on Ken Edwards

The two words that strike the reader most prominently in this latest semi-autobiographical prose work from Reality Street’s Ken Edwards are ‘Fractal’ and ‘Process’.

Memories are fractal: the more you focus in and magnify them, the more self-similar structures appear in their interstices, that is, in the gaps between them […]

In the geography of Ken Edwards’s mind memories are embedded between memories and the reader is confronted by a sense of vertigo as landscapes shift. Just as ‘Every street featured at least one skip by the kerbside’ to be constantly filled with ‘rubble, bricks, planks, furniture, the remaining legacies of dead residents’ so, as they are towed away turn by turn, ‘soon another would appear in its place’.

Wild Metrics presents us with memories on the move and that is perhaps why the word ‘process’ becomes so important. As if a magic lantern is shifting round we catch glimpses of figures from the world of the new British poetry scene: Geraldine Monk, Carlyle Reedy, Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer, David Miller and more, and more. At Lower Green Farm, the house near Knockholt and Badger’s Mount so soon to become a victim to the newly-designed M25, Maggie O’Sullivan and Geraldine Monk sit beside Bob Cobbing and Allen Fisher for a Saturday Poetry Course organised by Edwards and his co-editor of the magazine, Alembic, Robert Hampson. It is on this occasion that Fisher, author of Brixton Fractals, speaks about ‘inventive’ and ‘consistent’ memory. He offers the suggestion that ...