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.
Blending oneiric memoir, experimental fiction and glitched verse, An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun swirls narratives of adolescence, occulted textual topographies and Scotland’s pandemic lockdown. Sweet, funny, heartbreaking, clever and ridiculous, often sentence-by-sentence, Maria Sledmere doesn’t guide readers through these whirlwinds so much as throw them in. Yet her spliced reveries and decadent languages are always underpinned by a celebration of community, as radiant and permeating as the sun.
198 x 129 mm / 254 pages with illustrations and photographs
Pleased to be running two reading groups as part of the #ARCSpringFling 2023 at University of Glasgow. Open to anyone with an interest with plant ecologies, mushrooms and creative-critical approaches to environmental thinking, please sign up and come along with your questions, threads of thought and other entanglements!
Those who climb trees with such dexterity as to know how the vertical itself is a kind of knowing. The up-and-down world of clamping fingers and knowing what manner of pressure to apply to manage to hold. I want access to that but I come up against some limit in who I am. A sportsperson would hum in mine ears to try harder. Try to be better is a motto I’ll go with, thanks to a certain poet, but it doesn’t work with sports so much as an ethics for life. Wait. I had this leg on the walls of the world and all it really took was your sweet voice telling me there was a hold. A purple one, a yellow one. Just go for it. A spokesperson would yell in mine ears on behalf of surfaces: it’s going to be alright. I saw videos on the internet of climbers surpassing that moment of freeze to do something amazing like haul their bodies sideways, jump horizontally across the limit, and the thaw on their faces as they landed splat triumphant on the mat. One time another man landed on top of me, I let out a little squeal. It was deliriously exciting. I still have the scar. A rock song. All of the holds became rocks in themselves. You had to find a way to speak to them. If I do this with my fingers, if I really push, if my core could hold out longer for hovering. Suddenly it wasn’t about getting to any top or topping the wall or making that tap of completion. I wanted to find good places to literally hang out, my body a sort of hesitant dying leaf, relishing this thanatos in departing the life-giving branch. My nerve damage screamed in the rigid day. In the cafe with too-hot soup my sap bleeding out meant everything. I have envy for the strength of limbs in those who have earned it, their elastic ecstasies. In my dreams I hung upside down from trees, the frames of swings, the scaffolds of my dilapidated neighbourhood. My hovering grew powerful with longing for motion and soon I would strike a leg up, feel lusty for the whiteout snow beyond summit. Currently, the hardest climb in the world is called ‘Silence’. As I write this, condensation drips from the inside of my window panes, waters the baby aloes, drips like a cat lapping water. I watch a perfect lunar kitten suckle your fingers. The first nourishment. We can’t insulate the thought of my life. I put up my right hand higher than god and clutch.
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.
A few weekends ago marked a whole year since my exhibition with Jack O’Flynn, The Palace of Humming Trees, curated by Katie O’Grady. It was the height of summer, electrified by lightning storms and rain showers which sent the city streets flooding my ankle boots. I sat in the exhibition watching the auras of animals, drifting in and out of presence, doodling, planning short fiction I’d never write. The rain came down through the ceiling, just a little, and caught in a bucket. I texted in streams.
Something of the exhibition magicked itself into existence. We were all ’93 babies. Making things happen felt so easy. There were synchronicities and invincibilities. When Katie and I hung out at Phillies, we won the quiz. Jack and I wove this hyperplane of fantasy from the gestures of clay and line, whittling and glitter cast wide across floorboard and spiderweb. It was a strange time, the summer of 2021. I was also partially in the numb haze of grief. There was a delta wave but not like the deep sleep of the sea. People brought champagne and flowers to the opening. I wore a long white dress and wished the days were as long as they used to be. The Earth spins too fast.
Partly I wanted to write in the choral voice of many creatures speaking to one another. The process felt like a lyric surrender to this collective, their hyperintelligence of humming and stammer that spoke through pores, chitin, liquid. I don’t know where they learned all this. There was a sun virus in the emails we sent the summer before it. Time freckled on my arms. I could draw out the muscle ache from cycling more. It was possible then.
Anyway, about this experience of writing. A porous voice. Here’s an artist’s talk from a recent conference.
