There’s no need to be afraid this Christmas the landlords are all gone home to their mums in outer suburbia we can’t get turkey, mistletoe or snow on credit any more than poetry will get us into the club of our dreams on the bus gone very hot and fast to bed instead with the new living elves of a breadline
Grown livid in labouring pains for kids at the sonnet workshop wanting to sit on the same old future’s necrotic knee would it not be lovely to make a bid adoring sentiment this counterfeit O kisses of ownership set us free
I am going to be in New York(!) for a few days in December, doing some readings with a motley crew of Scottish poets: Colin Herd, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison, Nicky Melville.
So far, confirmed events are:
Sunday 17th, 12-3pm – Scottish Poetry Brunch at Torn Page. RSVP.
Monday 18th, 6:30-8pm – Poetry: A Christmastime Gathering with Four Scottish Poets at Frenchtown Bookshop. More info.
If you have any recommendations of cool things happening between the 16-21st of December in NY, hit me up!
do not go gently into the future that blooms abandonment update four hundred passengers with miles to go before they sleep in full view, refund & expense centuries passed in that mainline
Woundscape is a creative response to Making Imagined Objects, the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference which happened in Glasgow, June 2022, commissioned by The Alasdair Gray Archive in partnership with Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. This pamphlet has been produced with support from the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Poetry Pamphlet Fund’.
Released 4th November 2023 Edition of 100 numbered copies. * ISBN: 978-1-3999-7021-1
“An introspective set of poetics that sews together the gathering discomfort of the human soul and stretches it out across the urban decay of our crumbling cities. Sledmere is an architect of the atmospheric, the surreal, but captures with a brilliant and delicate undercurrent that singularity of emotion that we can all relate to; the absurdity of our existence. This book is inimitable, a triumph of melancholy raining down upon our weathered streets, where hearts are imprisoned, and all doors are carefully barred.” (Stuart McPherson)
“Where does poetry go when ‘tomorrow becomes sorer and sorer’? I’d follow it here, to Maria Sledmere’s writing. These brilliant poems encounter familiar woundscapes, from Alasdair Gray on the heart, to the scaffolding and sanctuaries of a city, our civic agonies, and remake the stakes of poetry again. As they meet the ache of bodily enclosures and language, something emerges, like a condition: shared, real and moving, alive. A kind of love poetry perhaps, that knows in its lightness the costs. Fake, hungry and true. ‘To eat/like to read a poem’. Nothing more urgent and fresh than this, ‘going home in the prosody of being sold nothing’. Eat now, before it’s gone.” (Carol Watts)
“A work which is at once meaningfully drawn from Gray’s own Woundscape and very much her own, this response is full of all the vividity, sparky connectivity and sensitivity you’d expect from Maria Sledmere. Never a dull phrase, never a dead word, her Woundscape – ‘disciplined/in the disappearing city/of civic agonies’ – is urgent and arresting.” (Rodge Glass)
“What Maria Sledmere deftly does is extend her prose beyond Gray and the ‘Making Imagined Objects’ event, weaving into it personal interactions, responses to other creatives work (including Louise Bourgeois), digital wanderings and liminal spaces. The result is a layered dreamscape written with a human heart but embodying otherworldly wisdom.” (Sorcha Dallas, Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive)
We are launching the pamphlet in Glasgow, at The Alasdair Gray Archive, on 4th November at 2pm. There will also be readings from Robbie White, Scott Hay and Alasdair Watson. Tickets here.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
Just found a sequin in my cup of tea now stuck to the organ grinding medicine of the morning after Claire de Luna declares it licking the inside shot of tequila like antediluvians lining the seabed with SSRIs did somebody say “free margaritas” I want to love the salt-rimming margins of reading the poem liquefied drunk lilac of loving
Smashed the disco piñata of my brain just to feel something logistical about happiness Blake says “eternity is in love with the productions of time” which is why we celebrate birthdays for age verification under the name of human nature like nobody puts baby on the carousel ouch, taking half of the pill you are horse girl summer.
