Sophie Mayer

I went to see Margaret Tait's films at Tate Modern last night. Tait was unique in many ways, not least that she was a brilliant poet as well as a filmmaker, working on Orkney and self-financing both her poetry collections and films. She said: "The kind of cinema I care about is at the level of poetry - in fact - it has been in a way my life's work making film poems." Ali Smith read several of Tait's poems, and there was a special screening of an unfinished film called "Video-Poem for the 1990s," (Tait started working in the 1950s) which was based on a Fluxus-like set of instructions she had created. She intended to circulate them so that anyone could make a video (or a poem) based on the instructions -- I hope she wouldn't have minded that I'm posting them here:

Video-Poem for the 1990s

1. A child reading
2. Edge of the sea
3. Birds in the wilderness
4. Shots on the road
5. Rust everywhere
6. Heavy traffic
7. Articulated lorries entering a ferry
8. Crash of a wave
9. Turn of a page

I'm in the middle of indexing an academic book (in fact, I've just been working on a chapter about Yoko Ono's Fluxus instructional pieces) so poetry is quite difficult to come by. There was a flash at lunch-time that's definitely inspired by Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (available as an e-book on Project Gutenberg), specifically the Foods section, although it's nowhere near as good:

Pie

dense with centre to circumference

And a poem that arrived yesterday that's somewhere between an index and a kid's skipping rhyme. Unfinished but going somewhere.

Weapon of Choice

stake
gravestone
back-flip
crucifix  
cymbal
pencil
sunlight
ice skate
knifeblade
bare hands
fire
repipe
scythe
spell
scream
hammer
crossbow
sword
organ
censer
tranquiliser
history
grind his bones
Mr. Pointy
fire axe
barbed wire
camera
gravity
wrecking-ball
holy water
rocket-launcher
this is the part where you make a choice