Tag Archives: collage poetry

Word and Image – sleeping, dreaming, floating

I’ve continued to experiment with the playful, irreverent and sometimes associative relationship between word and image in ‘collage poems’. The process of making them can be brief and impulsive, but often extends over a long period of time, and might be seen as an iterative process.

Although I was away when they were published, Ink, Swear and Tears, featured two of these collage poems in their Word & Image curation back in February – ‘Octopus’ and ‘To Sleep’.

‘Octopus’ published with Ink, Sweat and Tears

I’ve included an image of ‘Octopus’ above, which transforms the balletic tangle of limbs into a vision of an octopus. ‘To Sleep’ is another kind of visio-verbal fantasy of the luxuries of decadent, dream-filled sleep. Huge thanks to Kayleigh Jayshree and the team at Ink, Sweat & Tears for choosing these pieces for the feature!

A collage poem that I made as a birthday gift for my mum, also on the subject of dreaming, was featured on Sophie Herxheimer and W. N. Herbert’s Ghost Furniture Catalogue all the way back in August of last year. It’s titled ‘Fantasy Bed Collage’ and you can read it/view it/meditate on it here.

Detail from the ‘Fantasy Bed Collage’ published with Ghost Furniture Catalogue

The Ghost Furniture Catalogue continues to advertise an open call: ‘Poems needed to wallpaper skulls and fit out rattling minds’.

I’m hoping that this year I’ll have more time to think deeply and critically about how the visual and the verbal intertwines in my writing practice, and what a body of work on this subject might look like.

From Glasgow to Saturn Collage Poems

The 50th Anniversary issue of the Glasgow Journal From Glasgow to Saturn has a selection of collage poems by me in it. The journal takes its name from a 1976 poetry collection by Scottish Makar, poet and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Edwin Morgan, and this edition is something of a tribute, or a response to him.

Picture shows copies of the journal ‘From Glasgow to Saturn’ laid over my sketchbook of collages and collage poems.

My poems for the journal – ‘Floating Curious’, ‘She wants you to glide’, and ‘Cliffs and Crags’ – are all ‘collage poems’, works of visual poetry that combine found text and imagery to create something new and surreal. I started creating collage poems during the pandemic, but it was really a research fellowship working with the scrapbooks of Edwin Morgan at the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, that saw this method of poetic making flourish and develop.

Morgan worked on his scrapbooks between 1931 and 1966. They are huge compendiums of literary quotations, found imagery, newspaper clippings, Morgan’s own drawings and dream journals; vast, tentacular maps of the poet and translator’s creative mind at work. It was a struggle to make sense of them as a researcher, but creatively poring over the pages had me fizzing to try out the process myself. I bought a hardbound sketchbook, a pair of scissors, and a stick of glue from Cass Art in the centre of Glasgow and started gathering printed materials with which I might create my own scrapbooks during the evenings of my fellowship.

One of the collage poems, ‘Cliffs and Crag’s, published in From Glasgow to Saturn’. You will have to buy a copy of the journal to see the rest.

Working with Morgan’s scrapbooks has encouraged an interest in collage and visual poetry more broadly. I have been following 3am Magazine’s Poem Brut series, and really enjoyed reading Emma Filtness’s incredible collection The Venus Atmosphere, published by Steel Incisors (visual poetry press ‘with teeth’). One of my friends is also a wonderful collage artist and constant source of inspiration, Laura Mipsum, and in Manchester I have been to a Collage Club run by Local Hotel Parking, which introduced me to the joys of a good scalpel and cutting mat! I’m also grateful to Johanna Green, who not only welcomed me to Glasgow by introducing me to the delicious Little Italy Pizzeria but also encouraged me to think a bit more about visual poetry.

If there are any visual poets or collage artists you follow, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

Flat lay showing my collage poem ‘Floating Curious’
Close-up of some of the found text in ‘Floating Curious’