I looked for Birmingham and found

a rub of quintessentially English
forested country
remote and marginal meaning
the grassroots of being

I looked for Birmingham and found

eavesdropping in the Domesday
Roman conquest of hope
air ever-changing
tree felling appeal

I looked for Birmingham and found

modern humans
the Plateau of can goods
Beormingahām beginning
primary people legacy

I looked for Birmingham and found

Edgbaston in its AD
many burnt mounds
a celebration of free
progressive importance

I looked for Birmingham and found

early human Britain
artefacts suggesting names
hierarchies of the established
collaboration in a blossom

I looked for Birmingham and found

heavily bombed foundations
an economy dominated by people
a beautiful leading to the clearance
culinary scenes

I looked for Birmingham and found

river valleys of the tribal
our world’s past
cultural pluralism in bloom
transition and growth of a period

I looked for Birmingham and found

a built-up area
capability
an influx of the stylish
digbeth dining

I looked for Birmingham and found

the Guarded Font
Sherlock seeding roots
Highfield on its high
a Ring of Arden trees Lording

I looked for Birmingham and found

the dialect of its name
an infrastructure of planners
a sector of service
a fabric of shaken privilege

I looked for Birmingham and found

the stretching of forges and furnaces
a single bulk commodity of creativity
a wide variety of specialised
exceptional levels of the heart

See previous…

See previous….

see previous….

Font key here

See previous for font ‘key’

Some years ago I had what seemed an original and exciting idea for experimental writing: poems based on and written in the name/style of their unique fonts. These fonts were mainly [if not all] designed by individuals and supplied online, rather than being a part of, for example, Word fonts provided as a software package and selection.

It didn’t work. The main reason is the poems I wrote weren’t overall good enough. Naff in many cases, or just too literal – though perhaps that means the same thing.

But a few worked, it seemed to me, and some of these survive and exist elsewhere as poems, but in a conventional font.

I’m going to post of few of these in their original, unique fonts over the next few days. The idea was a resultant collection/booklet would have an index with the fonts named and written in their style so the reader would have to match to a subsequent poem to anchor the meaning. Anyone wanting to play that game with these few poems can do so. But first the title and cover of the book that never was:

Index:

First poem:

Combining my enduring nostalgia with a present immersion in writing found poems, I have quite by chance today come across the first cut-up poem I ever wrote, probably around 1968-69 when I was 15 years old.

Bob and I each wrote a poem about a cat, one black and one white, and I can’t recall who wrote which. The rest is as you can now see:

Very pleased to have the support of X-Peri for my writing project Novel Finds. You can read here