One of the exciting things about running a small press publisher is discovering new forms of poetry at the same time as totally falling in love with them. Like finding a long, lustrous hair at the end of the pencil and falling in love with it so much to spiralise your day around its protein. Like hearing a song on the radio first thing in the morning brain. What I mean to say is, poets are shedding all the time and sometimes you really want to be there, hospitably, in the moment of language leaving itself beautifully there.
Growing, shedding.
On 31st January, SPAM are releasing Thirteen Morisettes, a transatlantic communion between Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood, a 60-page book of lyrics and epistles which centre around the poets’ love of Alanis Morisette. Our eponymous chanteuse haunts the lyrical plazas of Woolwich Market, university corridors and Starbucks. It’s great to have a collaboration which feels like a true collaboration: the interweaving of voices, in-jokes, playful telepathy.
The Morisette itself is a new form developed by Jack and Courtney. The authors define it as:
The primary constraint of the Morisette is that its lines are formed out of the deliberate mis-transcribing of Alanis Morisette lyrics. The Morisette is (usually) comprised of two mis-transcribed verses, followed by a mis-transcribed chorus to end the poem.
The epistolary, then, is not just a mode of transmission but of listening. At the light speed of however many G’s we wish to bestow upon the airwaves, Jack and Courtney have made an ambience of their poetic communiqué and like the desire for better worlds we sublimate in the village of our most familiar coffee chains, typing away into elsewhere, they form a sort of pop-chorus-corridor across the Atlantic. I fucking love it. I hope you will too.
The book is available to preorder for £8 now.
SPAM TOUR:
Courtney and Jack will be reading on the following dates:
6th February – Instagram Live (@spamzine)
13th February – Glasgow (venue tbc)
15th February – Peckham Pelican, London (along with Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, Jack Young
16th February – Bookhaus, Bristol (Courtney only – along with Jack Young, me and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir)
mariaology 