reflections – mariaology

A second smaller heart: on writing The Indigo Hours

The first song I was ever obsessed with was Suzanne Vega’s ‘Marlene on the Wall’. It was on a compilation CD called Simply Acoustic that I’d found somewhere in the house. I’d listen to it over and over again on the CD player in my room. What I loved about this song was its narrative possibility. The protagonist triangulates her love affairs under the watchful eye of ‘Marlene’ looking down at her from the wall. My child’s mind made up all kinds of stories about this. Marlene could be an older sister, a mentor, maybe the lover of one of the men that passed through the life of her. Marlene seemed cold. She was not a jealous lover, she didn’t act out. Anything advised by Marlene is provisional, ‘what she might have told me’. I imagined her having very thick eyeliner.

For a long while, Marlene was a kind of angel to me. I saw her wherever I saw people on the wall. A Picasso print of a woman drinking coffee on a balcony. I haven’t been able to source this painting except to remember there was long dark wavy hair, the colours purple and yellow, coffee. I remember thinking it looked a little like my mother. It’s not something we kept when we had to clear her flat this summer. Maybe I took a picture, but I don’t want to look for it. Marlene showed up in my dreams. Marlene was there in my imaginary stories. I could never tell if she was the protagonist of a life or someone to whom things were done. She seemed to encapsulate a distant sexual maturity while also representing ‘the impossible’ and so, the untouchable.

I see 2018 as an apex year in my life. I remember dazzling summer nights, two kingfishers, kissing in the midst of cinders, hiding, my phone pinging constantly, no homework, sparkle emoji. This was the year I wrote the novella that Broken Sleep are publishing next week. I started writing The Indigo Hours partly in solidarity with a close friend who was writing a novella for her Masters degree. I was a year out from my MLitt and waiting to start a PhD. I don’t think we shared any work in progress; we just swapped manuscripts when we’d got to the end. I don’t remember writing this book. I don’t remember if I wrote it on my phone, a library computer, the Chromebook in the restaurant I worked at. Maybe it bounced between these locales. Maybe the bouncing was painful. It involved data loss. When I meditated today the AI-generated female voice said ‘find a point in your breath and this will be your anchor’. The point in my breath is a ‘flashing’ spot in my chest. It is an anxiety motor. It cannot be my heart because it is too centred. But of course it is my heart. Sometimes I think I have a second smaller heart lodged in my sternum, where I used to get an ache from purging. This heart is blue, a mottled and gold-streaked blue, and it is rare like the blue version of the rose, my middle name. Semi-precious.

I wanted to tell this story about two people kissing illicitly in a garden, surrounded by white poppies and mystery. I wanted to write about the indigo hour of midsummer dawn, when you are up all night with someone, the breath before a comedown, before it’s all over. I wanted to write about a relationship that felt like that and whose dramaturgy was always the dawn. I wanted to write about something that was ending over and over again, and the ending wasn’t the point. There was a life and people drifted in and out of it. I wanted to write about arousal and attention, sentiment and giving up.

The summer before The Indigo Hours took shape, I was writing a thesis about the curatorial novel, about object-oriented ontology. I was interested in what Ben Lerner says about fiction staging encounters with other art forms. For that to be embodied and taking place in a credible present. I was interested in the refrain of unseasonable warmth that haunts his novel 10:04, the way the narrator might have these hotspots of medial feeling owing to places in New York City where he received such and such a text. I was reading a lot of books that take place in the disintegration of some kind of love affair — Joanna Walsh’s Break.up and Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story (also loaned by the novella-writing friend). I don’t remember the plots of these books at all but I see them essentially as ‘novels that walk around, receiving and metabolising messages’.

Turning to write myself, I wanted to create a fictional world in the aperture of indigo, the special hours of Scottish nights in June and July where it never really gets dark — there remains this blueish glow to the sky. I knew these hours to be indigo because I didn’t really know what indigo looked like, only that it was some kind of shade of blue and everyone seemed to disagree about how light or dark it was. A morning and eveningness, a not quite. More like a mineral or texture.

How deep in the woods to go to get this indigo. How deep in love did we go, or in druggy reverie. It all felt so subjective, translucent. The love I was writing about was already belated, collaged and distributed unevenly through various places, fantasies and timelines. What could I say about it? This love that made an ‘I’ into both subject and object. That distorted the closure we had been raised on to believe was love’s destiny. It was an ambient intimacy, then. It was in medias res, ongoing. The midtone of indigo. In the process of editing the raggedy manuscript (what I referred to, in an email to the poet Callie Gardner, as ‘the trashy wee thing’) a couple years later, I discovered the phenomenon of indigo children. Since then I have learned more about what it means to be an indigo from the writer Laynie Browne. I relate this to a phenomenon of emotional & intellectual hyper-attentiveness my ex and I used to refer to as ‘shine’, also to a feeling of hyper-empathy and sensitivity not just to the mood of a room but to the mood of anything more-than-human. If you are capable of shine, if you are inclined to indigo, your presence might follow a gradient opacity. In Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon has a chapter ‘Melting’ which talks about what it feels like to have ‘no glue’ and no security: ‘You could melt into another person, or melt into a place like this [a psychiatric hospital]’. This melting is akin to what Stephen King calls ‘the shining’ or what others call ‘sensitivity, insecurity, shyness. Fragility’ (Scanlon). I’m interested in how to put that kind of melting character on the page. What would her voice sound like?

A vessel, a leaky container…a watercolour palette smudging ceaselessly in stroke after stroke…Being an indigo is a lonely experience but one that lights up at the world. Pure indigo has a high melting point; when heated, it will eventually decompose or sublimate. For some people, reading indigo must surely be excruciating. For others, it is true. I think indigos come from elsewhere, they remember other times, their memories mutate and take form in their dreams, they bear an awful gift, they don’t belong to any fixed thing. What could be their future, is it possible. It doesn’t have to be something that makes you special. There is a kind of love that makes you indigo, opens you. For a lot of my life and even now, I walk around like an animal or an open wound. These are cheap metaphors. It is more that I walk around like the weather. No, I walk around like indigo. I freeze-dry experiences into crystals and exhale them on the page. I can’t say whether this produces realism; it’s very smudged.

Trying to put Marlene on the page was an act of transmutation. I read Timothy Morton on beauty’s perception as an act of ‘attunement’. I wondered if my attempt at fiction was really just an attempt at sensing beauty. But there is a lot of horrible stuff in this book. A lot takes place in the shadows. A lot of the scenes are decontextualised and in a sense ‘free-floating’. We don’t get heightened climaxes and denouements so much as vignettes melting into one another. In Reading Machines: Ambient Writing and the Poetics of Atmospheric Media, Alec Mapes-Frances talks about the ambient poetics of Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin as a ‘vaporisation of the lyric subject or self’. I saw Marlene as a soluble force more than as a coherent character, a stable subject. Marlene was a problem to be solved; she was able to be dissolved. I needed the temporal mode of fiction to play this out over time, place and encounter. Ambience refers to the surroundings of something, the environment, a kind of base existence (there is light, it is blue; there is this mood; the room is cool) tinted with some accompaniment, encompassing. Can we plot ambience the way we might plot time? This was something I was concerned with when writing the book.

My friend Stuart read an early version of the manuscript and said something about it being constructed around several pillars or towers. I think he was referring to place, as it stands in the story. The central (unnamed) city, Berlin and the prairie. I imagined these towers as constructed of fragile pixels. A little data moshed and crumbling. The movement through the story might be closer to a dérive or distracted wandering (I imagine readers skipping over, revisiting, forging microloops as I did in the writing). Insofar as I can remember writing the book (which I cannot) I was doing so in order to ‘read’ a relationship. This took place in a series of loops and compressions. Similar things said, the same mistakes, rotations of closeness and distance. My towers were constructed to make something semi-permanent of a very dissolving time. Aaron Kent’s cover for the book invites you to choose from various alcoves and passageways, or drift onwards into mise-en-abyme. All the while, in the company of clouds. I recently rewatched season 2 of Twin Peaks and the finale, in which Agent Cooper slips in and out of red curtains while seeking Annie, or answers, resonates. Disorientation. Passing through thresholds. Trying to save your love from evil. And what if it was not one love, but a concatenation of shadows?