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Nobody at the wedding was on their phone. I think we should get married more often, why not do it over and over licensed a la carte of loving lightning bolts drawn on James that’s how it starts surrendering mood to the iPod shuffle of the noughties what monoculture still plays in thine ears is radio weight like watching your life salve lip-syncing grace of plenitude tattooed on our ankles tomorrow I travel 499 miles to witness meltwater come into song.
Julia Cameron says god has a lot of money. Did Kanye read The Artist’s Way? Junk bond celestine of autumn goldenness doesn’t glow like it used to, cash in my pocket starts to burn ecological moonlighting ruins on the basis of cigarettes in process light nutrient water recycling boosts the release of serotonin from the pre- synaptic cell party hiya stuffed pistachio cookie ether, either way. Drink up baby.
I’m so in love with my friends it might become a problem doing star jumps to ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ like holding sparklers too close to the sky, they start to think they’re shooting stars.
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Alex is a gender-neutral name of Greek origin meaning “defender of humankind” which is why they sent you to fuck the anthropocene so hard it turns to seafoam.
O God of Wine lush chromosomes of sleep adequacy fill my eyelids with orange dreamt sexuality of star speak Yasi is reading Kierkegaard and I’m crying finally alien pixels of being dumb emotional girl clutter surfing the internet permafrost people called me a living sim supervised by Anna Tsing I was salon assistant to the sadness device of forest massage.
It cost so much to let go of her leaving.
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The apocalypse is stylised polyester. You are wearing a dress of flame and burning up that slay would leave no fire behind you, white hot praxis rats with necklaces of satellite dishes beam me up softly to want Carhartt durable rent stabilised limbo of being a work in progress touched luminous thot climbing the ladder charisma
I was told a wild case of golden goose bumps a literal golden goose prone to memorising pop songs buying shares in Ethereum stomach pain from the ice crush of so many bruises.
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Still going strong in the life morning beautiful four-leaf lovers queen of the lit department trying to learn Luna checking the pee mail of the neighbourhood canines: Bruce woz ere, Peanut sayz hi I ❤ Keats etc.
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I mean the kind of snack that happens upon you, loves you back happy birthday foreverie golden surrounds finish the cookie to keep the peace trebuchet of personality the shape of how I love them is inexplicable like math fruit of loving itself Cinderace soccer ball of kicking fire up in car headlights just to write this adrenaline voice note of Caroline’s hopedrunk everlasting encore volcano of yasssified gender
our bar in Berlin translates as COMRADE NEST 3000 playing disco vintage of parataxis like putting the word ‘no’ in a poem as if to image the jagged edge of snowflakes snagged in my curriculum vitae of oesophageal rupture like hi, a career.
I’ll add that to the ADHD craft graveyard of my personal sabotage email embroidery flavour of the meadow we’re in for a bit. I like having a reason to be a little invisible dabbing the blue idea of what you said people should scunnersome boycott the grade device until they realise intelligence is weather dependent.
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I was my own sister kissed forehead a server farm of purloined bog myrtle from which distress is the same gaping brilliantly not like a wound just a knot in a tree made of cloud as you said of ceremony’s gigabyte largesse gone into orb tomorrow wear something comfortable and look HOT out in the plasmatron reality holism.
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Happy birthday, but like in four-dimensional waltz time trying my altitude regret I stay really high in the hero stage doing Barbie parkour while someone smokes blunts out the infra- twilight of being alive with y’all so much spinning around flowers in the pouring rain getting lit lit, lit, lit: let them eat chips.
It’s been a while since we recorded an episode of Lunch Club over at SPAM HQ, but I was really excited to join Jac Common and Ian Macartney in the studio to discuss the 2020 spamphlet Bad Moon by Samantha Walton.
Galina Rymbu, Life in Space (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, trans. Joan Brooks).
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) public domain.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii.I
Aiskhylos, Agamemnon in An Oresteia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Anne Carson)
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992).
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
Fred Carter (2022) ‘`Crude Oil Shaping Forms of Writing`: Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, Ecoes, 4, 56-65.
Esther Leslie, Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial Matters in Substantive Atmospheres in Electric Brine (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021, ed. Jennifer Teets).
Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Enquiry, link
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (New York, London: Duke University Press, 2021).
Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
mariaology 