Inextinguishable by Guest Blogger, Poet James Wood

Knucker Press published James W. Wood’s new collection of poems, “Inextinguishable” on 22 May. A collaboration with young illustrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, the collection is accompanied by an exhibition which ran in Edinburgh’s Owl and Lion Gallery from 23 May to 11 June. James writes for us about the experience of working with visual artists and what has happened since the publication of his first collection, “The Theory of Everything”, eighteen months ago.

James writes:

My first short collection, The Theory of Everything, ran to thirty-two pages and was selected by the editor of the HappenStance Press from a sixty-four-page manuscript. Encouraged by the reviews of The Theory of Everything, I continued to write through a difficult period in my life that included the death of my father, to whose memory my new book is dedicated.

Between my new work and the poems I had written earlier, I had accrued enough substance to consider a second short collection in just over a year. I have always wanted to work with visual artists, and so I was delighted to be offered the chance of publication with Knucker Press – especially since their Editor, Jane McKie, is a prize-winning poet as well as a publisher.

Knucker Press was founded in 2007 and aims to pair the work of visual artists and writers with a view to creating fresh relationships between words and images. I watched fascinated as the collection took shape with almost no involvement from my side. Barring one or two minor changes, Jane McKie felt that my poems were, as she put it, “fully formed”, and so proceeded to work directly with the students and lecturers at the Edinburgh College of Art to generate responses to the poems.

Weeks passed and I waited patiently. Then one night after dinner at Jane’s house I was presented with the proofs of the book in a near-finished format. Barring a few further changes, this was the book as it would be published. I can remember thrilling to the perspectives the artists had brought to my work as I turned the pages for the first time. In some of the work, artists had perfectly encapsulated in visual form what I had imagined when writing the poem; elsewhere, the artists had opened up completely new meanings, or illuminated corners of the poem I had considered peripheral to the meaning of the piece.

Overall, the interplay between the verbal and the visual in Inextinguishable has enabled me to return to the poems with a fresh eye – even after having spent weeks (in some cases) writing them. For me, the best examples of this are “After She Leaves”, “Afloat”, and, “The Craws”, where the poem and artwork meld into each other on the page, and the traditional relationship between illustration and text is broken down so that the poem becomes part of the canvas.

This experience represents the fulfilment of a long-held ambition for me, and I am pleased that Knucker Press are able to offer three copies of my new book to the readers of Fusion View.

Click here to find out how to win a copy of Inextinguishable