Category: literature

Last night SPAM Press hosted the wonderful Swedish-American poet Maria Hardin at Mount Florida Books, Glasgow, alongside readings from Kate Paul and Jane Hartshorn. Here is the intro I read for Maria.

I want to begin by reading a poem by the late Rhiannon Auriol, who was a kind, talented and sharp-minded poet. She had a voice that felt genuinely fresh and we were always excited to get something new from her in our inbox. We published her in the Plaza and our online magazine several times and when it came to putting the lineup for tonight together, both Kirsty and I had the thought: I wish we could invite Rhiannon to read with Maria. Rhiannon forever.

Here’s the poem, which was published in pif magazine back in 2021.

I drop into this poem and I am petalled. I have put my hand in the new burr grinder of how I am learning to read in grief. This self-petalling is a relief. I will soften! I will become rose water, distilled into essence! Energised by short lines! There is something ugly-beautiful about my becoming rose-water of the nominative. Yes I was born with the middle name ‘Rose’ and also the first name Maria. Rhiannon writes of ‘the moon particularly / at sea’. Maria and I share a name meaning ‘of the sea’. We found each other via the kismet of poetry, and her poem called ‘Mariaology’ which features ‘a cascade of every maria’ which I first received as an iPhone photo. Last week I was researching something and stumbled on the phrase from the website MindBodyGreen which said, perfectly: ‘caffeine can disrupt your hormonal cascade’. I don’t know what a hormonal cascade is but I know I have felt it in poetry. Yes, for you I’d drop everything.

By some miracle of the ether Maria is now here in Glasgow tonight and we are launching her pamphlet and I am CAFFEINATED. My being caffeinated will never truly replenish my energy. There is a tale here. Rest without respite. Sick Story. I like to think of this as a sister pamphlet to Maria’s earlier work Sick Sonnets and also a cellular cascade of the voltas played within them. We have dying bees and the premise if not promise of healing. In Maria’s sick sonnet ‘Glossolalia’ the Steinian rose becomes a rat becoming also a rose and the speaker reads ‘emotional responses to the end of nature’. I have always loved the general mood of melancholia in Maria’s work, the way a speaker can latch, mutate and render ornate a feeling, an image whose origins remain mysterious. One never feels quite settled; there is a rat-like restlessness. Is that it? But also the still, slow burgeoning and wilting of the rose. Of devotion. Hours of languishing. The void is decorated all the better to feel it. The void is remixed. If there could be endless Proustian bedtime there could also be a pain psalm and a ‘baited lamb’. 

Sick Story looks for alternative narratives in its telling of chronic illness. It asks ‘what is the shape of a sick story?’, with an eye to Bernadette Mayer’s Story and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ by way of explanation. For Le Guin, the carrier bag narrative is shaped like a bag, not the arrow of phallocentric linearity. Mayer’s Steinian Story bundles riddles, matter, anecdote, the stuff of ‘things’. Nothing feels pre-determined, destined for an ending; rather, all times rub their quantum shoulders in the bag. Have you ever rummaged in public for your medicine? Have you ever written notes on the back of your hand, worried the ballpoint would seep beneath your skin and stain something irrevocably navy? Have you ever shaken your life up so much you could almost smell its perfume? 

Here is a snippet of Mayer’s Story:

Voices fall.

It may be seen feeding on this under one of those tropical things.

The time or place of starting. 

He throws a hat on a seal’s head and a piece of his pack into a whale’s mouth, marking their characteristics. 

Lamp, lucite and plastic. 

I saw one once in a book, but I didn’t rip it to shreds, or even divide it, as I could

have (snap), but left it whole (shot), which it could never be unless it were left 

that way. 

Will that have anything to do with this? (67)

Mayer’s storied ingredients are packed upon each other like the storeys of a building. She disrupts the assumed causality of narrative with a prompt — that of the child’s or editor’s: ‘Will that have anything to do with this?’. I am at the soft mercy of every bedtime story. Once gathered into the bag, is everything relevant? And where does it take us. Details are listed like precious cues. Lamp, lucite and plastic. The pronoun ‘it’ bears wild liberty in its free-kicking materiality. I trample ‘it’ under the ‘perfect lucite heel’ to which the speaker of ‘Mariaology’ prays. I sub ‘it’ under light, lux, something solid and transparent — the supposed clarity of what I am trying to say, what does it all mean. What is the ‘time and place of starting’ when it comes to illness? From where do voices petal and fall? Are they, like rain, a kind of interference? Mayer asks ‘What did the rose do?’ after the word ‘History’. I think Maria is answering that question in her remix. We invent from adjacency some kind of story. Is the rose sick, is it guilty? How to place these scenes. I think of something Jane wrote in the same issue of SPAM magazine where we first published Maria: ‘Houses appear / where once there was marshland, a thin burn threading / between them.’ My imagination shrinks these houses to the size of pages and now I want to live in them. And you can too.

Here’s Maria Hardin, thanks everyone.

🌹

You can buy Sick Story from SPAM Press here.
It is SUCH a cute edition (A6 pocket-sized) and the writing will stay with you a long time. Carry it with you!

You can buy Maria’s debut collection, Cute Girls Watch While I Eat Aether (2024) from Action Books here.

Here is a long essay I wrote about roses, via Idlewild/Stein/Lana Del Rey/Joyce et al, back in 2017.