Authors Electric

My exhibition at Newcastle Central Library, Part the First.  Not another double entendre from me, you cry! To which I reply, I insist on getting it out as often as possible with as many different people as possible. Yes, getting our work out there, it's the perennial question to which there are many answers, all of them sadly requiring time away from writing, watching NCIS and messing about online. I’ve just returned from overseeing the installation of one such, ‘Will Power’, a solo exhibition opening today, which I was offered by the central library in my nearest city, of my poems inspired by Shakespeare. Exhibition Part Two: My 'Ophelia's Sista' Hamlet rap, some of my play posters, and Will S. I’m better known for death, sex and pathology poetry lately but occasionally I’ve bashed out a sonnet, sometimes based on one of Will’s but on a modern subject. As I’ve found with my science-poetry art installations, from very untechie (beachballs, sheep, swimming pool...

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...