Killing books?

This blog isn’t about the death of the book, the paperless poetry coven or the e-(uni)-verse. I think poetry fundamentally belongs on the page.

Okay, I know that historically and, at its most alert and lively, it’s a spoken medium. But I’m less a reciter than a writer. I like the form and shape of words, the spaces they occupy and the spaces they construct. Sounds are pretty important in my work, and I enjoy performing them, but I rarely write poems primarily to be spoken.

I am an adorer of books, a lover of words, and nurse ill-concealed fetishes for crisp, new pages and sharpened pencils. My family has grown a library of several thousand books. I’m rarely without one. When my eyesight fades so far I can no longer read, I will be bereft.

What I’m doing in these projects is having fun, pushing at a few apparent boundaries, seeing what different technologies and approaches to words can release and, perhaps most seriously, hoping that my “poetry objects” will bring other people to become excited by poetry. Maybe if something I do gets them interested, they’ll begin to open books they haven’t previously touched. If they read more, especially more poetry, and if they maybe think a bit more, or feel a bit differently, then I’ll maybe have achieved something.