the piece be received badly.
Writing is such an an endless string of occasions in which you offer your psyche to others. I find it exhausting sometimes.
But who cares about the author? Barthes killed us all a long time ago. Game Six is about that too.
We’ve taken the multiplicity of projections from the Camden Happening and distilled them into a ten minute film. Here’s an exclusive first look. Full screen, sound up, ten minutes long.
We’ll be showing this film and talking about all the thinking behind it as part of Edinburgh’s first ever poetry festival. This Sunday, October 17th, at 5pm. If you’re around we’d love to see you, we’ll be hitting town afterwards to talk about Derrida. Tickets are available here.
You can also buy a very limited Game Six publication, only 128 copies created. It features a foreword from chess grandmaster and philosopher Jonathan Rowson about metamodernity. He calls the work ‘intensely perspectival, abounds with signifiers, but pertinent, with an underlying pulse of truth seeking and even a hint of transcendence.’
You can choose from eight covers.
With my non-commercial work I go through the creative blues about every two months. I bet you do too. I wonder why I write. I despair at ever reaching a significant audience. I feel ashamed for *wanting* an audience, rather than just immersing myself in the craft. I look at poets with publishing deals and actual shelf space in bookshops and feel angry that I’m self-publishing and only selling dribbles through my own website. I look at the latest thing I’m writing (a sci-fi piece in an invented language, thank you for asking) and know, as sure as the sun avoids the moon, that it’ll never be as good as that thing I wrote a couple of years ago that people liked and consequently I’m actually getting *worse* as a writer, not better. On and on and on.
It passes. I write something I enjoy reading or someone buys a book or I just remember that what I think doesn’t really matter. ‘What writing can do’ is really beat you up sometimes.
I don’t have a point here, other than I’ve always drawn solace from knowing that other people who’ve chosen this strange, solitary, slogging way to touch the world also doubt everything.
Good feedback helps of course. (Though if you listen to the good stuff, you’re obliged to listen to the bad stuff too …).
The agency Accept & Proceed live in the future and produce a podcast called Endless Vital Activity, which reports back from the future.
They recently chatted to Ravi Naik, bringer down of Cambridge Analytica and founder of data rights agency AWO, which Accept & Proceed and I worked together on to launch. The whole conversation about data rights is fascinating and there’s a section from around 23m 30sec which specifically touches upon language and the impact it can have. ‘The law can be literature’ says Ravi, and if you work with writing commercially I think it’s a useful reference to the contribution we can make to some radical organisations.
Finally, to Robert Graves.
There he is, looking all classical-groovy and poet-wizardy in Deia in the 1960s.
The White Goddess is required reading for anyone who fancies themselves a poet. Ted Hughes called it ‘the chief holy book of my poetic consciousness’. It’s as dense as the forest thicket a white doe might find herself entangled in. However, one could prune the book back to being about the search for a muse.
Graves believed in ‘analeptic thought’. ‘Analeptic’ from the Greek ‘analēptikos’ meaning stimulating. He wrote prolifically, a mixture of poetry, novels and historical investigation such as works about Jesus. It was this last genre in which he used analeptic thought the most.
Analeptic thought was guessing. Instinct. Writing things that felt right then supporting them by references from Graves’ extensive reading. It wasn’t studying evidence to arrive at a conclusion, it was trusting instinct and then backing it up with things that backed it up.
‘The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.’
Wherever you sit on the idea of blocking motorways to raise issues, what both the angry motorists and Insulate Britain are wrong about is that none of us are ‘ordinary people’.
So when we lose confidence in ourselves, it’s our unordinary poetic instinct which is the thing to draw upon. In his lifetime Graves was mocked by scholars but generation after generation find something in his work.
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'Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.'
Distant wave from another strange, solitary slogger 👋