Work in progress…

Once again, excuse me if the site looks a little… wireframe-ish. Someone in my internal decision-making department decided that it’d be a good idea, whilst working on the range of other things I’m currently working on, to push forward with the development of a custom Wordpress theme. As if I wasn’t busy enough.

Although I used to be quite happy building websites from scratch, and although I’ve hacked Wordpress templates in the past to make them fit my needs, building a template from scratch is a new discipline for me. I’m being challenged to think about CSS and web design workflow in ways I was quite happy to avoid in the past. It’s challenging, but I’m a sucker for a challenge. Which, at this rate, is likely to be rendered as a statement on my tombstone…

First stop was font selection and styling (which I haven’t checked on a PC yet– bear with me, Windows people…) Next, I’m looking at the anatomy of a Wordpress theme, and making a list of the elements I want on each page. After that, I’ll start sketching some layouts, then playing with CSS positioning. Everything is based on the design of the text.

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Towards a contemporary epic?

Some recent link-hopping yielded the following–
an essay by Anthony Kellman: Towards a National Caribbean Epic

So much stimulus for formal exploration! Not sure if I want to write an epic just now, but the essay makes for interesting and inspiring reading. I’m thinking of the contemporary epics that could be written, particularly as a first generation immigrant from the Caribbean diaspora – Guyanese by heritage, (Black) British by location/placement, aspiring to hip-hop (and, by extension, African-America) and the then nascent drum n’ bass scene (and electronica in a wider sense) as cultures from which to carve out or cobble together some sense of identity…

“…of utmost importance, [the epic] emerged out of a need for honor and self-definition both at the personal and national levels. The epic was mostly concerned with depicting a society the way it wanted to see itself and the way it wanted the rest of the world to perceive it.”

It’s ironic that even the term “first generation immigrant” is ambiguous; here, I use it in the sense that my mother first came to the UK in 1963. I was of the first generation to be born on British soil in our little branch of the family. And I was born into a generation for whom the notion of a Black British community was just as difficult to define. If I wrote an epic, what would my nation be? Which society would I speak for? Who would my heroes be? Which ancestral spirit or muse would I invoke? From which culture would my rhythm hail*? Which cultural devices would I catalogue?

No easy answers there. Of course, whenever I start thinking along these lines (it’s a recurring theme) I think of work from Bernardine Evaristo, Diran Adebayo, Andrea Levy, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar (’home is always elsewhere’), and others. I worry about relevance. I worry about how hard it might be to transcend autobiographical navel-gazing. But if I could navigate a path to something new and fresh, it sounds like the kind of project I could happily dedicate a serious body of time to…

*Years ago, I had a conversation with Roger Robinson about devising a poetics inspired by drum n’ bass, along the same lines as jazz poetics, something like the way Robert Creeley did it, or the kind of reggae aesthetics that Kwame Dawes celebrates. Of course, it can be argued that drum n’ bass doesn’t have the same cultural weight as jazz or even reggae, so I’d probably interested in expanding my lens…

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Holiday? What holiday?

There was a hotel. A five minute walk to the beach.

And rain. ‘Nuff said. Salou (which I still can’t pronounce correctly) will forever be remembered as a bundle of fail. Although I was so dog-tired that the prospect of staring at the four walls of a pretty nice hotel room was actually quite appealing, I can’t forgive the dearth of decent food. Or the two hour wait for a train to Barcelona. Or the last few sleepless nights spent trying to finesse my response to the Free the Word commission. Apparently I should have spent more time in Reus. Ah well. We’ll know better for next time.

Strangely, everything felt better when I landed back in London. That’s not to say that I missed London so much, but I’ve been working at such a manic pace recently that, having cleared the major part of my “screamingly immediate” stack, things felt a lot more sensible. The Free the Word launch event was a joy to participate in (even though I’m not listed in the details for the event, I read the poem that launched the festival…) Since then, I’ve been back into Erith and Morpeth (schools), back to working with my Barbican poets, nudging the London Teenage Poetry SLAM project forward, getting the Camden SLAM off the ground and taking care of a few publishing requests, but beyond all that, I’ve been writing. And I think that’s a major part of the current buoyancy that I’m feeling. That and a pretty decent helping of summery weather.

And I’m really back into Delicious in a big way, particularly for archiving essays and poems. The tumblelog is feeling a little unloved, but I anticipate getting back there once I’ve made peace with what goes where. Poetry-driven visitors may find my ‘poetry anthology‘ tagged bookmarks interesting – they constitute an archive of online poems that I’m particularly interested in.

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