Evil was also the ravages of shame and depression, the doubling of seeing the dark in yourself. Or, depression was a particularly sensitivity to evil. I get into these loops about it. There is so much evil in the world. For much of my life, I have not felt like a person. There are clouds drifting in that part of my soul that is supposed to feel warm and full. “I am okay” etc. I am like a child, lily-padding over the clouds. The same child that needed Marlene to guide me. I experienced love as something annihilating and so bright. The blue-heart anchoring pain in my chest. Hawk tells Cooper that if you go into the Black Lodge ‘with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul’. What does it mean to give your narrator courage? I wanted her to have the courage of suffering and to see that in others. To suffer what would never work out. A constellation of burst blood vessels around the eyes. To have the strength to look in them, for that look to be a holding place, then a continental shelf, then nothing.

A foothold, even. For someone climbing the tower, trying to get to the kissable moment again and again. For the tower to be a text. I go to the tower, I spiral in stairwells, I see a prairie stretching farther and farther, I get so thirsty.

Are such towers architectures of refuge or incarceration? Here’s a passage from Hélène Cixous’ Hyperdream, a novel about grief, love, friendships, telephones and mother-daughter relationships (I will never not be obsessed with):

We don’t stop killing ourselves. We die one another here and there my beloved and I, it’s an obsession, it’s an exorcism, it’s a feint, what we are feigning I have no idea is it a sin a maneuver a vaccination the taming of a python the fixing-up of the cage, it’s an inclination, we don’t stop rubbing up against our towers touching our lips to them

Haunting the novel is this allusion to 9/11, but the towers as totems seem also to be something else, much more imaginary: ‘I saw it shimmer in my thoughts’, Cixous says of her ‘dearly beloved originary tower’. In an early document for The Indigo Hours I had this epigraph I haven’t since been able to locate from Morton, something about beauty being a homeopathic dose of death. I see my love go out the wrong door, I see a certain look, a turning back. Towers of collapsing sand. I see Marlene on the wall. Marlene from a tower. Marlene as the mother-tower, no, the sister. All my life I have said, who is she? She whose name means ‘star of the sea’. I rap at the door of Montaigne’s library tower. It survived a fire.

The homeopathic dose of beauty, like Cixous’ vaccination, prepares us for exquisite loss (and so soaring, to tower over). In a way, The Indigo Hours quite simply plots the disintegration of a what is now called a situationship. But really it is a book about everything happening in one plane, each shifting tense another groove of growing older. Growing into the old you were before. Essaying through this experience via encounters with art — everything from installations to Lana Del Rey (on whose early albums the narrator delivers protracted sermons — this being a book loosely about finding meaning in the spiritual emptiness of the 2010s). No, it is a book about things and time and pleasure.

Only recently did I look up the meaning of the song ‘Marlene on the Wall’. Apparently Marlene was the German actress, Marlene Dietrich, whose heavy gaze looks down from a poster. Maybe this is why my protagonist so frequently visits Berlin. Vega talks about writing the song for Dietrich after turning on the TV one night, her ‘beautiful face in close-up’. ‘Marlene on the Wall’ is a coming-of-age song, it’s also about power and violence, beauty and changing. There’s a butchershop but also a rose tattoo. I saw the song as an eternal love story with destruction as its anchor point. ‘Even if I am in love with you’ being the parenthesis through which to begin the working backwards of what Joanna Walsh calls the ‘fresh and terrible’. If I carried around that song I also carried the ghost-image of Marlene’s televised face in monochrome. How alien those brows, the beauty of another time. When I read fiction, when I edit fiction, when I approach a story, so often my question is ‘so what?’ I am looking not for answers, but for experience. Fingerprints.

Vega’s opening: ‘Even if I am in love with you / All this to say, what’s it to you?’ could be the central premise of The Indigo Hours. So for this book to be ambient is to be deeply interested in the ‘it’. Of love, of the being-in, of melting into the world, being washed continuously in its blood, its indigo, its chlorinated swimming pools. To look for explanation is one of many reasons for fiction. If Marlene peeled off the wall, I saw her growing along some trellis as a rare blue flower, a wallflower but livid and shedding, changing. I would write to water her, I would coax my clouds for a little rain.

Blurbing The Indigo Hours, Amy Grandvoinet (brilliant critic of Surrealist & avant-garde psychogeographies) writes generously of ‘a languageful love pulsing constant’. A blue heart plucked and buried in the book, behind some cloudy curtain. This heart is sequined to the rhythm of life. If there is a cadence to the book it is love and love’s chaos sewn into patchwork. Marlene returns to Berlin to see her friend. She sees an old friend and cannot bear to reach him because there is this substance between them. She paraphrases T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, she almost leaps the mirror fence. There are indigo seeds in these stories. I hope whoever reads it finds their own pulsing constant.

You can order the book from the publisher here. It is out on the 31st October.

AFK x sincere corkscrew at The Doublet, 14/9/25

Tonight I wore what can only be described as a billowing tent and cycled in the rain to the SPAM x sincere corkscrew AFK event. Summer is over, sorry. The newish Away from Keyboard series has so far featured poets-poets-poets — local and visiting — with some exceptional forays into prose. Tonight’s affair was premised more on the prose-y variety, with flash fiction, short stories aplenty, but also music and poets reading to music. A London poet recently said all the poets are now doing ‘sonic poetics’ and this trend has made its way north. I’ve been wanting something more durational for a while. Longer readings that feel like a proper ‘set’. Having sound in the mix trains us to listen longer because we are listening beyond listening for ‘meaning’. This event was set up nicely so that the first few performers did their punchier sets and then the final two were longer. I wasn’t involved in organising this one so also quite nice to just sit back a bit.

First up was Anna Walsh. My first time seeing them read after much hype from Kirsty over the years. Their short story pamphlet Stag Do / Fantasy Horn just came out with brand new London-based indie, Ssnake Press. Anna read a piece set in PureGym, ‘the best spin class in Shawlands’. It was funny, closely attuned, turning a sharp lens to the ennui and im/possibilities of desire, and made me think about the gym as a terrain of fantasy triangulated by disgust and expenditure. A toxic combination that is fun to sublimate through multitasking on the StairMaster, whether you are sending emails or texting e-girls. The observational plane of fiction would then cut up into self-reflexive moments of becoming-object. Here are my thighs. They are moving shapes. Sweaty hair. Here is the screen showing a beach. The pink disinfectant spray. In my notebook I wrote: What can you trust of how human relations conspire in the endorphin farm?

Sean reads with a beam of light splitting the room

Anna’s reading was short and sweet, followed by the blazing Tom Byam Shaw who delivered some hits from the cesspools of late capitalism. A disturbing anecdote featuring a licentious coworker at Footlocker. The reterritorialising of terror as gender reveal party… ‘We have a gender…it’s a war!’. A story about Chernobyl Cat Girl at the rave, ‘a party without respite or rest’. These are fictions which tremble with the hurtling premise of assured combustion. Tom’s book is coming out soon with sincere corkscrew. Launch at Mount Florida Books on the 3rd October. Following Tom was Sean Turner McLeod. Nobody knows if they have ever heard Sean read before. His author photo definitely wins best prize (if you didn’t see it, he’s standing in a picturesque river looking fierce af, exhaling dragon-quantities of vape smoke). He has been published ‘widely and discreetly’ and his work is great, witty, delivering its critique in lashes of sardonic commentary on everything from the gentrification of Glasgow to self-hating ghostwriters, poverty tourism, the Sunday night tv spectre of our Scottish childhoods, Neil Oliver, whose ‘voice made you drink’ (intone that darkly). Sean is good at verbal sparring and he essays with ease around many things vivid, for instance, the ‘controversial’ Joan Eardley painting of a male nude. Sean, I hope we will hear you read more!

