Clive Birnie is a poet and artist who works in both text and visual media. He finds inspiration at a place where poetry and art collide into something which gets called text-based-art but sometimes he types up the results as text only poems such as those included in his wonderful Verve Poetry Press pamphlet Palimpsest. Clive is also owner and editor in chief at Burning Eye Books.
He was the Hashtag# poet in residence at the StAnza International Poetry Festival in 2016, has exhibited work at the Saatchi backed The Other Art Fair, the Evolver Prize Exhibition, at Spike Island and in Millennium Square, Bristol. Palimpsest is the fourth in a series of experimental poetry sequences following Terminal Insemination Art (Silkworms Ink 2011), Cutting Up the Economist (Burning Eye 2014) and Hashtag# Poetry (Burning Eye 2016).
Clive’s pamphlet Palimpsest explores a near future where the banal merges with the bizarre, truth and fiction blur and digital and analogue collide. These are poems that are made rather than written in the conventional sense.
Poems that are built from scraps of text appropriated from magazines, junk mail, ephemera; erased, redacted, cut up and overwritten with original lines to create palimpsests. The title is thus both a creative technique revealed in the visible lines of construction and an eponymous anti-superhero in whose steps we follow as she emerges from a collage of fractured narratives and cinematic dispatches from a dark and murderous hinterland. This is a truly exceptional piece of work and well worth investigating.
