Surreal-Absurd Sampler James Knight

This week we have a nice combo. Some psycho-sexual Bird King poems from James Knight and art from Alex Stevens. Here are James’ and Alex’s artist statements:

I first wrote about the Bird King (a simultaneously terrifying and risible embodiment of the irrational) nearly a decade ago, primarily in tweets offering snapshots into his nightmarish world. These were later constructed into a longish poem called The Madness of the Bird King. Here are some snippets:

The Bird King spends much of his time

asleep on a throne of lightbulbs,
dreaming of love.

Waiting in the wings: his retinue of electricians.

Sometimes he wakes,
jovial.

His laughter breaks glass,
frightens animals.

He cackles and crackles on his electric throne.

Last summer, having long abandoned the Bird King and this style of writing, I found myself hankering after the avian monarch again. This time, however, I enjoyed constructing prose poems in a faintly quaint, pompously ornate manner, allowing sentences to grow rampant in their convolutions. And I approached Alex Stevens to illustrate the new pieces. His pictures bring a special level of disturbing beauty to the Bird King’s world.

Alex

My images connect to James’s words…..condensing a brutal whiplash of words into a smear of colours and shapes; blunt force trauma and the halo of circling birds.

James Knight is a writer and visual poet. Recent publications include Chimera (Penteract Press), Machine (Trickhouse Press), Rites & Passages (Salò Press) and The Murderer Threatened (Paper View Books). Twitter: @badbadpoet. Website: thebirdking.com. 

Alex Stevens is an artist living in Cardiff. His images lurk at the crossroads of science and magic; he employs anatomical, zoological and mystical sources in an active effort to re-enchant a fading world.

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