Ian reading playlist poem in Xiu Xiu tee. Poets drinks of choice: IPA, tap water, whisky

After a break we had Ian Macartney, cohost of the night, deliver a virtuosic list poem about playlists. A smart, discursive cascade which was hallmark Macartney, traversing pop culture, geopolitics and counterfactual plot twists of recent Scottish history. One of the first lines was ‘The playlist is a commons’. Ian is a true lover of songs and the anguish of how much love for the playlist is distorted by the cynical, algo-ploy of subscription profiteering comes across in the poem’s argumentative rivulets and sparkle. It got me thinking to how so much of this blog used to be ‘playlist posts’ where I’d diarise lightly around a playlist, as a way of marking time. At some point, I fell out of love with the playlist form. Too long, sprawling and tantalised by algorithms, I lost the ardour for ‘looking’ that precedes any possible curation. What then soundtracked my life since I stopped making monthly playlists? An album, or a single song. So how did that transform the flow of time itself? Did I get ‘too old’ for playlists? There was a loud tone. It was found resounding in everything. Summer’s faded peach. Plaster peach. Crooning afternoons. This one plucked lyric. Is that true though? I remember having a collaborative playlist (‘E-WASTED’) for my 30th birthday party and on the night, the pub wouldn’t let us turn it up loud enough to hear it. But we played it anyway, all 24 hours and 54 minutes, knowing it was there, knowing we’d never get through it. Registering time in its variety. I wrote in my notebook: Once the modal curation of the playlist was a way into writing but then I stopped thinking of songs in their lily pad potential to cross the river of whatever mood or walk you were caught in. So what, did I wear the songs instead? I let them wear me out and I wore them to death. The songs were hot freaks! Ian’s playlist poem was a poem of nowness, enacting its ‘repetitive pattern in space’. I heard a girl downstairs shriek ‘Bye, love you!’ and thought — that’s one for the playlist. Add ‘Bye, love you!’. Midway through the reading, Ian holds up a piece of paper revealing an obscure, eleven-sided shape. I hope the mathematical reality of the poem is some kind of angel number squaring of 11 and for the playlist to transform from anaphoric placeholder to the reflexive imperative — play [the] list — as you wish. Start the poem. Perform. An eleven-sided playlist for being born again. For this to be a gesture of love, obviously. & ofc, fuck Spotify – tho I have spent over half my life listing songs on its lifeless interface.

Following Ian, Madeleine McCluskey of Big Red Cat zine read some short stories with a fairytale flair. There was an island setting, ‘spindly earrings’ and ‘menthol cigarettes’. A girl who dies. Friendship, hunger, ‘a burrow formed where lunch ought to be’. I thought about the cruelty of fiction and how we must die and plotting towards endings and hunger as a grammar of prolonging. A few performers this eve list 1999 as their d.o.b. in the author bios and it got me thinking to what a fin de siècle aesthetic might be like. I wouldn’t say anxiety was a running theme exactly. Neoliberal hell obv. But maybe an archipelagic consciousness of hopping between — something about working with what is shorn up amidst so much erosion [more thoughts needed]. Elsewhere supplants elsewhere’s interminable now. We had another break then Zeo Fawcett did a set of live viola playing with backing tracks and singing. He is so so talented and the songs were unique and compelling, shifting the tone of the evening. He had this story about missing out on hanging outside Boots being an emo because of having Gaelic singing lessons as a teenager. Sometimes I wish I’d had the Gaelic singing lessons instead of hanging outside the Odeon being an emo. There was a song called ‘Feeling really impermanent right now’. Later, I start to identify too much with a rain drop running down the window in a memory of a bus window in a 00s tv show.

Introducing Charlie McIlwain to his Texture Texture outfit, Ian attests to the success of their connection, claiming that ’email is the way forward’. Honestly not enough people in the room questioned the boldness of this claim. I want him to be right about it though and briefly I parenthesise all communication to the epistolary promise of endless more soons like the swooning glut that would end platform capitalism and reunite us with wild cognition, in just enough time to save the world. For now, this chance pairing of Charlie and Ian will do. This is a fucking great set of surreal, whipsmart k-hole cantos delivered with register switch ups that surprised at every turn. Hilarious and devastating, with fitting improvised drone from Ian. I thought of Spicer’s radio and how there would be aliens in the ancient walls of The Doublet dictating this through the frequencies of wave machine. One regular punter from downstairs popped in by accident and stood in mesmerised bewilderment (nah, rly he was just giving glaikit) before turning back and losing the opportunity to have his head blown off by poetry. We had ‘white fire violetted daddy’, we had ‘sleep is just cloth’, ‘you can use your ass like an appliance’, we had literally two pairs of glasses, ‘stop killing Lorca’, imploring ‘the language is in trouble’ folded into ponderings borrowed from W.S. Graham, we had ‘Hegel ate a crow’, ‘the furniture will not endure perception’, we had Brian Wilson and John Clare ‘and shall I know that sleep again’. Listening was like trying to trip talk with someone who is not tripping and in the duration of that performance (idk 30 mins or so?) I let myself (what comprises brain matter of synapse and syntax) be scrambled by signifying mayhem and enjoyed every minute. Go buy Charlie’s Elegy [Model Interaction Trend] now you fools!

When I found the remnants of some kind of pop-up carnival show on Kelvin Way, cycling home, dis-articulated along the road in luminous obstacle, I knew I was still riding through Charlie’s poem.

Thank you for reading! This write-up is for K. and anyone else who couldn’t make it – plus I forgot to record the audio for this one sorry! but one day we will upload the mp3s from AFKs of yore…and this one will be remembered in the hearts & minds of all who attended… xx

Terrified

It’s terrifying to write about love as someone who’s grown up with extreme behaviors in relationships that would always send me on an emotional rush. The lyrics explain the anxiety of a relationship having no end point and thinking, ‘Oh my god, this might work out.’ I wanted to capture that feeling that I’m finally safe.
Jazmin Bean on ‘Terrified‘

Nursing their bleeding stars at the outskirts of asylum, Jazmin Bean plays nurse. Their bicycle is mint green and their hair is turquoise and they carry a box of medicine. When cleaning tables in my service job, I’d lip sync for real at the songs I’d play in my head to escape the music that was actually playing. When you fall in love it’s like bundling your stars into a bicycle and laying them all beside one another to clean them up, clean off the blood. Take them on a boat on the lake. Administer the painkiller to let them float back off to space. I listened to this song, Spotify tells me, more than any other in 2024.

The second song is ‘How to Rent a Room’ by Silver Jews. So when I’m listening reflectively to the Top Songs of 2024 in the linear unfold of a diary, the transition goes from three-minute perfect slice of zoomer britpop – Bean’s ‘I’m terrified / Sun in my eyes / I’m terrified / terrified’ – to Berman’s ‘I don’t really wanna die / I only wanna die in your eyes’ and the assonance of eyes/die/terrified collapses into the string section of mortal swoon. In ‘Terrified’, Bean sings about their first healthy relationship following a history of abuse and struggle in love. I’ve been following their work ever since Audrey Lindemann wrote about ‘Jazmin Bean’s Instagram’ for SPAM Cuts back in 2020. I kept thinking about that phrase ‘Imprisoned by Flesh’ as the locatedness of a room where men grasp at bedsheets and the elven blonde remains hugging their knees and grimacing. Lindemann described Bean’s aesthetic as ‘stradd[ling] a Butler-ian understanding of performativity and a Zoomer drive for authenticity’. The editorial implication of this piece is that we are reading Bean’s Instagram not just as art but also a kind of visual poetry. All of the gurlesque extremity channels into the emotional circuitboard through which I listen to ‘Terrified’. The transformation from this post-internet monsterkin to alt-pop star is pretty cool. The songs are bigger and more free. There’s space for the feeling to breathe.

Can we call this zoomer britpop? Atwood Magazine commented on the song’s ‘eruption of ’90s-era Britpop warmth’. I’ve been reassessing Britpop (capitalised here for History) with the Americans via the recent series of Bandsplain, where Yasi Salek and pals take on bands like the Happy Mondays, Blur and Oasis (and try valiantly to pronounce the various dialects associated with these bands). Britpop for me is the music that played as I nodded off in the back of my dad’s car, looking out the window or reading a book, looking for something else to do. Britpop, in its purest form, to me represents an emotional prototype for projecting personal excess and intensity. The actual lyrics should be fairly general and simple, with one striking detail. Your ‘wonderwall’ or ‘champagne supernova’, kind of like the novum of the song whose weirdness transforms all the ordinary detail like putting violet dye in an otherwise neutral lake. It also comes along with simple chord structures, homophony, melodic hooks, a compelling chorus or build towards it. EXUBERANCE (that is either swaggering or just a little unsure of itself). I am not trying to give a history of britpop I am just trying to get at how it currently resonates for me as a genre or perhaps more like a mode of music.

Another contemporary example of post-internet-leaning britpop for me was Grimes’ 2020 midi-acoustic elegy, ‘Delete Forever’ [‘I got super triggered when Lil’ Peep died’]. A song about addiction and dying that feels raw in comparison to the maximalism of Miss Anthropocene. I only just realised the line at the end of the chorus is ‘More lines on the mirror than a sonnet’. Sonnet = little song. Britpop anthems are sort of like little songs put through the maximalist ringer, or vice versa. When I walk through dawn listening to ‘Terrified’, what is it I’m feeling? Some proximity to that tunnel feeling of coming out the other side, coming into the light

and finding it utterly
fucking scary.