First delivered at Hear them speak: Voice in literature, culture, and the arts 10th June 2022
K Allado-McDowell, ‘And they showed me that their life was a pattern of hyperspace’
Who might be the ‘they’ in K Allado-McDowell’s statement? Taken from Pharmako-AI, published in 2021 and the first book to be co-authored with the neural network GPT-3, a system trained on extensive web data (from Google Books to Wikipedia), the quote suggests voice, presence and identity are questions of patterning, replication, weaving, plurality. Recurrent in Allado-McDowell’s book is the figure of the spider and its web, in a kind of constant movement like thought itself.
I was travelling north on a train when I began writing The Palace of Humming Trees, a book-length exhibition poem which forges energy fields of dreamy relation between many species of animal, mineral and element. Late spring and the fields I could forget about, texting myself more poem. The motion of the train according inverse to the downward scroll of the document. All the while seeing spiders in the corner of my vision, emitting great clots of silk. Commissioned by curator Katie O’Grady and made in collaboration with the artist Jack O’Flynn (both from Cork, Ireland), the exhibition was to offer something of a ‘hyperspace’ to its viewers: somewhere in which voices coalesced, formed new modalities of being and relation, new webs. In a Tank Magazine interview with K Allado-McDowell, Nora N. Khan notes that hyperspace ‘is an abstract space in which we perceive patterns of information and then shape them in language in order to communicate’. Having a big, serial and open field poem adjacent to visual work premised on bold, ecstatic colour and texture was to perform multiplicities of voice within an otherwise abstracted work. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘dark ecology’, adrienne maree brown’s ‘pleasure activism’ and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’, I wanted to think about that communication as a form of attunement through which we gather, desire and coexist as ecological beings.
In The Palace of Humming Trees, the lyric voice is taken as that trembling spider silk assembling worlds. Spider silk is a protein fibre which embodies the inside of the spider woven on the outside for shelter, cocoon, courtship or the trapping of prey. It’s five times stronger than steel and is now being synthesised to make everything from body armour to surgical thread and parachutes. I began imagining the twangling of droplets on silk strands as the visualisation of a deep vibration, perhaps the wood wide web – something humming in and between trees. The world of the exhibition was inspired by the Irish folktale, The Hostel of the Rowan Trees, also known as Fairy Palace of the Quicken Trees. In the story, trees of scarlet fruit provide refuge, but the fruit itself (the quicken berries) are highly desirable to the point of despair. The rowan was brought from the land of promise, and its berries offer rejuvenation. With these symbolic undertones of danger and desire in mind, we wanted to explore a mythic ‘palace’ which merged the digitality of hyperspace with the organic textures of woodland and the chromatic intensity of dream, fantasy and ethical relation.
At the heart of our project was a notion of infinity. Hyperspace suggests that our ecological sense of world, surrounds, habitat, umwelt is always being reassembled. I wondered if infinity could somehow be voiced in a way that wasn’t just postmodern recursion or echo. What does it mean to be open to a state of infinity? To let many worlds pass through you all at once, making diamond-like instants and gossamer patterns of prosody?
Infinity became our figure for ambience. As spider silk is densely structured, and the neural net densely layered, so the notion of ambience captures, in Brian Eno’s words ‘many levels of listening attention’. To walk through the door of The Palace of Humming Trees was to enter a portal of multiplicity. You could take any route you liked around the room, moving between sculptures of hyperfoxes and sparklehorses, lichenous forms, ceramic butterflies of psychedelic hue and illustrated groves where trees shimmered green, orange, purple and blue. You could also scan a QR code and choose to listen to a recording of the poem, voiced by Jack, Katie and I and accompanied by Dalian Rynne’s sonic dreamscapes. To hear something ‘humming’ is to sense its presence, even if you can’t wholly understand it; humming implies electromagnetic vibration, birds and bees, a weather event or tectonic movement. We weren’t interested in translating the more-than-human voice so much as bringing it into the forcefield of lyric poetry, and through that expansive patterning achieve ‘infinity states’ of reassembled meaning, of felt experience that could not be crystallised into singularities of being. Visitors took pictures, sketched Jack’s sculptures, ran their fingers through the luminous plaster dust, placed to highlight the debris or excess of our clay animals. Something always in the process of creation or decay, incomplete. Corporeal, yet infinite.
