Travel Shorts

I'm still thinking of silence. John Cage's Silence isn't really a new idea. Shackleton wrote about it in his diary and many writers before him used the connotations of silence within their work. What would radio be without silence? Silence plays an important part in art and poetry. I wrote a dissertation about snow and its connotations of silence. In my delirium of solitude I was associating his silence and all the snow in some sort of pathetic fallacy. Snow - a blank field - is both empty and full of promise. Silence carries the same duality. Perhaps his silence means he's trying to forgive me? Perhaps it means he wants to punish me? Maybe he hasn't given it a thought? How can people say silence is nothing, when its so full of options? I'm filling my time with music and making, reading and writing because it detracts from the over-possible-ness of silence. Similarly, Cage experimented with sounds - claiming that any sound constitutes music. Sometimes when there's too much sound I need to empty my head, and like Jenny Diski; seek refuge in ice and snow to escape from it all. It's interesting how, prior to this recent Arctic blast, we connote snow in such a way. People's attitudes towards silence and snow are changing out of some necessity for them to do so. We'll see if 'Cage against the machine' make it to christmas number one this week...

My new idea for pushing my poetry into different directions is to make collage poetry sprinboarded from the news I've read and tweeted. This is an arrangement of words telling the news as I see it!

Sunday Collage

flightless fly
defined by transfinite recursion
wanders in
representations of cardinality
and fractured fissure.

Suture of silences
anguish languish in language
and mocking my clattering ejectives.

delphic aleph emphasises
phatic legacy;
prophetic epiphany
connotes rainbow.

Two of my friends wrote a poignant song last week. They're both musicians I've respected for some time, but this new track did something different. Once I'd heard it I haven't been able to stop listening to it. It inspired me. In the one line 'It took silence to talk you round' I have started a WIP of a whole poem exploring the juxtaposition of my previous relationship. He was born into silence and believes in non-verbal communication. I was born into a thunderstorm ad have always fought to be heard. Words are my everything. Click to listen to silence

Here is the beginning of my Silence

It’s your silence that speaks to me,
Pragmatic necessity.
In all those unsaid words
Lie lessons you made me learn.

But your quiet can’t break me down.

You were inaudible when you were born;
Didn’t speak til you felt worn.
Didn’t need words to be in the room.

In your silence I glean bits,
Understand what you think fits.
In your silence I hear a sound.

It’s your words I never trusted
Artificial sounds
and their message.
It takes more than words
to make me hear.

Diegetic duplicity;
Your spirit lost but your soul free.
You entered earth in a thunderstorm
fought with noise since you were born -

It is silence that creates sound...

The silent sonnet














                                                aching chasm