I had some news in 2023 which changed the way I felt about life. I found out that by a 50/50 draw, I hadn’t inherited a harmful gene mutation which greatly increases your risk of cancer. This gene variant is responsible for breast and ovarian cancer is multiple family members, some living and some not. I’m still learning how to write all about this and I find it easier to do so through song. What rips you to shreds but melody in some of these moments? But the ripping when cast to melody is more like a ribbon. And I tie it around my wrist and I get on with it. Is the ribbon pink? I don’t know / it is more like a mirror or mobius trip. When Bean writes about ‘Terrified’ as capturing ‘the anxiety of a relationship having no end point and thinking, “Oh my god, this might work out”‘ she hits the real heart nerve. I feel like this about my whole life. For various reasons, I didn’t think I’d live past fifteen, then I didn’t think I’d live past thirty. By ‘live’ I mean literally and figuratively. It was hard to imagine pushing past those milestones into further life, existence, going on. Then I was given this gift in the form of a medical letter. It trickled into everything. It was real in the moment but long-term really just a symbol or sign (I will get sick like everyone else, my stars will still bleed). At the start of 2024 I walked around listening to this perfect three-minute song because it was a homeopathic dose of the new scared-hope I was administering myself. A tiny infinity. I let a few of those stars back up. They’ll return for me.

Records I listened to in 2024

Okay music this year was weird for me. I liked things where the lyrics were meltwater into guitars and my ~spotify wrapped was all obsessively listened same songs split geode feelings. Exclusively masculine guitar bands with the exception of Brat (top 5). I too am the virus. Maybe because it rained nonstop all year in Glasgow, even with my heart split with California it made so much sense to listen to The Natural Bridge on loop and felt that bridge would cross the ocean. It was the bridge in the song and the bridge of the ocean. I kept thinking about high-singing shoegaze sirens and lay in the mud during a Mogwai gig. Songs about blues and magic mountains and lucifer and love and sympathy and blood and fluoresce and dallas and golden days and dreams and strawberries and tiredness and june and miracles. Seriously I know 2024 was music gossip and humming cancellations and virality blown up to chromatic ontology but (here I want a line break) I just wanted to be stoned at the claire rousay gig forever. And that was my music.

“Come talk to me about it outside”

Thought about taking a searing breath onstage and how long til it heals?

[Shane Lavers’ shriek]

dream u can have for free:

“Then there was this weird music video that popped up in my complaining featuring jelly sparkle heels and the message was about destroy your cloud with new CD-R storage capacities! and there was this song from the early 2000s and in the music video you could walk around with big yeti slippers

and this really horny barbie song set in a swimming pool which honestly just sounded like goats but was visually orgiastic & gauche

guess I blame the pseudoephedrine!”

Approximate seasonal index:

Winter – shoegaze, e-girl
Spring – folk, emo, concrète
Summer – jam bands, indie rock, hyperpop
Autumn – alt, slowcore

~ NEW RELEASES ~

Jazmin Bean — Traumatic Livelihood

Kim Gordon — The Collective

DIIV — Frog in Boiling Water

Waxahatchee — Tigers Blood

Julia Holter — Something in the Room She Moves

The Lemon Twigs — A Dream Is All We Know

Bladee — Pyskos

Four Tet — Three +

Grace Cummings — Ramona

Vampire Weekend — Only God Was Above Us

Pearling — Lovelocket

claire rousay — sentiment

Billie Eilish — HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

Charli xcx — Brat

Dr. Dog — Dr. Dog

Clairo — Charm

Bella White — Five for Silver

Chanel Beads – Your Day Will Come

Loukeman — Baby You’re a Star

Phish — Evolve

Kelly Lee Owens — Dreamstate

SOPHIE — SOPHIE

LI YILEI — NONAGE

claire rousay — The Bloody Lady

Asher White — Home Constellation Study

Porridge Radio — Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me

Horse Jumper of Love — Disaster Trick

Papa M — Ballads of Harry Houdini

The Cure — Songs of a Lost World

Magdalena Bay — Imaginal Disk

070 Shake — Petrichor

Horse Jumper of Love — Disaster Trick

Previous records of the year

2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023

hmu if there’s stuff you think I missed……………………………………

xoxo

SPAM Tour Diary: February 2024

SPAM Tour Diary: February 2024

I wanted to write this a week ago, in the throes of a northbound Avanti while grown men stood up shouting things like ‘plastic cunts!!!! all of em plastic cunts!!!!!’ (some cryptic reference to the footie) before departing at Carlisle, but another border had to be crossed and here I am, writing this from my sickbed. Week 6 of the academic semester finally got to me. But this is my diary of the first official SPAM Tour. Guys, I was so so excited for this tour. I even got up at 5am on a weekday to iron the custom design on a tour t-shirt (omg why did nobody tell me how hard it is to draw on tshirt fabric?). I love that poetry literally takes me places. I met some of the best people ever on tour. Tour tour tour.

What follows is my fond paracetamol-induced delirium ❤

We were a poetry carousel in celebration of three new pamphlets: Thirteen Morisettes, a transatlantic collab by Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood; in the country garden/the end of england, by Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir’s All in Animal Time. Ever since the latter was submitted to SPAM I have been rolling it around in my head when something is asked of me and I want to say, sighing, yes yes all in animal time, it will be done. Who were the horses? Who were the horseback riders? This is getting a bit Yeatsian so I’ll give you the names: of course there were the two Jacks, Courtney and Karó, along with Marianne Tambini, Leo Bussi, Annie Muir, Eve Esfandiari-Denney and me. And everyone we met along the way.

It may have been my decision to go see All of Us Strangers on Valentine’s Day but the transition to a dreamstate of solace, if not soul-searching, was upon me. Walking home on Wednesday night I wrote: ‘When she looks at him taking his wet clothes off from the rain and knows that suddenly he is older and she is sort of his daughter. I feel so messed up and grateful that it is raining and when I get home I can cry and read my stupid poetry. How I have missed this ceaselessly crying. I was always too sensitive like melting into the folds of the world’.

The next morning was all coffee and white noise, still a bit shook. I met Kirsty Dunlop, my glitchsistertrix, at Glasgow Central and we piled on the Avanti whose queue as ever was abundant. I had big plans to commit to ‘agile working’: I was going to research Detroit techno, ahead of a summer conference, get my MLitt marking done and generally clear the inbox but these earnest endeavours were DERAILED by the indubitable fact of half term madness. This is a concept still foreign to me, as someone raised in Scotland, the February half-term. Idk if that is a sufficient explanation for why there were about 300 twelve-year-old boys on our train. In the queue, the Avanti guy is like to me and Kirsty, ‘are you in the school trip’ and I clipped back, ‘nah, we’re far too old’ and he does this kind of sweet double take ‘aw not really’ to like, I guess encourage our confidence that we could make convincing schoolkids, probably with our backpacks etc. I take that as a flirt, though on hindsight maybe creepy. He’s a good guy though, I see him every time I get the London train and he’s having to put out fires with the insouciance of work-place survival tactics, every time. You can tell he’s reliable and it’s like being ID’d for cheap sauvignon blanc; you have to take compliments when they come.

On the train, from the get-go these schoolboys are kicking off. For the morning, Kirsty and I convince ourselves we are schoolboys too. We are practically hysterical. They are practically hysterical. The boys have discovered a famous boxer on the train called Anton. They are, let’s not beat around the bush here, obsessed with Anton. Every other word that comes out their mouths is Anton. ANTON. BIG ANTON. I daren’t google to see if he’s real or not. We are convinced he’s made up, a fiction. The hyperstition of their near arrival. ‘Let’s get Anton on snap’, ‘Come to the bathroom and we’ll go see Anton’, ‘Come get food and we’ll go see Anton’, ‘Let’s give Anton a present’, ‘I want to give Anton some milk’. K. and I dissected the extent to which such gestures were euphemisms. We answered some overdue Plaza emails because it was literally the first time in weeks we’d had a shred of time to do dedicated SPAM admin. We took pictures of ourselves being silly because how silly it is to be travelling poets. I’d left my anti-nausea pills in the big orange bag I couldn’t bear trying to get off the shelf in front of everyone, so I sat tight and gingerly sipped a ‘fiery kombucha’ and loosened my tie. I really do need anti-nausea pills for England. When we pulled into Euston the boys threw some of their milk sachets in our direction, landing by our boots, and I wondered if we’d been the hyperobject of ‘”Anton”‘ all along.

