an interview with Clive Holden

CV2: You are obviously a writer who works in diverse forms—including fiction, poetry, film and music—as well as the primary artistic force behind Cyclops Press which seems to mirror these interests in its range of publishing projects. What, for you, is the creative vision behind your multimedia approach to poetry? When combining music and poetry, what do you hope to achieve, first in your personal work as a poet, and then as a publisher who has brought together other poets and musicians to create spoken word recordings to music?

My approach to poetry is that a poem can be formed out of almost any raw materials: words on a page, speech, songs, sounds, silences, photographs, moving images, buildings, found objects, world events, etc. If a poet points to a man and says, "He's a poem," then he becomes a poem in that moment. It's the framing by a poet that transforms the subject into a poem.

To paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges: "I know exactly what a poem is, until the moment someone asks me to define a poem." I've participated in three film festivals that specialize in the "film poem," and as you can imagine there was a fair bit of debate as to what this phrase meant. I've always thought that it was simply a good replacement for the phrase "experimental film." You could argue that they each use non-linear structures, metaphor and symbolism, they're usually shorter works, and they blur the line between concepts in prose such as "fiction" and non-fiction," they're sometimes lyrical, or confessional, or conceptual, they're as hard to define, as poetry itself.

I do "write" poems in the traditional sense of the word, with both formal and sometimes avant garde strategies, but in practice I think of all the art I make as poetry. I'm talking about the process of art-making here, which is what interests me as an artist, and not so much about where the art will be shelved or exhibited, which is for other people to decide.

Whether I'm making a film, a sound work, or seeing if I can write a really good sonnet, or country and western song, it's all the same process for me. If I write a poem with a set meter, it focuses my creative energy into that frame (and I have the added, crucial, challenge of trying to somehow make it new). This process has a "so old it's new" quality for me.

Or, I might decide with a new film that I'm only going to use footage shot in a particular neighbourhood, within a 24-hour period, all from a low angle, with straight cuts only, no shots lasting less than three seconds, with a different white dog in every shot. I'll make the best film I can within those parameters, and it's largely the same effect, the frame creates the focus. I might even make a series of films with these same parameters.

As for Cyclops Press, the original vision for it was to become a publisher of many, many forms of art-making, from finely made books of lyrical poetry, to spoken word or sound art on CD, and eventually to film poems on DVD, and on the web, and whatever comes next. I don't know where it's going to go. The whole thing's an experiment from top to bottom.

As for my combining music and poetry, this is a very traditional activity, pre-dating books, of course, so on the one hand I'm just doing what comes naturally for a poet. But in this case, I was also craving artistic collaboration when I made my CD. I'd been working alone in a room for years, so it was thrilling for me to work with other artists, and especially with such talented ones.

CV2: How did you become interested in working with poetry and music? The music of jazz has had a long relationship with spoken text as verse, as well as the voice as an improvisational instrument. Has this kind of innovation had an influence upon your work? Who have been some of your influences in this work? By mentors I mean artists, types of music, technology?

I actually first became interested in working with spoken word, and by extension combining it with music and sound, when I was studying James Joyce and his many successors, and realized that it would be ideal if these works could be heard. Reading many of the works in this tradition requires an "extra literacy," often even more so than poetry. However, in oral performance, either live or recorded, I think these works would make more sense to more people. Take Finnegan's Wake, for example, the reason it's so hard to read for most linguistic mortals is because the work's partly meant to be experienced as sound, or spoken music. When we read, we tend to insist on understanding the meaning of each word, but words are also sound. Effectively listening to Finnegan's Wake might be compared to the experience of hearing an opera, or any song, performed in a language we don't understand. Ideally, we'd change our expectations to suit the situation, and allow ourselves to enjoy the music.