TUBULAR POEMS “I make words without songs. I make paintings consisting of words scrawled on paper. I make sculpture from cardboard tubes covered with acrylic paint to which I collage strips, usually, of computer print-out word text. My word-texts are composed in the manner of cinematic montage, not continuity-syntax sentences, but short sequences of words with few connective ‘and’ ‘but’ ‘a’ ‘the’ or parts of the verbs ‘to be’ & ‘to have’. Not much mention of time or place, ‘now’ ‘then’ ‘here’ ‘there’. In many of the pieces I call ‘accumulations’ the words are all taken from phrases or words heard in broadcasts or read in printed matter of all kinds. More recently the words are thought up one after another, which is the age-old common practice of poets.
“I began seriously to take painting as interesting when I was about fifteen [1951]. In UK, I learnt drawing & painting for 3 years at school from Maurice Percival, painter illustrator & calligrapher – & from his assistant John Ryan, cartoonist.
“I was far from his pious mediaevalism: I loved Henri Matisse & modernist colour. Later I spent a summer in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the life-painting class under Henri Goetz, print-maker & painter. I also did life-drawing at the Cambridge Polytechnic. At the Regent Street Polytechnic in London I did life-drawing & etching.
“While I was still at school I began to write poems. I found that formal requirements of metrics & rhyme got in the way of what I wanted to ‘say’. I read the modern British poets & novelists in the hope of finding out what to do about that problem. I made use of Louis MacNeice’s writing & his 1938 book on writing poetry - Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. At some moment I tried writing poems made up entirely of sounded syllables without any sentence-like structures.
“I haven’t changed much since then, just grown older thinking the same way, expanding my interests in several directions & in all the arts, particularly into poetics & poetry of the past fifty or so years in the USA. Closest to that is Francis Ponge whose writings I have been studying in the past three years.
“I have made ten chapbooks, one a collaboration with the printer Tara McLeod, one with the poet & printer Alan Loney, the others self-published & designed by me. Nearly all my poems appear in digital media by way of photos.
“The poem tubes are usually one-offs. They are tools for reading long unpunctuated texts – parts of an endless stream of alternating words & silences between them. Lately I have been key-boarding texts using coloured graphics. I photograph these on screen. The photos go on my Facebook page & on my page on www.flickr.com/photos/fflap . Sometimes I put photos on Twitter”.
Tony Green, Auckland, 6th April, 2015
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