‘The creative
writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which
he takes very seriously – that is, he invests it with large amounts of emotion
– while separating it sharply from reality.’
Sigmund
Freud
Creative
Writers and Day-Dreaming
There are methods and meanings behind every work, and they
oscillate, naturally. There is what these poems are, and then, what they are
made of, in order to be what they are. There is a balance I must try to relate.
What the poems might mean, and what attention they desire.
Crayons are the domain of children because they are less
messy than most paints and markers, and they are blunt. They smell, faintly of
excrement, in a pleasant way, and children often try to eat them. Dogs eat them
too. Thus, they are required to be non-toxic. They occur to me as a means of
getting to a tactile process of writing that embraces instinct, the symbolic
and an aesthetic that needs not even countenance figuration or font-love. They
are a thing of potential, because they require loyalty to their actual physical
constitution. They rub, they snap, they stink. They are small in adult hands
and their mark is unmistakeable. Moreover, they appeal because most adults
don’t wish to be seen making pictures with a little scat stick any more than
they want to write poems that don’t offer an immediate insight into their
emotional intelligence. Of course, most adults don’t want to write poems at
all. Perhaps it is because this book of crayon poems is so potentially
appealing to everyone except poets and artists, that it might very well end up
appealing to no one?
Here is a formulation I would not say I believe, but have
often thought of, making these works. If the crayon is for the child, and
children are the most living of human beings, the most life orientated of us,
being new, being closer to birth and further from death, and the crayon is
their artist tool, evoking bio-matter, edibility, refuse, mulch, excrete,
bodily colours and vegetation, then are crayon pictures not somewhat symbols of
mortality? Otto Rank, given to me by Ernest Becker, suggests the primary trauma
of life is birth (not the Oedipal Complex, causing Freud to cast Rank aside for
this break in psychoanalytic dogma). Being birthed then begins our
uncomfortable relationship with creatureliness. Going for a shit reminds us we
were born and we will die. We are repulsed by the reminder, the smell of it,
and the gushing of blood, popping spots etc.., and with good reason. These
things are often, unlike their imitation in crayons, disease bearing. This is
why, I believe, I was drawn to crayons to write poems, and that these poems
became illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ
geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. Things alive but not alive in
the way the human mind thinks they are alive. Perfect for kids and a book which
is a celebration of life.
If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then
wonder drives the texts. In a sense, these ‘reminders’ that interest me so
much, in my work and in all things, can be equated to wonder. They are the
shock of realisation. Surprise. This may stretch beyond extreme emotions like
love and near-death, into any kind of alive consciousness or moments of
distinct knowing. These moments also evoke both our childhood, that process of
constant discovery that masks the confusion of our adult lives, and our end,
that we cannot imagine the world without us, in one moment. The shock of
wonder, like the reminders of creatureliness, put us in time. They force us to
realise, in that temporality, we are.
Some of the poems nod towards ancient Greek or classical
Latin phrases that encapsulate this idea of wonder, and I reference them not to
show my reading back to readers but to reflect on how permanent this sensation
is to human experience. Et in Arcadia Ego might be the most concise example,
being not just a statement of curiosity, but of warning and mystery. Beyond
these quotations, I am striving in the poems to get to the immediacy of the
decisive moment myself, in making, methodologically. I have always been
fascinated by the dissolving of self-awareness that is obvious and essential to
any moment of creativity - the downregulating of the pre-frontal cortex
etcetera - always mysterious and unknowable, lost to us and rarely discussed
outside of phrases like ‘flow state’. In these poems I am embracing this
lostness not to flow or create what others might term ‘good’ poems, but to
marry this inattentive focus to the material of the crayon itself –
accidentally and inevitably moving against the second phase of ‘quality’
writing, editing. The making of these poems negate the possibility of the
textual edit, in the age of word doc replacements and synonym optionality. I
think of the tradition of the calligrapher, or even painter, making their mark
and then on to the next page, and then, afterwards, one of these being correct
to their eyes. I think of this but in strictly literary terms. And I think of
these terms with a crayon in hand.
I have tried to capture language moments that are
absolutely poems but are also about the crayon making the words appear. Too
quick to edit. The text is done without planning. They are from the depth of my
own strange process and from the language around me. Any editing was then
addition, semantically, decided stop or twist until often bust, with more being
more and then in the bin. Any editorial process was overwriting, which I didn’t
plan but I grew to enjoy. Rewriting, in a different colour, over the original
text, somehow fixing it, trusting it, illuminating it. I created hundreds of
crayon poems and binned the majority, ripping them up happily.
This is my fourth book exploring the possibilities of a
literature that fades between the legible and the illegible, aiming to make a
literature abstract and illustrative, asemic and semantic - to not patronise
the eyes into immediate linguistic understanding - an attempt to allow a fight
for understanding. However, this is the first book where I have also been
thinking through literacy. Perhaps it is because the crayon carries with it the
spectre of the child, learning to write as they draw letters. I have often said
in teaching and interviews, literature likes to justify its own importance by
conflating literacy with literature. The first is an inarguable benefit to
every human, the second is arguably a hobby with an exalted past and religious
delusions of grandeur. So using my hands, using coloured sticks, I found myself
attempting, for the first time in thirty years, to really try to write the
text, sometimes allowing that, sometimes failing. I thought of myself as a
child only then, my childhood literate but actively unliterary, thankfully. My
parents never reading, but me knowing they were definitely able to, and that
being something known because of how often they would talk of leaving school so
young, at 14 years of age in post-WWII Liverpool. They were proud to be
literate; they had an active sense of it. As I grew older I saw the limitations
of this and in writing this book I realised one small reason why I became a
poet even though I often feel contempt for myself for being so.