Before we get to London I should tell you about Tuesday. We had this great reading at Mount Florida Books, hosted by the glorious Katia: a bookseller and all-round babe whose generosity and humour ne’er fails to completely lift my mood. We agreed the secret to Glasgow was to talk freely about your life but don’t name anyone. We talked about when you can’t stop thinking about kissing. And sexy poetry. How did we get here or there? Most of us, as non-south-siders, were at the mercy of rush hour traffic. My bus didn’t show up. I missed the pre-match dinner at The Battlefield Rest and Courtney got stuck on a 90 bus which took her on some kind of motorway loop out of town. I love that she called it the freeway and briefly my brain merged the M8 with Los Angeles and an offbeat sunset, nine hours behind. The 90 bus is such a gamble at the best of times it is best taken when one has made peace with the possibility that you might end your journey on the moon, or Carlisle. We know that it’s always Carlisle, wherever you are. Perhaps Loch Lomond. On the bonnie bonnie bus to Loch Lomond…….okay, shut up Maz, get on with it.

Happily all poets were fed and watered and though they arrived late for their own reading, this is in fact a local custom to be adhered to. Plus, if you are going to have a press run by two ADHD queens this is going to happen at some point. Time must reasonably adjust to our lossy measure. Have you ever tried to get several poets out of (or, for that matter, into) a room all at once? My fellow editors had brought wine with the security tag still on (‘Kirsty did you steal this wine?!’, ‘No, ofc not!!!’) and which I sort of shotted with the precision demanded of 7pm on a Tuesday. Kirsty and I introduced the evening and I did something weird which was when she said the word ‘earworm’ or something like ‘lines that curl in your ear’ I couldn’t help but go to touch her ear onstage, like it was a seashell. Ian captured this gesture as a blur of the hand and my big stupid grin.

Our readers (Marianne, Leo, Annie) were by all accounts devastating, hilarious and super-luminous. Apparently it was Marianne’s first reading and you wouldn’t know it because she was so funny, deadpan and confident. I loved the M8/mate poem. She is a very fine reader of the absurdity of the world. Puns galore. Swerves. Leo also. Omg that Ben Lerner poem of theirs. Leo co-runs this amazing reading series in Glasgow that’s been going for over a year now: it’s called Waterwings and on Wednesday they have a pamphlet launch at Strangefield, French Street. Annie is a good friend of SPAM and MF and we are label mates on Broken Sleep Books (she read from her 2021 pamphlet New Year’s Eve along with some new stuff). She also runs Time For One Poem which is a poetry podcast I listened to a lot in the pandemic, and a workshop series at Glasgow Zine Library for beginners and experienced poets alike. I really admire Annie’s passion for breaking open the joy and difficulty of poetry and she really lights up a room when she reads.

This was the first time Jack and Courtney had actually met each other IRL. The story goes that Jack tweeted his first Morisette and only two people liked it (no way to prove this as Jack, like all respectable people, is no longer on Twitter). One of them was Courtney (the other purveyor of a like remains a trade secret). She slid into his DMs and thus the collab began, and the rest is post-internet poetry history. Both poets read from their new spamphlet as well as other books. they had such a joyous and sweet kind of poetry sibling rapport. You can watch their performance on youtube! Please like and subscribe to SPAM on youtube! If you do probably we will find more things to share there.

Afterwards, thanks to an enthusiastic Mount Florida resident and fellow writer Victoria, we wound up in a place whose sign promised ‘a friendly local bar’. We had tried to get into the Clockwork which was our usual post-poetry haunt, but they were not having it. Maybe they genuinely were closing for the night. I don’t know the ways of the south side. Anyway, it was too ‘well-lit’ for our tastes besides. Since it was the 13th February, the florist next to Mount Florida was still busy working at 9pm to put all the Valentine’s roses into sumptuous red bouquets. It was joyous to see our friendly poets all making friends with each other. Ian and I practised mewing and everyone seemed to have vitamin T and it took me an hour and a bit to get back to Haghill because the Cathcart Circle and the fact that trains are cancelled at Queen Street more frequently even than Matty Healy. I feel like somebody has made a similar joke in a poem before. I fell asleep at my desk next to a bowl of cornflakes reading about cybernetics. Yeah, idk who was doing the reading, me or the cornflakes. Theory eats itself.

I woke up with the horrendous news that I had been on Twitter (‘X’) for fifteen years, that is half my life. ‘Happy X anniversary’ is giving this bitch will never get married and their anniversary might as well be with an extractive hyperdistracting platform in whose word limits dreams are made and unmade.

Okay back to London. What the hell, we arrived and spring had sprung upon Euston with a vengeance. Which is to say it was seventeen bloody degrees and I was wearing my sleeping bag coat because Glasgow was cold and we had about thirty bags of books to carry between us. We stopped in Tavistock Square to rearrange our garments (essentially, stripping in public — I nearly pulled off my tights right in front of the Woolf statue). The purple crocuses were out and even some spring blossom on the trees. Lovely. I texted solidarity purple crocuses to someone who was doing a good and important thing back home. We got to the London Review Bookshop and spoke to the wonderful John who benevolently relieved us of some of our stock (including the work of the tour poets, plus Brilliant Vibrating Interface, Cocoa and Nothing, Visions & Feed). Down in the poetry basement and secret pamphlet cupboard, it was not long until I’d found away to pile the weight back onto my luggage in the form of Prynne’s Snooty Tipoffs, Ted Berrigan’s Get the Money! and Rachael Allen’s God Complex. Kirsty’s partner Sean also met us at the LRB (he’d gotten an earlier train but arrived later, such is the the Avanti’s negentropic spacetime elongation of the West Midlands) and saved us by carrying some of the bags. The suitcase, however, was doomed for. Kirsty has an unfortunate history with London-based suitcase drama and this poetry trip was no exception. We couldn’t get the damn handle to budge and at some point her and Sean had to perform a kind of suitcase surgery, whose outcome I can’t remember. I do remember wrestling with it on the floor of Euston while K. was in the loo and people looking at me like I was doing something not only suspicious but positively heinous. Yes my hair was in two plaits and I was wearing a tie but so what! Let the poets have their endless, impossible luggage. The tote bag theory of poetry tour.

We made our way to the Tate Modern and I can confirm that not once did I put us on the wrong tube. This is one thing I can show a concrete, material improvement on in the past five years: navigating London with confidence. After stowing our bags, we spent an hour and more wandering the Philip Guston exhibition. I’ve been wanting to see that for months. It was really breathtaking. We all choked up a bit at some of the late works, especially the painting of the tangled limbs in bed and the sense of mutual pain. I sat in front of The Ladder for a long time. Kirsty said sometimes in exhibitions you forget that it is actually the real painting in front of you, like it’s travelled all this way, and that’s quite overwhelming. Especially after a life of scrolling digital images. I thought about the sincerity of paint strokes and presence and colour and preservation. How lucky we all were. Worlds. Emotional corporeal pinks. What pink must’ve been like before the millennium. Our navigation of the Tate had a comic air of being in the funhouse, going between connected buildings. I took pictures of Sean and Kirsty on the escalator and charged on ahead because I was so excited for art. The coat check guy was kind of horrified that we found London hot because he said it was freezing to him and he only feels that way when he goes to Spain. Sometimes I forget how cold Scotland is in comparison. Once I was in London for one night only in March and it was genuine full-blown floral aromas while it snowed back home.

When we finally got to the Peckham Pelican, Kirsty fell into a hole right outside and let out a cry. You have to watch out for those holes in the ground (they might lead to Carlisle). Sean charged his vape and I delighted in the phenomena of ‘happy hour’. We ate nachos and pizza with caramelised onions and goats cheese and I drank an Asahi very slowly because I kept getting up to say hi to people. Reunited with so many poets and hugging Jane so hard because it had been so long, and everything we’ve been through. Katy with their long wavy hair and pizza queries. Adam and I talking about Don DeLillo. Courtney got stuck on a bus again listening to this guy talk on the phone to his girlfriend Jodie about how to cook a pork chop for over an hour. We sold loads of books (thanks!!!) and the readings were so gorj and we recorded them so stay tuned for the URL Sonata podcast episode someday. I loved taking pictures of the poets and I love the pictures where you can see people’s faces reacting to the poets, so wholesome. It was a dream to be united with our queen Denise and also Nasim and many others.

Kirsty and I performed our weird Morisette intro poem that we penned on the train and semi-plagiarised from Alanis and Lana. It makes a lot more sense if you hear it being sung but fuck it, here it is (we read it a line each taking turns). See if you can guess which Alanis song it’s from.

