Phantoms

An excerpt from a potential collection of prose poems I am working on. These will explore imaginings/memories of places and people as destinations in the mind. The poem this excerpt comes from is constructed as a list of places visited and people encountered (mentally and emotionally rather than physically) in a morning.

A half hour flickers by and another, nothing moves. Conjured O in bed. Conjured O in bed. Conjured O in bed in the old flat, the ceiling running away from us, falling back into the pillows, the door clicked. Conjured O in St Helena with his ear under the palm leaves […] Levitated over volcanic ridges. Climbed the crudely carved steps of Jacob’s ladder and watched the Heart-Shaped Waterfall blossom into wet season. Sat up in bed. Threw the weight off my body. […] Laughed. Jumped when it came back to greet me. Wrapped myself in O at the airport. Went to Agadez to hear Prince. “Rain the colour of blue with a little red in it.” Buried my feet in the hot sand, there on the sofa cushions.

Mdou Moctar

Paraguay

Island Postcards

Dear Chloe                                                                                                 With love, Joe.

I received these images in an email titled “Island Postcards” from Joseph Curran, who is currently filming on the island of St Helena. I believe they are film stills from his The Script which you can watch here. Beautiful as they are, I found them to be cryptic considering the intended postcard form – short, straight communication, sent from a far off friend. I am thinking this week about place in poetry and also about ideograms. With those things in mind, I read the images as coded messages mediating between two places and set out to decode the messages. I treated the elements in each photograph as ideograms, pulled possible meanings from each ideogram and used these pieces to reconstruct each message.
For example, in the last postcard:

Brick wall : enclosure, construction, obstacle
Triangle : walking, shelter, arrow
Balancing rocks : vulnerable, busy, thoughtful
Labels : categories, order, learning
Rubble : disarray, work, distraction
Slip of blue sky : optimism

With possible messages:

“Mental block with work but am learning and optimistic about the direction it’s taking.”
“Happy to be learning from walks amongst the ruins.”
“Vulnerable here but gladly finding a routine.”

Panic Folds

Panic Folds is a mini book I created for this year’s Small Publishers’ Fair at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. The book project was conceived as part of my MA study in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway.

It consists of one long poem over 8 pages with a pull out origami poem and is concerned with holistic anxiety treatments.
Opening the book, you are confronted with handwritten panic symptoms. The book demands a physical interaction with these lines as you fold through them and, through calming origami gestures, transform them into an origami swan (see video below). The rest of the book, through instructive yoga language, walks you through the yoga “swan pose”. This is situated alongside meditations on the body as it confronts its need for calm.

Printed on ivory card and perforated paper, hand bound with glue and thread.
There are a few of these left. £2. Email chloemproctor@gmail.com.  SOLD OUT