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Iris Colomb, Nothing Intensifies (London: Pamenar, 2025)
For many practising poets poetry exists in two places: performance and on the page. This transmissions includes recorded and live performances (with or without an audience) and in books or visual mediums, such as posters and artworks of various media. Performance and page-based poetry are of course two separate entities but bear relation. Poets traditionally have written using metre, line breaks and sonic elements to tell readers how the poem should be performed or intonated (although textual scoring can never lock how a poem can be read).
Nothing Intensifies questions transmission on a couple of key levels. First, how to score poetry on the page that is primarily intended for performance that goes beyond the voice, to the embodied. A variety of performances on Colomb’s website include her reading poetry in uncommon situations: whilst eating ice cubes, whilst being hoisted, tied in ropes, and durational pieces such as Deadlock where a cable-wheel is rolled back and forth in a ginnel. On a second level the poems in the collection ask how we can transmit ‘nothing’ (well at least at times they do). More of this later.
The poems are a collection of eleven of Colomb’s performances, which are designed in the book as textual pieces yet which are also to be imagined as performed. At the back of the book are descriptions of how the performances have taken place, how, in some cases, they can be adapted, and a QR link to the performances included in the book.
The book is slickly curated, reminiscent of another great performer of French heritage, Caroline Bergvall and her collection Fig. The poems ? and & are prominent in Nothing Intensifies and representative of the whole, interspersed throughout the book, presented in the Oulipian snowball form, with the snowballs growing and growing as the book progresses. ? is left-aligned and & right-aligned, creating a symmetry and pairing the pieces. Yet the two poems are also in contrast. ? is a set of questions and & is a set of statements. In the original performance of ? a long ribbon of text spools out, which Colomb reads from start to finish with phrases that repeat with the structure ‘does it?’ – “does it watch”, “does it touch”, ‘does it X’ and so on. In contrast, the performance of & is a set of loose screwed-up pieces of paper on which ‘& you’ statements are written of varying length and read at random – “& you leap”, “& you leap fuel & you flow”, ‘& you X’ and so forth.
Textual pieces run the risk of being less malleable than the possibilities of varied performances. Free-verse, scattered text, is one way to negate this rigidity. There is a long history, from Marrinetti to Maggie O’Sullivan of how ‘scores’ and the way they are laid out offer different possibilities for performance. The snowball form in Nothing Intensifies, and Colomb’s choice of line-breaks, make for interesting textual reading, pointing to the live voice (the fundamental difference of performance over the page perhaps) and also towards the opportunity for adaptability of delivery. Here are the first few lines of ?:
does
it watch
does it
touch does
it twist? does
When Colomb reads live she tends to read the individual questions as clauses, with consistent pace. In the textual version variation in pace is suggested. A kind of acceleration can happen due to the varied position of the start of the phrases. We could also read each line, pausing, with extra pauses when there are question marks (which feature sporadically throughout: “does / it watch / does it / touch does / it twist? does”). The poem indicates that readers, rather than just imagine how the textual scoring could be read aloud, should actually read it aloud. Although here Colomb does not explicitly tell us how to sound out the poem (like say in Holly Pester’s News Piece from Hoofs) by virtue of the descriptions at the back of the book, and the links to live performance, the reader should certainly take performance into consideration to gain full experience.
In Nothing Intensifies the textual version of &, where lines were read as random choices by the performer, is now ordered[1]. However, even with this ordering, just like the snowball form in ?, and the asymmetry of the clauses, readers are offered multiple ways of voicing the poem:
&
you
toss &
you tie &
you mark &
you mark & you
Colomb’s ‘it’ in the ‘does it’ questions of ? could refer to anything of course, but would seem to refer to the body and the things it can do or could do. Likewise the ‘& you’ statements of & also refer a multiplicity of embodied actions. You might have had a feeling if you’ve ever done yoga or Pilates of there appearing to be infinite concoctions and contortions for body and mind.
After navigating ? and & early poem in the collection, Before Say, seems to be a collection of lines that are clipped introductory statements: “in this situation / because I think that idea / questions the meaning / it doesn’t need to like”. What they are introductory to is unclear but the effect is of ‘not saying’ in the mould of Beckett or the early plays of Jon Fosse. In fact Beckett’s intention in Not I, that the play should "work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect", seems at the heart of Colomb’s poems. What are we thinking, what are we feeling when words and phrases are used but an obvious transaction of meaning is not communicated?
The poems in the collection are all roughly ten pages long. And most of them have repetition of similar phrases at their core. The title poem Nothing Intensifies exemplifies some of the effects and the agendas in the book. The structure is roughly two to three short sentences per line with a carriage entry between each. These were originally performed to the tune of a foot pump, marking each clause. The poem opens: “There’s nothing there, nothing to say. You have nothing to say and you are saying it.” Being challenged about meaning, that flits in and out of view, we also encounter the challenge of the dissonance of the poem’s sonic qualities. The title of the poem leans towards the elliptical too, as in the phrase ‘Nothing intensifies like…’. As Jeff Hilson mentions on the blurb, there is actually a constant intensification in all the poems on a sonic level and on a temporal one too. The poem “grows and as it grows it grows / And there’s nothing, nothing left, nothing still to say”. However, elsewhere in the poem some things are ‘said’, things we’ve all felt before strongly: “Nothing lasts. Nothing fits”, as well as the Zen-style paradox “Nothing happens. You see it happen. You hear it happen. You let it happen”.
In Fracture restriction and breakdown in communication, whilst still being obliged to communicate, is made more explicit. At the back of the book Colomb writes that this poem was written as a response to the UK’s Brexit vote. The poem tussles with new identities imposed on those who voted remain; in Colomb’s case a French person whose home is in the UK. Written as a kind of manual for the unfixable, the poem uses language taken from machinery: “you’ll need to count / the cables entering”. As the poem develops the language travels from English to French. After Brexit “the circuit is dead” and as Colomb returns to French, a language that is still ‘European’, she sees cracks and blockades, weaknesses and traps: “Faiblesse” and “Piège”.
The collection ends with Just Between Us, which again tackles identity, this time specifically Colomb’s. Fragments of the starts of conversations occupy a string of lines: “Oh Iris / Oh it’s you Iris / Yes it’s me Iris”. The poem perhaps highlights how much language relies on the nuts and bolts of grammar and discourse to fully function. Just Between Us, takes us full cycle, back to instances in life when we struggle, or desire, not to communicate, but where there is an electric intensity that burrows both inwards and outwards in conjunction.
[1] The poem also appeared in the 2023 anthology Nothing on Atkins (Crater Press) as a single block of text.
James Davies is a minimalist, conceptual and systems-based writer. His poetry collections include stack, Plants, Forty-Four Poems and a Volta, A Dog, Snow and it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall. He is also the author of two novels - The Wood Pigeons & When Two Are in Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter (written in collaboration with Philip Terry), as well as the short stories The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton & Changing Piece. He edits the poetry press if p then q, between 2008-2018 was the co-organiser of The Other Room reading series in Manchester and in 2025 started up The Manchester Experimental Poetry and Arts Festival.
Copyright © 2025 by James Davies, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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