WRITE THRU U (ME+YOU)

You mispronounced my POEM
You didn’t wait for all the INFORMATION
Before you turned me away
Wait a minute sleekit beastie
You kind of hurt my feeeeeeelings
You see me as tinned meat delight
And you’ve got a meal deal taste
I see tonight through you
I know tonight through you
I feel the SPAM bite through you
I talk tonight through you
You took me for a sonnet
You took me for a round of golf
You took a long hard look at my sass
And then played crazy golf for a flash
Your hacket face is like a fish
You pat me on the motherboard
You took me out to lyrically slay me
But didn’t hear a damn anapaest
I remix through you
I hyperlink through you
I glitchfully seduce you
I’m loooooading you
I’m buffering you slowly
Oh hello Mr. SPAM
You didn’t think I’d come back
You didn’t think I’d show up with my poetry
And these goddamn pamphlets on my back
Now that I’m (almost) a doctor
Now that I’m a zillionaire
Now that I’m the incoming integrity officer of the tortured poets society
You scan the credits for your literary influence
And wonder why it’s not there
I write through you
I’m typing right through you
I’m recording right through you
I’m poyuming right through you, you
You, it’s all for you
everything I do
I tell you all the time
heaven is a place on earth with you
tell me all things you wanna do
I heard that you liked the bad rhymes honey
is that true
IRL from Glasgow me and you
who knows what these poets will do
………..(FADE OUT)

People said they thought it was funny and very ‘written on the train’.

That night, I stayed at my brother’s in Hackney and it took Jane and I an hour and forty-five minutes to get home because London. We met Jack at the station and he also missed his train because they cancelled a bunch of trains. I tried some of the beautiful Björk liqueur that Karó had brought us as a gift from Iceland and it tasted like licking the sweet vanilla minerals of the most exquisite waterfall. In Joe and Minnie’s flat, I ate leftover Valentine’s babka, slept like a log on the floor and felt pretty good in the morning. We woke early and went for breakfast for weird mushroom lattes and talked about work problems, and our awesome school friend who now does hardstyle gigs in New Zealand. Karó, Courtney and I got the train to Bristol from Paddington and I sat next to Courtney and talked about love, about how being with poets is like a drug because everyone talking about poetry getting higher and higher on the total collapse infinity of language. This sensation was augmented by how warm it was on the train. We talked about cats, about US poetry scenes and struggling with narrative and being in love and the difference between feeling and thought, the art of being charming and our favourite poets. I kept thinking about how beautiful Eve’s poems were and how great it is when you discover a new poet.

When we got to Bristol, we headed straight to Bookhaus and met another Joe, this time Joe Vaughn of Strange Region who is super cool and lovely and hosted us in the bookshop that night. You can now buy a bunch of SPAM things in there! Courtney, Karó and I got lunch at an organic place round the corner (more kombucha, this time turmeric) and we talked about our craziest student/teaching experiences, learning runes for no particular reason, doing virtual workshops, making friends on the internet, making films, our collective love for Jack Underwood. We then got lost in a mall looking for Second Page Books, an excellent secondhand place, in which I found a copy of The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. I was pleased to find that Bristol did in fact fulfil all my Skins fantasies and more, as a place with bluetooth speaker jungle music, old tramlines, pervasive smell of weed, authentic mall goths, Cornish pasties and a vibe that seemed extremely conducive to thrifting. We walked around laughing about how bins in England always have to have some kind of rhyming poem on them to convince you to use them. After checking into our Travelodge, doors held open for us by earnest hockey-stick brandishing teen boys (more half-term trouble?), we fulfilled Courtney’s bubble tea craving then headed to Cargo Cantina where tacos were had along with orange wine and much funny conversing about the stuplimity of Valentine’s chocolates, dreams revolving around BeReal, the inimitable typing speed of Jo Lindsay Walton. It felt so classy and impossible to sit outside for dinner in February but I guess this is possible in Bristol! We collectively admired Courtney’s vintage coat and its interwoven display of amphora. We were just on time for our reading at Bookhaus. Alex Marsh of sold out Hot Orange Squash Sky was there and I was so excited that SPAM poets from multiple seasons were present in the same room, so far south from Glasgow.

We were hosted by lovely Dan Eltringham, who co-runs the reading series Toppling State (from which this evening had been christened as Toppling SPAM, and some people had thought it was a sushi tasting event from the poster) and who wrote this amazing book Poetry & Commons which won the ASLE-uki environmental writing prize last year. I read first, a few poems from my new book Cinders and my second collection, Visions & Feed. My copies of Cinders were supposed to arrive yesterday but UPS did that thing where they pretend to have showed at your door but they don’t leave a note or anything, and you were there all along and didn’t hear the doorbell. Jack Young and I were in the eco-bubble of the reading and he did such a brilliant performance from in the country garden, a book that was so great to work on last autumn and a book that has taught me a lot about the violence of taxonomy and what might a garden mean to ongoing colonialisms and how do we cultivate something queer and flourishing instead. Karó read wonderfully too, and I thought about her girl and punctuation poems as innovative gems that have stuck with me more than I otherwise realised. It’s like metabolising the lyric by way of Lisa Robertson (at her most camp) through Rachael Allen’s ‘Girls of Situations’ through zoomscapes of play and animal joy. I also want to shout out all of Karó’s showstopping colourful outfits. Courtney, alone this time (Jack U couldn’t make the Bristol leg of the tour) performed totally irresistible Morisettes numbers alongside poems from her book I Love Information and even read some of Jack’s poems from A Year in the New Life. We debated the pronunciation of apricot. I prefer how Americans say it. I loved that she even near-sang some of the morisette poems to get at the sway of melody. The genius goddess of bad moons, Sam Walton, hosted a Q&A with all the poets and we talked about the importance of small press poetries and it was so nice to hear Jack, Karó and Courtney talk about the origin stories of their spamphlets. Thanks Sam, Dan and Joe for being great hosts!

Afterwards we went to a delightful pub called The Orchard where a drunk hippie fell on me (feels like a Bristol right of passage) and we guzzled the best cider I have ever tasted. I was so tired from the fullness of poetry and travel that I was falling asleep right there in the pub mid-conversation, such is my habit, I would fall asleep and chime in a few beats later with some anachronistic question. For a long time this happened to me constantly, such as at gigs or in attendance of lectures, and I now realise it’s not narcolepsy just a symptom of intense sleep deprivation. I was sort of light-dreaming while talking to my friends in the pub. It’s like my brain wants to be in both worlds at once. We talked about heartbreak, dating musicians, dating poets, writing novels. Joe is writing one, Courtney has written one, Alex is also writing one. I want to write one. I have an idea now, we cracked it out over hotel breakfast the next morning. Perhaps more on that later.

The next day we had to say bye to Courtney who was going back to London before the next leg of her Europe trip (Paris!) and none of us wanted to part </3. In an attempt to console ourselves Karó and I went to look at some art then we did some drawing and then met Sam and Dan and bought some supplies from Cass Art and got amazing noodle hotpots at Chilli Daddy that were bigger than our faces. Karó gifted me a big bag of Icelandic liquorice for the train home. I couldn’t believe that tour was over and we’d have to go back to our lonely heads. The train manager announced that people were having a good dance in coach H. Reader I almost joined them, but instead I read Courtney’s books twice because I was missing her and tour already and then I finished reading the Cixous novella I’d brought with me, which was all about time and grief. People seemed especially beautiful that day. Even the boy vomiting in the bowels of Queen Street Station was beautiful. Some women twice his age stopped, brandishing wine, told him that puking was a right of passage. It was Saturday night. They said they were having an overdue Galentines, which reminds me of gelatine which reminds me of the sacred caul in which spam is encased. SPAM forever!

Buy Thirteen Morisettes
Direct from SPAM
US folks might want to order from Printed Matter
UK folks might want to order from Good Press, or head to MF Books or LRB Bookshop to pick up a copy.

Buy Season 7 and other SPAM publications
https://www.spamzine.co.uk/shop

Reflections on the poetry of somnolence

I spent the weekend in Zoomland with a group of really brilliant practitioners musing on the affordances of sleep and dreaming in our writing. We took the opportunity to discuss chronotypes, insomnia, hypnagogic poetics, oceanic feeling, nocturnes, dwelling and dreamwork among other things. Everyone has a relationship to sleep and what I love about these workshop spaces is the way so much is unlocked by paying attention to the liminal moments in the day. I really enjoyed hearing about how modifications to one’s writing environment (turning the lights off, going outside, changing the light temperature on your writing device) an affect what we write. We thought about darkness as discovery. We considered the lullaby. Sleep as a transformative force, sleep as anti-capitalist, sleep as a process of (un)becoming, sleep as trip and trance. Sleep and caregiving, sleep and safety, sleep and homemaking, sleep and the more-than-human.

