Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

3 pages and notes from a work in progress

A Humument is an attempt to make a gesamtkunstwerk in small format: it includes poems, stories, music-scores, aphoristic notes on aesthetics and other philosophical topics, autobiography, pages dedicated to individuals, pop songs, language games, parodies and jokes, as well as the longer sequences which form the main substance of the book.

   It takes the form of a treated version of a Victorian novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock (in the 1892 edition: Chapman Hall, Crown 8vo). The new title is Mallock's title as it appears when one page is folded in upon another.

   Each page is worked on to extract material, is mined for its undertext of fact and rhapsody, or, as often, more brutally excavated formatter quite alien to the original novel.

   In proportion as Mallock's text is removed visual material is supplied as the means of its obliteration: each page has thus become a fusion of text and image, the pictorial orientation of each page being confined and, (as in verse with rhyme) somehow liberated by the layout of the character, to intricate miniatures showing people, interiors, landscapes, etc. Some earlier pages are executed entirely in pen and ink but this method has been generally superseded by the use of acrylic paint in conjunction with pen and ink. Collage issparingly employed since the rules initially set up for the making of the book precluded the use of verbal matter from outside the original novel. Colour codes link pages thematically.

   Although I had been amusing myself isolating various vertical word-pairs in magazines for a long time, it was not until I read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review no 35, Fall 1965) that it occurred to me to push such semi-aleatoric procedures into more ambitious service.