V. EARLY LITERARY WORK

Blake-Plock’s earliest writing emerged from experimental poetry, translation, and visual text practice.

Between 1991 and 2001, under the name R. Richard Wojewodzki, his poems appeared in journals including Ant Magazine, The Wisconsin Review, The Windless Orchard, and The Dudley Review. During this period he also worked in the field of visual poetry and text-based mail art, participating in exhibitions and collaborative actions with groups such as Vortice Argentina, AUMA, and Artpool P60.

From 2001 to 2002 he was a member of the Dudley House Writers’ Workshop, where he wrote new poetry and produced translations of Ancient Greek verse. With fellow member Phillip John Usher, he edited and published the multilingual poetry review Annetna Nepo. In 2003 he completed a book-length poem, Baltimore, which premiered in a public reading at Lehman Hall.

This period also saw Blake-Plock experimenting with hybrid literary and musical forms. He became a member of the Red Room Collective and in 2007 he wrote the libretto for The Violencestring, an improvised musical narrative recorded with an international ensemble of musicians and co-released by Umlaut Records and Fall Records. The work combines radical free improvisation with Victorian storytelling and tells the tale of a young boy who longs to play the violin but is born into a family of werewolves. The project marked an early attempt to merge literary horror narrative with improvisational music performance.

Subsequent long-form projects explored increasingly speculative terrain. In 2010 he completed and ultimately shelved a 120,000 word novel centered on Enochian vision magick. Since 2013 he has worked intermittently on a manuscript examining esoteric ritual, drawing in part on W. B. Yeats’s A Vision and the “Castle of Heroes.” In 2018 he completed a science fiction novel with the working title Qubit Hound, but chose not to pursue publication.