Poet/Writer

My work currently covers an entire building in Marylebone, in a piece called Improving The Remarkable which was written by eavesdropping on people in the area around the building and recording snippets of comments and conversations and presenting them in thin lines of text which contain hidden codes.

A PDF of fifteen of my text works – all of these were recorded by KLK in 2011 and released in 2012 on squib-box records.

For Richard Dawkins (2010) was constructed by sequentially extracting words beginning with G, O and D from Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion. Newspaper 5 (2011) is the fourth of a set of five pieces written over two years and containing around forty-thousand words, where all five character collisions were consecutively extracted from a newspaper. Like a child in the womb, Like an enigmatic moon (2012) contains all sentences in David Lodge’s novel The Picturegoers with the word ‘like’ in them. I am my own Lolita – part I (2009) contains every single instance of ‘l, me, mine, my, myself’ in the first part of Nabokov’s Lolita. For Christopher Hitchens (2012) contains all capitalised words when they were in groups of two or more in Hitch-22, A Memoir. Madhouse Prophets And Quacks Multiply The End And The Beginning (2012), contains all occurrences of the conjunction ‘and’ extracted from Albert Camus’ The Fall, with the two preceding and two subsequent words, where hyphenated words count as one and all punctuation has been eliminated. To Bring A Monstrous Flesh Machine To Orgasm (2011), contains alliterative statements from Justine, by the Marquis de Sade. Arrows, Sticks and Decorations (2011), contains all words and numbers surrounded by punctuation extracted from Robert Winston’s book Bad Ideas? In 2009 I went through Georges Bataille’s Story Of The Eye and extracted any word that could potentially cause offence, including obvious choices like fuck, shit, arse and cunt, but also more complex words like kissing, priest, flesh, religion and church. I then kept the word either side of the offensive word (unless it was a proper noun), which resulted in A History Of The Offensive Eye. In 2008 I went through the latter part of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom, going through the six hundred passions, in four sections (simple, complex, criminal, murderous) opening up the details of each, revealing more each time, which resulted in The Story Of A Magnificent Banquet. Verlaine (2009) recorded every word used in the titled poet’s complete works that ends with the suffix –ing. In Fluffy Sparrows I extracted all words with double same letters. I like to draw attention to that which might easily be missed, not because I think it is important for it to be seen, just because it is interesting. I enjoy alphabetising, editing or arranging in some way, large bodies of work, for example, the complete lyrics of Tim Minchin, all Shakespeare’s sonnets or a complete play. In 2021, during lockdown, I wrote the music and lyrics for thirty songs which became the album “This Is A Warning And A Threat” performed by Sarah Parkin and Dominic Irving.

List of Works

The following list is not comprehensive.
[starred pieces have been performed/published]