Naked and mad

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Clive Hicks-Jenkins made this with letters and images left over from his just-completed animation project for the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. It is of course the poem generated from one of my recent erasures of Pepys. I told him I thought that conceptually, in relation to the erasure, it’s as if he’s put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Presented this way, it feels much more like a complete poem to me. In place of the white emptiness of erasure, there’s solid black. And Clive’s vibrantly colored majuscule letters don’t shout, but intone.