Owen Bullock

Impression Owen Bullock

'Impression' is what I call a 'fusion poem', which blends linear experiments, prose poetry, haiku and tanka, and found material. It takes the haibun (prose and haiku) as a model for other hybrid forms. I've been writing poetry for forty years, and haiku, tanka and haibun for about twenty. In my PhD on semiotics and poetry, I started to experiment more regularly with the use of page space and hybrid forms, resulting in the collection Semi (2017). My next book, Work & Play (also 2017), featured a section of prose poems, but also lineated poems, haibun, haiku and tanka sequences and limericks. I am both a formalist and an anti-formalist. That is, strict forms can always be revisited, or invented, to see what else we can learn from poetic constraint, even though my preference is for freer, experimental writing. I am most often inspired by other art forms, especially music, and have written about a theory I call 'radical ekphrasis', which aims to allow art forms that inspire us to shape the structure of our poems and not just their content. In my academic work, I often write hybrid critical/creative essays that include poems alongside theoretical discussions - I love the way that gives me two angles of approach (or more). The presence of found material and the diversity of reference points is important to my 'fusion poems', because they try to create a form appropriate for the age in which we live, that reflects the way information comes to us through so many different media sources, as well as through our direct experience of the physical world. I've discovered that 'fusion poems' go across well with audiences at readings, as they respond to the different voices of the texts.