(source: Word ‘Blue sky cover letter’ template)

(source: Word ‘Blue curve letterhead’ template)

(source: Word ‘Blue steps letterhead’ template)

This is a palpable production – as a physical thing with its handicraft in welcome evidence, and as a creative response to Covid/lockdown from the writer: this latter obviously conveyed in the resulting typed pages, but also as much by the author’s before/after commentary with its honest illumination on (intense) intention, process and outcome.

As Tom Phillips writes in March 2020, the purpose of this project was to ‘provide a focus each day’ in lockdown, and undertake the process of producing a ‘complete typewritten Coronavirus genome (29,903 characters)’ where, in using a typewriter, ‘I was able to touch it’. The tension between the increasingly apparent ‘meaninglessness’ of the typed genome characters on a page and how Phillips then further engaged with/experienced this (more physically typing, that repetitive process, a growing visual response) became the unfolding creative output. This is assessed and commented on when Phillips writes again about the conclusion of the project in March 2021.

I keep trying to articulate why I have enjoyed this booklet so much but have erased all attempts to do so as over-complication. The pleasure/reward is having the product itself, this palpable and well-produced ‘real’ response, completely devoid of any pretention because of Phillips’ honest statements about intention and then appraisal of the outcome.

You can too here.

(source: Word ‘Blue spheres letter’ template)

(source: Word ‘Blue grey resume’ template)

God has a position
on yoga – that is, from a Christian
perspective – somewhere

Right of Beelzebub and the
Proud Boys who ironically practise
their Sirsasanas when being

Assanuses, but not in their
Alabamas where the art of Yoga
has been banned

over 28 years for
fears of injury and conversion to
some kind of Dharma.

Is it a gateway to
psychotic pleasure and peace,
the awakening

of no longer
voting for those who would deny
a vote

to the cross-legged?
It is another random line drawn
on a mat:

do not cross over to
become the roots of the woke in
an alternative Sabbat.

source

(appropriated from Chapter XXI Division and Classification – Logic Deductive and Inductive by Carveth Read)

This one didn’t/hasn’t made my final collection &there4 – on the one hand it doesn’t matter if it isn’t technically workable and/or ‘right’; on the other, I haven’t convinced myself it does even make found and manipulated sense.

My appreciation to International Times and Rupert for waving the flag of my poem here, one from my &there4 sequence of found poems.

It is
supply and demand, and
the chain,

all the way
to the Suez Canal
and back again,

or not,
depending on hope ever being
green again.

There is a
shortage in raw materials
but not puns

or irony: all those
rosy-cheeked lockdown smiles
lost in their

fairy-tale diminishing,
or not. A nation that needs to
deal with things

also needs the
alchemy of familiars,
that fishing or

pissing in gardens
like the sound as normalcy
of a night outside.

Seating is depleted
too – nowhere new to sit as we
watch and wait

for the blockages and
virus to subside, turn diminution
into the magical.

source