I meant to end this blog months ago.
The residency itself ended in February and we launched the book in early July. But happily Keeping Time won’t go away. Projects never have neat endings do they, even if events and exhibitions claim to formally conclude them. There’s always an afterlife, or an aftermath, or whatever you’d want to call it.
Part of the aftermath of Keeping Time is a series of meetings I’ve been having with an Oxford branch of the Poetry Society. Some of the poets came along to my first Modern Art Oxford artist talk back in February, and this evening I’m going to show the work to the remaining poets and invite them all to respond in some way. After that first artist talk a couple of the poets spontaneously sent me responses to my work—a wonderful surprise—so I think there will be some interest in responding further. We’re keeping the brief intentionally broad to begin with, and I have no idea what directions it might take once the individual poets make it their own.
If I were writing from the video myself I think I’d focus on its structure: how the line keeps moving and can never be still; how you never get to read or identify anything it produces; how it enacts rather than describes a certain temporal situation of writing. But I’m aware that this is already what happens in much of my own poetic writing.. which is partly why Keeping Time ended up as it did.
So when I present the work this evening I’ll have to be careful to describe but not to prioritize my own interest. I’m keen for the poets to rummage through Keeping Time and its draft videos and take whatever direction they choose from start to end, rather than feeling their work needs to stay with mine or return to it.
We’ll see what happens tonight.
