A workshop exploring Strathprints through creative practice with Dr Maria Sledmere (School of Humanities) & Dr Karen Veitch (Scholarly Publications and Research Data).
Was really fun jumping into the Strathclyde repository on Monday with Karen and students from across the university. The whole worksheet accompanying the workshop is now available open access via Strathprints. We looked at the relationship between open access and open forms, ecopoetics and recomposition, collage, cut-up, erasures and wildcards – with examples from Chloë Proctor, Caleb Parkin, Caroline Bergvall, Kendrick Loo and others.
Visions & Feed is a collection that spans over two years of work brought together under the mirror phase of an anthropocene lyric filtered through crises of femininity, disordered eating, dysmorphia, labour and loss.
Sledmere asks: what does it mean to be a body in one of many dying worlds, what forms of work are done to endure it, what desires and pleasures are still possible and which are breaking down? Adopting playful and associative registers of ascent, while exploring devotion, metabolism, magic, domesticity and the ambience of dream forms, this is an intimate poetics of song and hormone, isolation and longing, fashion and pop, colour and vision in the saturated live feed of post-internet lyric. Amidst the reverb of climate melancholia and oestrogen blues, the speakers of Visions & Feed morph between depth and surface, film and music, myth and play to weather the days. Between epistolary, elegiac, confessional, ekphrastic, prose-poetic, processual, discursive and long-form cascades, the book offers iterative, experimental and fractal modes for exploring ecological entanglement within daily life.
This is my second full-length collection, following 2021’s The Luna Erratum. Many of these poems were written during lockdown or in the stretch of long afternoons at the tail end of big critical work that had occupied me for several years. I was immersed in dream and the idea of symbolic disclosure in poetry, lyrical shatterings and seeing oneself forever through glass, never clearly. Through a glass redly, purply, wrong. It begins with an epigraph from Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles (2003): ‘A glazier walks through the earth calling the ruins strapped / on his back an angel’. How can poetry fit ruins into any transcendent firmament when the shards are still stuck in its back? I was admiring the glazier from afar wanting him to fix me. Suzanna Slack writes in The Shedding (2022) of ‘trying to have angel surgery’. In this book, my speaker seems to want a stomach replaced by clouds and to rain forever, why is that? I was born in a lightning storm with a lilac tongue and ate the suns like smarties. Fine. Very mild, even warm. To become glint in general felicity. Giving a zoo charm. Zooming.
Corpuscles spit constantly from the idea of sleep so I begin to fear it. Blood in the morning, metallic taste, no sweetness left from the Corsodyl but we try. Bits of shared housing make their way into my art, particulate matters: the gunshots pop pop, just fireworks; the neighbourhood yaptastic chihuahua called Barry; the pyrotechnics of teenage boozing which take place at the end of my street. A fully red tracksuit, a purple tracksuit, a secret shop which sells brownies laced with weed. Brown paper parcels with rips in them. Which Christmas ruined everything. Clicking dream materials of remembering scent, coming out with bundles of abundant orchids. Impossible for them to flourish here. Yet I coruscate brightly as if after surgery. If I could work with the wallpaper swirls in my dreams I would
put them into comets, then sentences.
Explosives can fire in space. They can’t disperse a tornado. In the hands of amateurs, the fireworks emit more smoke than is desirable. I go out to the smoke-laced cold and see a glow belonging to the moment I want. It’s over there. It’s so close.
mariaology 