Long Poem Magazine

My prose poem sequence Scenes from Out West was published in LPM 30 (Winter 2023). Mostly I write short prose poems and micro-fiction, but occasionally I feel the need for more space to allow greater complexity to develop. The challenge with a longer piece, for me, is how to retain the reader’s engagement while not making ‘too much sense’. When a text expands to more than 300 words, patterns begin to assert themselves which imply sequence, connection, possibly cause and effect, an argument, a narrative. This kind of coherence doesn’t accord with my experience of the world. I aim for indeterminacy and ambiguity in my writing. In this essay I’ll discuss how I tried to achieve this in each of the five longer pieces I have written.

The first long sequence I published was Out West, a pamphlet from Albion Beatnik in 2018 with an introduction by Luke Kennard. It recounts, in ten short sections, the adventures of a Native American called Elk Head during a brief stay in the frontier settlement of Cripple Creek. An artist friend, Zoë Rubens, provided illustrations. Like many people in the UK growing up in the 1960s I played cowboys and Indians and watched Westerns at the cinema on Saturday mornings. I found the ‘Indians’ particularly attractive and didn’t see why the ‘whites’ should always have the upper hand. Later I learned the bloody history of the ‘Wild West’. The sequence parodies popular culture tropes about that period, drawing on a range of sources.The series of loosely connected vignettes is set in an indeterminate time and place. Cripple Creek is the fictional location of the earliest surviving ‘western’, a brawl in a bar-room, released as an Edison short in 1899. Some details in Out West draw on that film. But Elk Head’s job as a travelling encyclopedia salesman might locate the story in the 1950s or 1960s. Any sense of realism is undermined by the general absurdity. The sheriff mangles sentences from the philosopher George Santayana, a big influence on Wallace Stevens, while Elk Head has a propensity for quoting Shakespeare.

At the time Out West appeared a friend in the US suggested there was maybe scope to expand the sequence. I tried adding new episodes, but the elliptical nature of the original ten sections had an integrity which seemed to get lost if more material was added. Eventually I found a way to supplement the original text by writing the companion piece Scenes from Out West. This has five sections and features the same characters as Out West. Some sections were salvaged from the earlier attempts at expanding the original sequence, some were new. As with Out West I drew on a range of sources. The cowboy comic Purple Sage and Red Onion is derived from Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and a pun on ‘Red Indian’. The final section with the magic mushrooms has many possible antecedents including Carlos Casteneda, 1960s beat culture, and my own experiments with psychedelic drugs.

The companion piece has the same, relatively straightforward style as the original Out West sequence. But back in 2020 I wanted to see if I could create a more complex narrative in which the geography is unstable and time more synchronic than linear. Sanchez Ventura, published by Leafe Press in 2021 was the result, once more with illustrations by Zoë Rubens.This sequence again uses parody but also incorporates disruptive strategies like beginning as a story within a story while later looping back on itself, the sense of a beginning and an end becoming occluded. As with the two Out West pieces the material in Sanchez is derived from general reading and notebooks where I jot down ideas and observations.The presence of two card players from a Cezanne painting in a café, the appearance of a Cezanne lookalike, and a view of Mont St Victoire is one of many threads which weave through the text, its relationship to other elements impossible to pin down. Another thread involves a shadowy group called The Word Liberation Front. The cut-out texts they produce are a kind of reversal of the idea of ‘blackout poetry’ (e.g.Tom Philips A Humument), the graffiti a type of collage poetry. Graffiti art as practised by the likes of Basquiat, Keith Hering and Banksy is also being evoked here.

My next long piece, Some Guts, published in Fortnightly Review in January 2024 with collages by John Goodby, employs similar methods to Sanchez. Here it is detective fiction and action cinema which are being parodied. The identities of several of the characters and locations are transformed in the story by rearranging the letters of their names, foregrounding the materiality of the text. The ‘action’, such as it is, takes place at the level of language. Everything is mutable, everything imagined. John’s collages re-mix images from the text, inventing their own visual narrative rather than simply acting as illustrations.

In my most recent long piece, Blue Eyes, published in May 2024 by Zimzalla, I returned to a more straightforward format – a series of dialogues. The genesis of this piece was my reading around nature writing and eco-criticism, and in particular anthropomorphism. In the past I have avoided attributing human characteristics to animals and vice versa. But through introducing an element of absurdity I found I could create something in which the characters did not exhibit the qualities of their supposed animal selves (noble, secretive, loyal, etc.), or become reduced to human stereotypes (greedy, wily, etc.) I looked for two creatures which, at least for me, were free of any particular stereotypical representation. I chose a tapir (female) and an armadillo (male), placed them within a vaguely Latin American setting against a backdrop of extreme weather events, and attributed to them sections of dialogue which I had originally written with human speakers in mind. This seemed to work. The two individuals began to acquire distinct mannerisms and the work evolved from there. Some of the dialogues are games with language which the tapir and the armadillo use to while away time.

Susie Campbell in her generous and perceptive review of Blue Eyes for the LPM website, writes:

The title Blue Eyes is itself suggestive of Collings’ interest in ways of looking and a new, ‘blue’ kind of vision. The book resembles a gorgeous, swatch-style book, with blue card pages which turn around a silver paper screw. This flags a concern not just with how we look but also with how we read, as we must twist and move the unnumbered pages, even turning them upside down. Vision recurs as a motif throughout the poems which feature ‘blue eyes’ (the very first poem starts ‘Hey, blue eyes’), the game ‘I spy’ (‘I spy’), and eye-like marbles which ‘have blue swirls inside’ (‘Marbles’). The final poem features a word-play game in which ‘eye’ moves from the literal ‘eyeball’ to a medley of more figurative uses of eye (‘eye candy’, ‘one-eyed monster’, ‘look someone in the eye’ etc), surely a playful invitation to the reader to re-think their assumptions, to look again.

Each of these longer works evolved over a period of time with much rearranging, re-writing and cutting. In some cases the finished work is barely recognisable from its beginnings. Eventually they reach a state which feels ‘finished’ and I stop.