Month: October 2024

Phantom Architecture

the stillness of the painting has a kind of speech to it
the sustaining restless grammar of poetry
is that how good poets defy things with their heart
the sun on the tongue is a kind of living
the poem seems to fill up with this
a panic, just in the peripheral vision
a mode that can maintain the day
something of Schuyler in the act of saying
how it allows the people to enter the self
we are not complete
when I’m writing, I’m the right size
I’m not bigger or smaller than anything
kindle’s like etch a sketch
one of the issues of elegy is not being able to let go
the Orphic is endless
we’re all here because we’ve been taken captive by our reading practice
a text of dubious origin which is a great analogy for poetry
trick us into thinking these are finished propositions
the only authority is the sound itself
foregrounding the process of echoing
the lyric utterance as operating system in the present moment
humour my error
invent my own invisible poem behind the invisible poem
beginnings are always about nothingness
meaninglessness makes meaning
a horizon or atmosphere that I can continue to write into
I am always beginning…
I literally don’t know how to write a poem
phantom architecture of a poem
the complexity of getting from one line to another
a properly honest relation to our temporality 
the poem that doesn’t know it’s good is usually good 
you can’t find anything if you’re not lost
making nothing as a suspension of labour
marking the duration of a symptom
speculative topos for tracing affinities
there is no better time than the present when we have lost everything
a generative uprooting of one’s identity or biography to do the work
incantation to wrestle the poem from its enclosure 
to project in divine sublimity
hoping poetry might come back 

*

All of these lines are quotations of things said by panellists and contributors at the Peter Gizzi Colloquium at St Andrews University on 18th October 2024: Anne Boyer, Luke Roberts, Oli Hazzard, Honor Hamlet, Colin Herd, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Rosa Campbell, David Herd, Caspar Bryant, Daisy Lafarge, Anthony Caleshu, Peter Gizzi.

Tonight I am

Thinking about this song over and over as I prepare something to say about Peter Gizzi’s Sky Burial (2020) at a colloquium on Friday.

Lyric refrain: the gig that was meant to happen and didn’t. The poem that was meant to be and wasn’t. The soul that was to be given. Ellipsis of what’s left. Diminuendo. Poem thank you kindly.

Midsummer Song (Hypercritique)

In 2018, I started a Doctorate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. I also started a new diary. In October, the month it all started, I wrote about duplicate footsteps and permanent landfills. I wrote of lacking the energy to dance, being lost in the forest, looking for safety among swirling leaves. Can’t remember if the forest was real or metaphorical. I wrote seemingly in lieu of being able to actually venture beyond the confines of my working life. Over three years and three months, I went through multiple iterations of research focus. I looked at foam, clouds, technicity, glitter, quotidian measures, fire and cinders. I fell asleep on coaches circling lochan sunsets. I produced a list of figures for how we might conceptualise this project. It was a sort of Escherian dollshouse, a self-deconstruction of building this place to think. I thought about Bhanu Kapil dropping her book in the river. I thought about doing a writer’s residency within the confines of a square-shaped digital platform. I wrote of ‘An angel tossing her gunpowder sequins’ and ethical eating, ‘how so often you are so paralysed between two choices that you just don’t eat at all’. I wondered what kind of home this work would make for me. This was a material question: thanks to the Scottish Graduate School of Arts & Humanities, it was a funded period. It paid me through Covid-19.

These were my original research questions:

  • How can creative and critical writing interrogate and depict the apparent tensions between the Anthropocene’s deep-time and the quotidian context of our ecological orientations?
  • What hybrid critical-creative forms might open up possibilities for a future ecological art, one which builds productive ways of ‘tuning in’ to a non-anthropocentric experience, with reflexive attention to the artistic and technological media involved in this process?
  • How might ‘the everyday’ provide a temporal and formal mode through which to develop a critical, interdisciplinary Anthropocene aesthetics, negotiating ecological questions of affect, sensory relations, ethics and responsibility at scales both macro and micro, human and nonhuman?

It is up to the reader to decide how far the end result fulfilled or strayed from these lines of enquiry.

Six years on, having graduated from being a baby scholar-poet, I am really thrilled this project has found a dream home with No University Press, a new imprint from Tenement Press. The ‘no’ of refusal feels appropriate to this project, which very much concerns the affordances and limits of an academic and institutional mode when thinking through (im)possible questions of ecological thought and living on. Working with Benjamin Pickford and Dominic Jaeckle, editors at Tenement, I was able to bring the project’s creative detours and modalities to life in its final book form: Midsummer Song (Hypercritique). This is definitely the most ambitious work of my life. It’s 469 pages of critique, poetics, meadow work, illustration and elegy. I see the whole book as a big song, a study, an architectural attempt at making an ecological home in lyric.

Somewhere between an academic monograph and performative dreamwork, poetry and poetics, conceptualism and the commonplace.

You can order the book direct from Tenement here or from Asterism here.

You can read a full description of the book and access endorsements, sample poems and other materials here.

I will be touring the book at some upcoming dates in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London:

09.11.24                      Peter Barlow’s Cigarette /
                                        with Maria Sledmere,
                                        Harriet Tarlo & Lucy Wilkinson
                                        The Carlton Club, Whalley Range
                                        Manchester
                                        See here.

05.11.24                      Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
                                        Maria Sledmere,
                                        David Farrier
                                        & Colin Herd
                                        Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
                                        See here.

26.10.24                      Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
                                        Maria Sledmere,
                                        Chris McCabe
                                        Small Publishers Fair
                                        Conway Hall, London
                                        See here.

22.10.24                     Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
                                        Maria Sledmere,
                                        Carl Lavery
                                        & Colin Herd
                                        Advanced Research Centre,
                                        University of Glasgow / (Online via Zoom)
                                        See here.