Webster
England
-
Bang in the middle
of the wall,
a speck.The tip of a pen:
dot, fleck,
a spot where the pin dropped,
silent
in the arctic, the vast of it.Around me, the infinite
makes me itch.I fidget, jitter,
send a ripple, a letter.
In the middle of an ocean
it is unheard breath.Still, I inch out of the cast.
Crack, leak,
a neurone sparked
from a fire on the beach of an island in the dark.Keep talking, I tell myself,
trying new words until I see my feet
plant a path,
walk, run,
jump up and climb
until the sky comes down to my height.The contours rise with the beat of my heart.
Hear it bleep; the monitor of a mountain.
The conscience of a conqueror:
Keep on.But like the peak itself
I begin to slip, to stumble,
as I reach the top.
Still I speak, if onlyin broken words.Here, hold my breath.
It is still. Surrounding.
An everything so immense
from up here it is nothing.I have zoomed out from the picture
and from here I see the endless pixels,
flakes of snow, the strokes of the painter’s brush,
the red-green-blue of the screen making white.A whitewash,
this wall
has been made anew.
Greg Webster, Whitewash
British, b. 1979, playing from Wateringbury, UK
I’m a 34 year old man from Kent, UK. ‘Man’ is the hardest part of that sentence to write. I’m still 17. I never got on with diaries but poetry seems to be the closest to my brain and hence I’ve been writing poems since I was a teenager - often nicking lines for bands I’ve played in. My first poet love was Carol Ann Duffy who still speaks through my words now, no matter how hard I try to shake her. I later went on to (predictably) find the beat poets and Bukowski, feeling completely disconnected and uninspired by the classical poetry taught in school and unable to find much else beyond the tiny sections in libraries and bookshops - and so I am ever thankful for the internet and online stores!
For the past three years or so I have been running a poetry blog on tumblr.com which has helped me develop my poetry through frequent practise, experimenting with new forms and devices and conversing with fellow writers.
My writing blog: loqui.tumblr.com contact email: colloqui.loqui@gmail.com
Thoughts on the Telephone process
It was an interesting challenge to interpret an entirely different medium in this way. Not too dissimilar to writing something inspired by an artwork or a piece of music, but the aim here was to translate / interpret / decipher the message being communicated, as opposed to an open interpretation. I suppose I felt a bit pressured by this initially, but there was an exciting feeling of mystery which kept me going, having this one piece to work from out of many others out there in the ‘game’, and wondering where it would go next from mine. At this point I’m finding it really hard to wait and see the final pieces all together but I’ve no doubt it will be an awesome achievement and I’m very grateful to have been involved.
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