Thanks to everyone who attended ❤

More events and work on sleep & somnolence will be announced in the new year!

For now, you can check out other Beyond Form Creative Writing opportunities here: https://www.beyondformcreativewriting.com

who can smell the tiny garden

I awoke to a singular bleep that seemed to come from the membrane between wakefulness and sleep, a state where perceptual phenomena cannot be traced to either realm. I checked my carbon monoxide alarm, inspected the boiler (for what, idk, a desperate mechanical groan). Side effect of anosmia is you don’t know if you are going to perish by smoke (this came to light when the building next door to mine was on fire, there were trucks of firefighters hosing it down with water, I couldn’t smell anything even with the window open), let alone gas. Carbon monoxide is pretty much odourless anyway. You have to rely on your landlord’s possibly obsolete detection technology. I flung open all the windows. I had Covid again last week and tried to remember the last two times I was quarantined in the same flat: long phone calls pacing around, screaming every time I had to sit down because of the muscle pain in my legs, watching German television shows about drug-loving teenagers, getting the same results.

I don’t understand what’s happened to my sense of smell. The doctor prescribed regular Beconase nasal spray, the shit I’ve been using all my life for hayfever. Daily use over several months led to nosebleeds and headaches. I tried salt water rinsing, voluptuous inhalations of the steam exhaled by menthol crystals. Yesterday, I was walking through Shawlands and stopped to rub lavender between my thumb and forefinger. Brought fingers to my nose with the tenderness of someone first applying the buttercup method, somewhere else. I could smell the lavender. Just about.

When I was small, we’d sneak in the back way to a big National Trust park where you could go to the Walled Garden. Mum would point at the various herbs and name them. She’d say to rub them between your thumb and forefinger and we’d do that to save picking them and being caught. Sometimes I’d press them between pages of notebooks. Mint, basil, rosemary, thyme. We had a lot of lemongrass in the garden. I would steep it for tea. I would go through puberty and try to smoke it.

Maybe it’s the smells with memories that remain. I should’ve drunk more coffee as a baby.

Is there a method for coaxing cellular repair? I buy cut-price little boxes of salad cress from Asda and plunged my nose in them. I pick up an antique book about keeping illustrious shrubberies, and the seller advises me that the kinds of pesticides mentioned in the book should remain in the early twentieth century. My heart aches. I’m a very tiny garden.

Grapevine

Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain.

— Natalie Mering

Of course, the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world are one.

— Catherine Malabou

Morning brings indigo gluttony of the night’s dim prizes. I remember a night in February of 2019, the brightest stars in my life we saw above a kirkyard eating chocolate for all the stars. Looking for tickets to see you again, star stuff for popcorn synecdoche of eating the bones of what you believe at the movies, infinity pool, the liminal alimony of the heart you have. I pay it all back which is why skylines exist. At this time of year, we make our own light. I text you all day and all night the text pings resonate without me, though I’m still conscious. This is how I listen to music. Harvest the ricochets until my synapse nozzles are ripe and sweet.

“It’s too difficult”

the beautiful song in my ear
The Butterfly splitfin will go extinct this year

“My plastic girlhood obligatory
wrote a novel you’d never know
elemental love for the noise of horses”

Electra pastel of giving the lecture

Its voice never falters

Spotify should hire poets to replace the algorithm with iambs

A perfect way to respond?

The album cover of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow features a glowing heart which is the idiosyncrasy of love song, gentle and melodic and good and wrong. There is something we say at breakfast about the inexplicable intimacy of an interval, this bit in the song where the chords do this or that and suddenly your heart’s aflutter. Why is that? I feel vulnerable and unclasped by music like the locket of a promise necklace snapped open, opulent. When are you gonna feel okay?

I like it best when I don’t expect it.

Designing the conditions for crying is easy these days. A tiny fly lands on my wet nail polish and departs as lavender.

I used to wander the abandoned golf course and around the monument to see the snowcapped hills and feel it.

Perished by screaming clouds in my brain.

I am in love with the music of Weyes Blood, we share the same birthday.

At a recent gig the singer said “thank you all for being alive”. Some people describe these songs as hymns. Last year in the climate rush of COP26 I was cycling around with my bones on fire and freezing. I would show up to the job being stared at, horrible mess of myself couldn’t hide, what do you think of this poem I said it’s a lot to unpack. Why don’t we leave those tools in the box? He says toolbox isn’t so bad. You could just improvise. I don’t look to these men to be mentors but menthols were my first cigarettes, a clothing brand called MEN is like SHEIN you could have MENOUT or menagerie, mispronounced as shine, a giraffe made of glass or a tiny glass seal with whiskers of onyx, weeping. MELATONIN or MENACING, MENDACITY / my avuncular muses of more money have outraged, they will never understand candida. A spanner in the works. No more lies. I’m most men when in lingerie maybe or styling my old surprise, the giant window in a dream wouldn’t close after I’d opened it so I had to go looking for a man to help me, high-vis or high waters our time would come to close it, not until I had escaped. Fled is that happiness. Look at it hardcore. No more lies, no more dying. Your arms in the air.

I heard catastrophe on the grapevine which was snipping guitar strings all the better to hear the lyre underneath, the union makes us strong, picket-cold and trellises our kitten hearts are growing, Natalie as in a new flower or the Minecraft roses coming up fast this year to be eaten by the dreams of spiders. Nicky Melville poem says if you’re a soft person you just get squashed, Sarah once read it aloud at the picket. I pictured a soft orange in the principal’s pocket. Roses last forever even when past their superlative. Shedding their petals to cover our eyes. Bunny put them in cubes to exhibit. Smooth wax skin.

Violet roses.

Ever since my friend with the purple aura died I’ve worn so much purple to find a flame of them, purple flame of my Raynaud’s and holy flux of traumas. What’s the point of poetry, it’s purple. I lilac therefore I lamb. I am on the lamb, I am lambing seasons, turn me into a leaf on the riptide, for I am lost. The clouds are glamorous, in pursuit of beauty’s excreta, a bad era, the best

negentropy saves us from losing everything

Secret blue note.

Wine-dark reverie of the quiet escapade, my late heart
blooms for the red, the read receipt
staining your tongue.

Catherine Malabou says ‘The body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body’. Descartes dripping wax on his robes, a lecturer pouring a pan of boiling pasta over his hand in rehearsal; the red welts between two moments, my horrible bleeding thumb. Scarlet clustering of old blood. Say it feels personal, say it is orange or purple. When it started inside me I felt the glow in my chest handed down by hyleticism of data from song: the body electric or incarnate. Menstrual tripping, I saw Kate Winslet literally on fire in fantasy after watching Romance & Cigarettes but she was invincible, what’s this script, literally the fire coming out of her in waves was my love of music. I harboured desires to stub cigarettes out on the wrists of saplings, light them and throw them barely smoked on the street; imagine my child self, scurrying around to collect them, smoking wholeheartedly the barely unsmouldered, especially rose ones. Lemonade’s infinity sunflower. I was so guilty in my treehouse for getting high, higher, highest of them all to bioluminesce in lieu of sunsets, fuck it. The cruelty displayed to our cousins was a lonesome one. What’s that word for when a word is hinged between two things, like flesh stitches that keep skin together and then dissolve inside you — a word that makes sentences make sense in this precious knitted way. What’s Latin.

Butterfly notifications in my dopamine receptors.

Coffee luxuriance and pillowslips ink-stained with diary slumbering. There are too many images trying to bed us. A stage whisper for the saints. I was born from a chrysalis of synths swaddled in melody all the better to tell you.

The discourse is banana-bruised and overly ripe in your bag.

Perfect oracle rosehip tea.

You can’t fully vanquish chaos but
on the phone
at a planetary scale
your mouth an aquarium, spilling numbers.

It’s okay that I died, and you died a little bit that night
we all did, really.