One of the many voicings of this project was Letters from a Sun Virus, a correspondence between Jack and I that occurred over the first Covid lockdown, documented at the back of the exhibition book. While the email exchange had distinct senders and receivers, the you and I, over time in collaborating and sharing work between the visual and textual, our voices were beginning to mingle. Sometimes this co-voicing was painterly; other times musical, inflected with the characteristic intonation and energy of our respective speech patterns, moods, expressions. An entry from April 2020 reads: ‘…the wateriness of the poem. I had completely forgotten about all that blur. It’s like all the brush of the ocean and one which seems the idea to spill that way. Almost like a pressure, lines that go on and hair turning into the sea, each one of kinetic energy then finds all these points’. To assemble the correspondence for publication, I plugged it through text remixers, copying, pasting and rearranging phrases to enhance that sense of two voices repatterning one another. A ceaseless quest for points; for elements acting upon objects, emotions. Denise Riley has written of ‘inner speech’ as a strange oxymoron, where one hears voice at the moment of issuing voice inside us – a kind of running commentary that hums without actually humming. The letters suggest a kind of inner voice infected by the anticipated response of the other, rendering intimacies of collaboration which form a sticky substance, sentences and mobius formations holding time’s play and repeat – ‘Unending loop of my dream resins / not to complete the palace infinity of these trees’. Imagining the many of them speaking.
In Texts for Nothing, Samuel Beckett writes:
Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear, and somewhere a hand, it calls that a hand, it wants to make a hand, or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is made, of what is said, you can’t do with less, no, that’s romancing, more romancing, there is nothing but a voice murmuring a trace.
To ask whose voice in The Palace of Humming Trees is to hear sound bouncing as light, romancing, refracting in what Katie, the curator, calls a many-panelled ‘vivarium of humming thought’. To say ‘there is no one’ is to declare at once absence and the impossibility of presence as a singularity, there is no ONE. What if voice was infectious, modular, sporous, erotically charged, in common? Early in the project, I had this conversation with Jack where he told me that sometimes in the process of sculpture, he’ll try turning something upside down, or inside out, to revitalise the work. Make it strange or more-than. To sculpt by hand is to ‘leave a trace, of what is made’, and to write is to leave a trace ‘of what is said’. I wondered if the inner speech of the lyric ‘I’ could be turned inside out, to be exposed to the grain, the noise, the weather. A voice that touches is and is being touched, traced, smudged. I imagine this book as a glasshouse, somewhere between inside and outside, shelter and exposure; a chamber music of alchemical voicings, always repatterning, transforming each other. Sound and light. A place of invitation, ritual attention, metamorphosis. Many selves stuck to the web of a visual, expansive language.
Hyperfox – photo by Sean Patrick Campbell (French Street Studios, 2021)
Experimenting with Weather A workshop with me and Tawnya Selene Renelle
(Online and free)
Thursday February 17th
6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom
Join us for this free workshop. Maria Sledmere will be our guest as she gets you ready for her new course Writing the Everyday which will begin on February 24th.
We will be deep diving into all the ways we can experiment with weather and thinking about the ways that weather can shape both the content and structure of our writing. We will be thinking about the influence of weather and how something simple might be woven into experimental writing.
Suited to all genres, skill levels, and artists of any medium.
Ecopoetics and Postcapitalist Desire As part of Glasgow Goes Green Festival (QMU, University of Glasgow)
(in-person, 5pm on 23rd February)
In his 2012 essay, ‘Post-Capitalist Desire’ Mark Fisher recalls protestors at the Occupy London Stock Exchange critiqued in the press for having iPhones and buying Starbucks coffee. In many mainstream framings of environmental activism, to be ecological is to be solemnly ‘pure’ and somehow entirely free of the taint of consumerism’s impulse. How do questions of energy, desire and expression come into artistic and activist responses to the climate crisis? Can we complicate the binary of ascetism and pleasure when it comes to ecology? This workshop asks: what does it mean to be ecological in and beyond capitalist society? Looking at various works of contemporary poetry, we will locate ecological thought within complex expressions of excess, hedonism and despair; works which intersect ecology with queer joy and critiques of racialised capital; works which negotiate ecological politics and ethics within everyday life and its games of recognition.
After a short introduction to ecopoetics, we’ll read some poems (distributed as pdf handouts), explore writing activities and have discussion.
Open to anyone interested in reading and writing poetry.
Location: this workshop will take place in Committee Room 1 of the QMU. Enter through the front door of the building and take the stairs or the lift ahead to the third floor. A member of staff will be present to direct you to the workshop.
Please bring your own preferred writing materials.
mariaology 