Concrete poetry at the Parsonage

When I submitted my artwork to the Didsbury Arts Festival Summer Open earlier this year, I knew I was taking a punt, as it’s not what you’d call usual exhibition fare. I love to create concrete poetry, which plays with text and also how it appears. Often a concrete poem can take the shape of its subject matter; sometimes its layout can reflect a mood or feeling – in the case of my submission, “Rivers”, the whole look is intended to convey a sense of movement.

“Rivers” consists of three concrete poems: the simple ‘Boat’, which took its original spark from Lisa Robertson’s book of that name and a reading she gave on a typically Mancunian autumnal evening in Ancoats; ‘Banks’, inspired by me navigating the River Seine through Paris a number of years ago, and ‘Arethusa’, a nod to the opening of Under Milk Wood. 

An earlier version of ‘Arethusa’ appears in my limited-edition poetry pamphlet Lune, which was published by Red Ceilings Press and is now sold out – it notes the names of all the craft moored on the creek downstream from Dylan Thomas’s boathouse in Laugharne when I wandered along there a couple of years ago. 

The three pieces were made at different times, but with their watery themes, I felt they sat well alongside each other so I brought them together and played about with their positioning to also achieve an appealing picture.

I’ve mentioned the idea of “playing” twice now – and playing about with words and ideas and techniques is something I enjoy when approaching all my poetry, not just the concrete work. 

I’m a big fan of the Oulipo movement, a group of writers and mathematicians who got together in 1960s Paris and applied constraints such as anagrams and noun-swapping and forms such as sestinas and snowballs to free their work. I learnt about Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature) as an undergrad at the University of Manchester during the 1990s, taking French Studies and eventually submitting a thesis on the Oulipian writer (and crossword puzzle setter) Georges Perec. 

When I returned to do a masters in Creative Writing in more recent years, I also revisited my studies into Oulipo and started applying restrictions to my own poetry as I developed my style. I really like how imposing certain systems forces me to land on words and phrases I may have otherwise overlooked, and which by default makes the poem infinitely more interesting and innovative than it might otherwise have been. It’s also pretty good fun.

Concrete poetry also helps focus the mind and I appreciate being able to make something that is a poem but also something that can be put in a frame and hung on the wall. I’ve shown concrete poetry in the past, in the Manchester Open at HOME and also at the annual Blah Open in Withington, and submitting to the DAF Summer Open paid off as the whole show was really impressive with some fabulous work including by well-known artists, and superbly curated by Nan Collantine, setting “Rivers” beside Chris Williams’s lovely lighthouse linocut in the Orange Gallery at Didbsury Parsonage (coincidentally where I performed my “Flight Patterns” commission for DAF 2023, pictured). What’s more, “Rivers” now has a new home, hurrah!

The DAF Summer Open PV was on Friday 4 July 2025 and the show ran at Didsbury Parsonage, Manchester, until Sunday 20 July 2025. Didsbury Arts Festival will be back with a full programme in the summer of 2026.