In writing this volume of crayon poems I have also realised
it is unusual for one to ask, as I have very early in discovering
writing-as-a-hobby, what is writing made out of? Is it made of colour, as well
as shape? Is it made of wax or ink or does it not exist in the three dimensional
world? The answers are of course banal, dependent on how literal one is, but
the question does force us to not take such realities for granted. For in them,
the childish certainties of what we are doing when we write, when we draw –
poems or shopping lists – we might find new ways to make, read, learn. I have
tried to create something unclever and distinct, that can be flicked through or
studied, that worries about colour and its absence, illustrative potential and
composition in order to open space for something wondrous because it is not
really wonderful at all. I am attempting to communicate, but no communication
can abolish a fundamental difference. I want, like a kid with crayons, more
than anything else, more than anything like truth, to be understood. I want
people to just look, very intensely at the things upon the page, and tell
themselves what they mean. Then just like a kid once more, I don’t really want
to hear about it again.
I have always noticed and remembered poets and artists who
were not artistically productive in their childhood. They were busy with making
things I am sure, but not did write or make poems or artworks
when they were young. Robert Rauschenberg and Henri Michaux are perhaps the two
most influential on me. They were not arty children. Both conceived of
themselves without the practise of making art before they began to do so as a
vocation. Both worked their whole lives, prolifically, without obsession for
the delicate reveal of scarce gems. Both were inventive because they were
curious. I too can think of no creative refuse that I made between the age of
the crayon and felt tip and young adulthood. At least a decade of making
nothing for fun or presentation that is now perhaps my most judicious,
accidental creative holiday. In this vein, I will admit,
finally and cheaply, there is a part of me that has made a book of crayon poems
because I am often surrounded by intellectually brilliant writers and the works
they produce, and find them no better in social, emotional and psychological
terms, for that brilliance. There is a part of me that wants to be messy, dumb,
clumsy, childish, ape-ish and impatient because I am quite naturally these
things and these things are preferable to pretense. I never wish to be a child
again, and will be granted this wish, but I’d rather be one than a fraught,
bourgeois adult, and so robbing the techniques of infants seem a valuable, if
petulant, path to safety. What better reason than childishness, amidst the
recreations of mortality, animalisms, literacy and colourfulness, could there
be for me to author and labour a book of poems made exclusively from the wax
crayon?
This essay first appeared in SJ Fowler's Crayon
Poems (Penteract Press, 2020). Crayon Poems is available now from Penteract Press.
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in
London. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Somerset
House, Tate Britain, London Sinfonietta, Southbank Centre, National Centre for
Writing, National Poetry Library, Science Museum and Liverpool Biennial amongst
others. He has published eight collections of poetry, five of artworks, six of
collaborative poetry plus volumes of selected essays and selected
collaborations. His writing has explored subjects as diverse as prescription
drugs, films, fight sports, museums, prisons and animals. He has won awards
from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Nordic Culture Fund,
Danish Arts Foundation, Arts Council Ireland and multiple other funding bodies.
He was part of the first ever Hub residency at Wellcome Collection, and is
currently poet-in-residence at J&L Gibbons architects and formerly at
Kensal Green Cemetery. He is associate artist at Rich Mix. He has been sent to
Peru, Bangladesh, Iraq, Argentina, Georgia and other destinations by The
British Council and has performed at over 50 international festivals including
Hay on Wye, Cervantino in Mexico, Berlin Literature Festival and Hay Xalapa.
His feature-length films have premiered at Whitechapel Gallery and his plays
have been produced by Penned in the Margins and Dash Arts. He was nominated for
the White Review prize for Fiction in 2014 and his short stories appear in
anthologies such as Liberating the Canon. His visual art has been
exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, V&A, Hardy Tree Gallery, Jerwood Space
and Mile End Art Pavilion, with installations at Kielder Forest and Tate St
Ives. His librettos have been performed at LSO St Lukes, Wigmore Hall and
Guildhall Music School. His articles have appeared in Nature, Vice
Magazine and Jacket2. He’s been translated into 27 languages
and produced collaborations with over 150 artists. He has pioneered the fields
of performance literature, literary curation, collaborative poetry and
Neuropoetics. His asemic writing, sound poetry and concrete poetry have also
become known internationally. He is the founder and curator of The Enemies Project and Poem Brut as well as poetry editor at 3am
magazine and former executive editor at The Versopolis Review. He is
lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University, has
taught at Tate Modern, Poetry School and Photographer's Gallery and is a
Salzburg Global Fellow. He is the director of Writers' Centre Kingston and
European Poetry Festival.