Photographers Who Do Poetry

No, the series of Constitutional Highlights isn't over. The post for the second half of January will be posted shortly and at the end of January, naturally. In the meantime, J.S. is honoured to be amongst some amazing poets and artists interviewed by the equally awesome Claire Trevien on her blog as part of a series exploring poets who also produce visual art, or should that be artists who do poetry?

You can read the interview by clicking here.

If you want to find out more about J.S.'s poetry or other aspects of her writing you should check out her website

The Submerged Sea - Cover Art

I have a new poetry pamphlet coming out in the spring and I am, not surprisingly, very excited about it. Like all my books (this will be the sixth), it is my baby. I have worked long and hard to make the words right and, also, the visual art because (as with my previous three poetry publications) the cover artwork (excluding the lettering) is mine.

It took a good deal of trouble and effort to make and choose the right image for the pamphlet and, as it is a photograph, I thought people might be interested to share in the process that went into it.

To begin with, I thought about the image I wanted, but I soon realised I didn't have the equipment to produce it (it would have involved underwater photography). So I thought some more and considered the photographs I already had. I selected about forty and no, breathe easy, I'm not going to display them all here, but here is a flavour. The pamphlet is called The Submerged Sea and the photographs are all sea themed. The seas in question are a mixture of british and international.

 Some of these photos worked better than others because of size, shape and quality of image. Others had a better "feel" to them. Specifically, I was looking for an image that captured the essence of the poetry, that would fit the cover size and shape of the pamphlet and that would allow the pamphlet's title and my own name as author to appear clearly, and, of course, I wanted the finished result to be eye-catching.

 I decided to take some new shots to create some more abstract, less naturalistic images. I took a vast ocean of photographs. Here is a taster. 

By now, combining the artistic photos with the natural ones, I had about ninety images, so I had some serious culling to do. I forced myself to be ruthless in eliminating images that didn't have the right feel, that had the right feel but were of a poorer quality, that wouldn't fit the landscape shape of the pamphlet cover without destructive cropping, that were too similar to others etc, etc, etc.

I managed to get it down to about thirty images, but that's still about twenty-seven too many, even if I wanted to provide the publisher with a choice of images.

Further painful culling ensued. I find it really difficult to reject my babies.

Eventually I got all the short-listed images on to a single computer screen and then eliminated those I liked least.

Then I slept on it.

When I woke up the next day, I repeated the process.









At some stage in the process, one or two of the images started to leap away from the others. They were the ones that, at each comparison, I liked the most. They tended to be the artistic and slightly abstract images I had specifically created with the pamphlet in mind.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to two images, my favourite and second favourite. I sent them off, fingers crossed, to the publisher in the hope that they would like at least one of them.

Fortunately they did. A photograph was accepted and a cover was created. The final photograph and the cover made from it are shown below.

The Submerged Sea (ISBN 9781907435591), a poetry pamphlet by J.S.Watts will be published by Dempsey & Windle in spring 2018.

Strawberry Fair 2016

On Saturday, 4th June, I spent most of the afternoon sat in a field (a.k.a Midsummer Common) in Cambridge. I was one of many poets and story tellers performing at Strawberry Fair (on the fabulous Wild Strawberries Stage).

I took a cheap pocket camera with me. I was only going to take a few photos. When the camera battery ran out (I was only going to take a few photos...) I took some photos on my phone. The quality of the snaps is therefore variable.

In total, I took over 210 photos of Strawberry Fair (remember the bit when I said I was only going to take a few photos...) and some of the Wild Strawberries performers (though by no means all). 197 of the photos have been posted on Facebook. Thanks to the vagaries of Facebook, these were not published in any real order. I have whittled it down still further to just over 100 pictures and am going to attempt to post them in some meaningful order. Hopefully they provide a take on my perspective of this year's event (or the elements of it that I saw).

Oh, should you be wondering about the welly boots -  they are mine. The only photo I took of myself throughout the afternoon. I don't do selfies.

Patrick Widdess

Fay Roberts and Emma Ormond

Fay Roberts

Nikki Marrone and Wesley Freeman-Smith

I probably should say that the lady with the horns is poet Fay Roberts, a very fine performance poet in her own right, a talented singer and the person behind the poetry organisation Allographic that runs the Wild Strawberries Tent

Marion Leeper

Ups Subba

There are now going to be a goodly number of photos of the maverick beat poetry performance duo that are The Antipoet. They are clever, fun, entertaining, frequently offensive and, for two "men of a muchness", remarkably photogenic. The photos have been whittled down, honest. I originally took a lot more!

The audience

Nikki Marrone

Nikki Marrone

Justin Thyme

Michael Brown

Michael Brown and Patrick Widdess

The Labyrinth

Mark Mcgivern

Tim Knight