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 an email letter about work in progress and my current thinking. Follow me on Instagram.
In February a billboard I invented some time previously for The British Library unexpectedly got some big numbers on Twitter and LinkedIn. That led to lots of new sign ups to this increasingly occasional note about writing that you’re reading. Hello you. I saw your email address on the list and I tried to imagine who you were and what your own relationship with writing is. I wondered whether you’re a poet or copywriter, marketeer or a very specific enthusiast for wide, visually-stark library billboards that both embrace the need for cultural institutions to surround their core offer with monetising opportunities whilst gently subverting such a capitalist state-of-affairs.
If you’re the latter then the rest of my output is going to greatly disappoint you. But if you like thinking about writing more generally – both commercial and non-commercial, then hey, me too! Feel free to email and tell me more.
The deliciously bittersweet thing about that British Library billboard going viral was that, having created two popular campaigns for the BL over two years, I’d just pitched to do a third big campaign and not won. The procurement website told me NO mere days before images of the billboard started popping up everywhere.
The game of writing is full of mad emotional swings. Isn’t it invigorating?
Of course The British Library are lovely and they followed up the automated rejection with a nice note, explaining the decision. The kind of work I do wasn’t the kind of work they wanted for their next campaign.
Not winning projects is a blow, but it’s also a positive experience to be turned-down for the right reasons.
It means that you set out clearly what it is you do. Sometimes that will be attractive to people and sometimes that won’t. As dreary old Wordsworth said ‘every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.’
I’ll talk more about that at Birmingham Design Festival. I’m appearing there on Friday 10th June. Tickets are free. (Enticing event description in italics below.) There’s an amazing line-up of designers, illustrators, makers and superstars at the three-day event. I seem to be the only writer on the programme, so if you’re around I’d love to see you there. It’s a brilliant festival. Book a ticket for me here.
Come to this talk if you’re interested in what writing can do. Will include exciting examples of design and writing in cahoots to shift consciousness. Some further talk about writing as both the cause and antidote to jaded emotions. A bit of detail about how you’ve probably got poetry all wrong. And featuring writers who think language is a virus from outer space and how there’s only one sci-fi occulture method to escape it.
Have you ever considered your image-clusters? The things you mention in your text which regularly appear close to each other.
There’s a tradition of spotting these in Shakespeare going back to 1946.
E.A. Armstrong, a British clergyman and ornithologist, was writing a book about birds in Shakespeare but then noticed something odd. Whenever Shakespeare mentioned kites (a type of bird) he would, within a few lines, mention ‘sheets’ and ‘death’. Other clusters were discovered. He mentions ‘dogs’ and then invariably talks about ‘sweetmeats’. In Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, Caliban has a cluster of ‘berries’, ‘cave’, ‘pinch’ and ‘feeding’, which were foreshadowed in a much earlier work Titus Andronicus, coming from Aaron the Moor. That cluster also appears in a couple of other mid-career plays.
I can’t tell you how turned on I am by this kind of stuff.
The question is of course, the next time you’re writing do you try to break your programming … or do you embrace your image-clusters as the taste by which people must relish you?
I released a new long poem a few weeks ago. Called ‘The Supreme Point’ it’s about a rocket and it’s about the breakdown of consensus reality. One hundred pulpy paperback copies were printed and are now all over the world. I think it’s brilliant but I’m totally the wrong person to ask.
In an attempt to disrupt image-clustering, some sections of the work used a couple of cut-up techniques. In the first, I took lyrics from the title songs of Disney’s film-length animations from the 40s and 50s, and spent a day slicing them apart, reconfiguring, slicing again, reconfiguring again. The key to cut-ups is exercising judgment about what to actually use.
The second technique was to fold-in feedback about the poem I received from a small group of trusted commentators who kindly read my works-in-progress. Their comments then became part of the poem, creating a strange loop. Almost as if the text is reporting on itself.
The Supreme Point is heavily influenced by hyperstition. If you’ve got a copy and are wondering about the strange Afterward, then this explains a little more.
I might do another print run of The Supreme Point soon, so if you’re interested in a copy drop me a note. All free because as Robert Graves said, ‘there’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either’.
Writing success. It’s never really defined is it? We begin writing because of whatever yowling void parasites within, endlessly hungry and unsatisfied by the cake, cigarettes and boastable postcodes life offers us on the way to our long-home. Then we get good at writing and decide we want SUCCESS. Which is always simultaneously the vastly unreachable best-seller list / Pulitzer Prize, and the next small breeze of praise someone in the ‘business’ might waft our way. The former is impossible and the latter is a series of meaningless rewards for playing the game properly.
It’s been bothering me for ages. What do I *want*? Well, I decided to decide. It’s this. I want 50 to 100 deep readers by the end of my life. People who will revisit bits of work occasionally because it adds to their existence. 50 to 100. Feels achievable right?
With that in mind, I’m now putting together my first hardback book. It’ll be a Selected Workings 2017-2022, 350 pages of long and short poetic pieces. Nice cloth cover, gold foil on the front. Slightly smaller than quarto. 200 printed.
And I’m going to do ‘get one, gift one’. Anybody who wants a copy gets a free one, as long as they’ll take another to gift to a friend. (Concept stolen from the art world where collectors are only allowed to buy work from hot artists if they promise to buy another and gift it to an institution.)
Email me if you want to be added to the list, but I’m also interested in your thoughts on the concept. I tell you all this because the business of writing is as much the business of being read as anything else. In fact, being read takes more work than writing. This is my latest idea on how to be read.
Last week I was poet-in-residence at a three day event at Hawkwood College. Beautiful surroundings, woods to get lost in (I got lost in the woods), stories around the fire and, most interestingly, multiple conversations about how to change global systems that clearly aren’t working for either the planet or non-billionaire people, (apologies if you’re a billionaire, I’m sure you’re one of the good ones).
A highlight was meeting and listening to philosopher John Holloway. Here’s a taster. He told me he liked my poetry and I presented him with a book.
I was struck once again by the importance of writers to the creation of a good future. The tastes we create, the image-clusters we generate will guide us through the woods.
Sculpture doesn’t do. Sculpture is. I’ve just made this advert for the Henry Moore Institute. A joint production between me and Studio Sutherl&. It’s going down well.
If you like it then please do share from my LinkedIn or Instagram.
Thank you for reading.