A friend is on the phone trying to renew medication. The record-breaking temperatures have lost their meaning, as in a lost glom of mercury swallowed by me. The Butterfly splitfin is in jeopardy. I have never fixed on a form for these cramps in language. The males intensify in colour when excited. The young are entirely silvery. I want to go on the profiles of the gentle ones and swim with them; you don’t need these comments, you didn’t need these things. The internship of being elegant more insect is fading. At some point

I wanted to drive. I was a girl toy and thought of many plastic cassette cases filling up the doors, the backseats with sugar. The idea of analogue as shadow, scrolling magnetic and stopping. I’m glitched by the ache which is lightening, gloss, disquietude, gelid. Girl drivers filling the roads, pouring concrete from their jars of face creams into the sea and beckoning

to make love on the white lines, almost drifting

you were there, you were swimming,

our worlds elided

I wanted to drive you to the sea cliffs of skyward to breakfast on blue.

Natalie and Lana sing of the body California incarnate, plasticity glowing emails,
eyeshadow blue as in Bowie

my exospore of the hokum knowhow, excessive sentiment, hearts aglow

That house over there. That home over there. A palm. Analgesia of the sea.

Ghost for your thot

organology of a negative situationship

Catharsis polaroid still develops in my purse of us, you’re blowing out blue smoke in the dream, I’m bowing out. The eye emoji, heart stun soft mote.

And in the darkness…

It’s good to be soft when they push you down

[…]

Such a curse to be so hard

Lightning bolt award for being born at all.

I used to chew beads and often swallow them

C. said so inside you it’s like the anthropocene

many plastiglomerate organ marias

menstruating rainbows

What someone called my emotional Teflon was melted by your white-hot non-logic, almost like heroin of the pain I was in, as if to have a little blister polishing her oysters. Why is there no word for girl-come

or the tragedy of icepacks.

Kept panic-crying at the idea of sleeping

and did it until the blood vessels burst around my eyes

which are sea-coloured and colourless, unseeing.

Divine & oversized teardrop:

I bought this not on etsy but via the estuary, quartz time, I dreamt a skipped ad and heard myself in the rearview mirror bound in leather. Here is a lilac wine and the name of that bone in your chest, flagrant sternum of the lonely highway, pulling your jacket to keep warm

picking pearls off your shoulders, all the better to lick this neck

in the flesh of the road

Bernard Stiegler says the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence

a pair of glowing red eyes

Buying more dreams at the pharmacy

of lurid blue

your poor wee cold sore

sky porn falls into humming. It’s free, it has to be.

Anything lost at the point of service.

There’s so much I wanna say about this album

holding me tight

I wanna tie the lights

and go off to hear it shimmering beneath the moon, whose memory

bruises

rosemary

real blood from your forehead

and the shadow of the one who

was yours

a long plague

season of neutral sensation

new motor neurons at the cosmic dawn

tripping cured my parosmia somewhat I could smell sauerkraut, frying onions, coffee, kerosene my only name the body odour of the shadow you loved

I can’t tell the trees from the shape of lightning

in subtitles

spiralise my love for the seventies

in edible language

flares in the highlands

the problem is not being affectless

but totally loving too much

all the tautology of stardust

let’s take the motorway route to ride our souls

under sunblock and metal sculpture

you feel balmy here, less exposed, fear of

merging

what we are

white hot collision

emotional whiplash

Emerging triumphant the dawn is a fog machine it is only October, none of us a sweetheart neckline could finish the sentence

swishing our way to ceremony

music makes sense

instead: a down & dirty musical set in the world of italicised starlings

which are assholes

because of radiance

for the love of original mud which connotes the whole story

they had to take flight

The body of both selves is ochre like in Husserl the real world is everything

a dialectician of starlight

Morning gluttony. Grasping. A worm in your blessing

fragile apples on the counter / collect to rot.

The real era was gradient and dependent on what Merleau-Ponty calls illness, ‘a complete form of existence’. I lost a normal form but what I found was the shimmer conundrum of the shape of you, California, a rice harvest of shiny red-blue tears to grow a purple flower, you guessed it.

Possession.

Pearly beads, the slasher heartfire of a bold new vision

touching me soft jealous of cornfields

Hellbound in egress, dark glow, December’s acupuncture of clouds.

How can something so big feel so cosy?

The creature is god.

Told myself I’d scrub mould from the bathroom today. Flux glow from the dirt that is given us to know the worst.

A given thing: music is grieving.

I wrap the vine around me in the hope of fruiting, or any violet outcome is fine. You bake a good pastiche like an electric goddess, cancelling plans all the better to scream at the stars.
Loop trope.
Hold yourself soft or hard, by the collar or hand, by moonlight
tripping in Finnieston
and in Yorkhill and by the masticated night
which is always online
in the digest of even the worst
‘The Flower Called Nowhere’

Mothering the subgenre of oblong buildings, bliss our heart this hurt. You essay your way to music but is it not your allergies that crystallise accomplice to the throat of time? Thank you, thank you for the mystery. It’s so late.

And we love this crescent moon

for all intelligence is the art of rupture

Falling asleep at the movies

And I am choking for a sweetness that really sees me.

Some italics are lyrics taken from Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022).

Solids

Corpuscles spit constantly from the idea of sleep so I begin to fear it. Blood in the morning, metallic taste, no sweetness left from the Corsodyl but we try. Bits of shared housing make their way into my art, particulate matters: the gunshots pop pop, just fireworks; the neighbourhood yaptastic chihuahua called Barry; the pyrotechnics of teenage boozing which take place at the end of my street. A fully red tracksuit, a purple tracksuit, a secret shop which sells brownies laced with weed. Brown paper parcels with rips in them. Which Christmas ruined everything. Clicking dream materials of remembering scent, coming out with bundles of abundant orchids. Impossible for them to flourish here. Yet I coruscate brightly as if after surgery. If I could work with the wallpaper swirls in my dreams I would

put them into comets, then sentences.

Explosives can fire in space. They can’t disperse a tornado. In the hands of amateurs, the fireworks emit more smoke than is desirable. I go out to the smoke-laced cold and see a glow belonging to the moment I want. It’s over there. It’s so close.

Tomorrow’s a needle in my arm.

Tinnitus is the sound of the universe.

Mush

Bataille wrote ‘affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or a spit’. Losing the self in formlessness is ‘in common with erotic perversion’ and also ‘death’. I’ve always wondered what it felt like to have a galaxy embrace you. All the buried stars popping off underground where your meadow is a whole erogenous zone. Swish the mint wash around my mouth and spit. Blood. Sky stuff.

O how I’d love to swallow wholly and be done with something, star self, in its millions.

Bataille: ‘I propose to admit, as a law, that human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds; this notion has, in itself, a certain logical force. If elements are put together to form a whole, this can easily happen when each one loses, through a rip in its integrity, a part of its own being, which goes to benefit the communal being’.

Open wide?

Our toothaches in sync and the sky gone down, its scroll won’t work. Clouds clot rain in our gums, I feel sorry for them.

What do I owe you?

Haven’t eaten anything crunchy and good for several weeks, I’ve lost count, there was that pizza at Little Italy that was the last good thing, dripping with goats cheese and artichokes. Formlessness. A gnarly tooth set back in your mouth, meaning something then the lack of it. We drank whisky where the doorman made me empty my huge bag and explain what Marxism was. I let alcohol numb my jaw and stumbled, I was upstairs, sleep weeping in lieu of sleep in a bed, in a travel lodge imagining myself like Sean said to be a larva in a honey colony.

Growing especially acquainted with mush again, less wisdom, I develop fresh desires for attachment. I’m baby for a while, wanting. Scrambled egg, porridge, cherry kefir, refried beans, applesauce, marmalade for no reason, chocolate ice cream, melted cheese, lentil soup, sweet potato, oat milk. Mush has sentience. In your mouth you have its true formlessness and you become one with it. Literally the last few days I’m scrambled, soupy, result of melt. I wanted to be licked thoroughly to nothingness, just this sweetness at the back of your throat.

Jealous of hard edges, hipbones, infrastructure.

Happy Cunny October.

Dentist with claws in my dreams, dentist with dog food in a bowl for me, dentist with a very tall pylon, dentist with a sabre the length of god.

Spider in my shower, spider tattooing itself to my nail, spider has form. Style. Spider in each of my eyes.

Redistribute anything of meat that remains. Bataille wrote of eruptions, necessary expenditures, ‘laceration’. No more content.

You must let the blood clot. No coffee for five days.

Poetics of mush: reduce itself down, a sauce made with the juices released from thought. Tasty essences and tastelessness itself. V Covidian feeling: the only taste is mould, garlic, capers. Salting my kale. You said something.

It hurts to smile!

Bataille, Georges, 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, trans. by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Category: reflections