books – mariaology

Intro for Maria Hardin 1/11/25

Pamphlets titled Sick Story spread into a spiral on a wooden table

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a snippet of Mayer’s Story:

Voices fall.

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

The time or place of starting.

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

Lamp, lucite and plastic.

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

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

that way.

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

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

Here’s Maria Hardin, thanks everyone.

🌹

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

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

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

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

New book: The Indigo Hours

🦋🌫️🍋‍🟩The Indigo Hours…forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books

In 2018, I wrote a novella about erratic romance/Romance and the lyrical space-times of its (im)possibility. The fictional ~situationship at the heart of this work is stretched into, over and through various places — real and imagined — which the narrator digs into as pockets of presence and meaning. With its wandering, non-linear plot, I’d describe The Indigo Hours as ambient fiction. It’s a little eclipse of a book. It was ambiently written (leisurely, over one summer, as a dare) and may invite ambient reading. Which is to say, a textual experience more inclined to ‘going round’ a thing, attuning to its surrounds, getting lost, adjusting the frequency of (dis)interest. This is like dating a semi-transparent person. To adore the ghosts of both of you. How might love halo or envelope one’s personhood? How might love’s presence be felt ambiently in the objects and subjects of everyday life? The work tests love against memory, song, travel and friendship. I was interested in the phenomenon of blue — specifically indigo — as a desiring filter. Indigo as a singularity. Indigo as language of variable opacity. Denim wash (to go someplace). The supernatural inflection of indigo children (as a vocalised attempt at performing divergence of attention, durée and feeling). The book is full of aura, fleeting connections, music, art, intimacy and loss. It will be out on Hallowe’en, 31st October 2025.

Some nice things people have said:

The Indigo Hours’ lyrical prose, daubed from a free-associating palette of sensory psychedelia, becomes a portal into a ‘blossomy blossomy realm of the possible,’ where sadness is a sexuality, jealousies cause for celebration, and love a drunken texture. Painterly, tender, and spatially generous, this affecting novella rewards re-reading, like a magic eye that reveals a new image, and perhaps new self, with every glance.

— Poppy Cockburn

The Indigo Hours is watery fortification. Beneath li’l triads of asterisk constellations, Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports, where feeling wretched wandering midnight miles is a complex freedom, as exposure on cobalt-lit webcams, dozing/dosing to dub deep trap techno, bruises so Blühen. Yet under cosmic circumstances that augur heartbreak, Maria gifts us the deep assurance of ancient-blue auras and a languageful love pulsing constant. For insomniacs-or-otherwise against analgesia’s ‘“who cares”’, a most vital and tender-prone tonic.

— Amy Grandvoinet

Preorder now from the publisher.

x x x x x x x

Languishing, cute is in the world!

In August 2022, which legitimately feels a whole fat wormhole ago, Ian Macartney and I found ourselves working in Edinburgh for part of the summer. We met up at after-hours cafes (more prevalent in the capital, what you playing at Glasgow?) and walked around the Botanical Gardens where the staff promised ~*’Instagram flowers’*~ and we talked about our hopes and dreams and struggles as booksellers and teachers. Part of the emergent narrative concerned utopian ideals of Scottish infrastructure, where one could zip to Lerwick in a hyperloop heartbeat (all élan, not El*n) or at the very least catch a local bus on time, or unlock a hidden realm below the loch of Linlithg(l)ow. Part of it was about friendship, love and pop music. We were listening nonstop to Caroline Polachek and feeling okay about it. Pretty good actually. There was her vocal flipping over the crags, at sunset. I remember purifying my heart with orange liquor. Wearing a lot of lilac. Bleeding ink into industrial bedsheets. We were thinking about pivotal points where our childhoods overlapped with culture. We wrote things in documents and met in the months ahead. I did a lot of chaos cycles, late, trying to meet Ian at say, the Mitchell Library to go over some edits. A lot of awful things happened in the months intervening but there was this document we could splash land into and like turn on the light. Poetry’s coy ambience zonked up to warp speed. I liked doing this project a lot. I’m glad it’s in the world.

I think it’s in the same universe as say, An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun and Ian’s 2024 essay for Futch Journal, ‘solarity, reclaimed’.

We’re publishing the full collection, Languishing, cute with the wonderful Tapsalteerie, an indie press based in rural Aberdeenshire. Ian’s worked with them before via their pamphlet imprint Stewed Rhubarb Press and they published some of my poems in the 2019 anthology, edited by Calum Rodger, titled makar/unmakar: twelve contemporary poets in Scotland. We’re big fans of Duncan Lockerbie, Tapsalteerie’s founder and editor, who does so much for Scottish poetry and beyond.

We’re also publishing, thanks to the exquisite printing of Earthbound Press, a separate riso pamphlet of b-sides titled The Gate. Look out for that at our launch events…

From the publisher

languishing, cute presents a collection of jittery missives that propels the speculative Scottish canon of Morgan, Gray and Mitchison into a maximalist ‘high femme goth surrealism’ via hyperpop, Celtic futurism and digital culture. Here the poets tend towards e-pistolary contemplations of retro-adolescence, fizzy ecology and mercurial slippy gurlhood to complicate notions of Scottish identity, nationhood, ecology, nostalgia and more.

Nice things people have said:

languishing, cute is the opposite of a flyting — that traditional bare-knuckles fight between two poets. Rather, the two poets here offer their worlds to each other in the gift of friendship and they listen back: it’s not a duel, it’s a jewel. Where they meet is in a place of Anglophone avant-garde stimulants — locating codes include Francesca Lisette’s Teens, Edwin Morgan, Tim Atkins and Peter Manson — and the dancefloor has Bunny Is A Rider pumping out in up-melancholy and autotune. At times this is glitch-poetry, funny, para-kitsch and mesmeric. At other times there are the amplitudes of tenderness and self-effacement in a palette of citrus and greenest day-glo. What’s also fascinating is the pressing together of the virtual and its tics with its mineral and viscose underpin, all via the very human. It’s a leap from body/mind to capital/digital and back again, flickering, a visit to Silicon Brig-a-Doon you’ll want to be the first to Insta.

– Richard Price

[…] Messy as a teenage tumblr, flashy as a strobe light, this is two exceptionally generous poets bouncing off the walls of the backrooms with the energy of a thousand monster energies… here ~The Glitch~ is not a glitch but a stitch between windows, the glue between a b2b set, the rhythmic green hills of algorithmic infinity … and yet these re-mixes and e-mails traverse an internet of metal and cable, the business of poetry is conducted by staples through sheets of reconstituted tree::: there’s something old-school, decidedly analogue about all this. It feels like you could feel it. It feels like the push of a button, the caress of a bright cool screen. Actually no it feels warm and coarse, a cosy transmission rumbling, re-tuning itself like you’re flicking from station to radio station, flickering between noise & dialectical noise, patterns emerging in the static as the ether unknots itself, and the stuff of life comes spilling out […]

– Dan Power

Endless aureate refreshment from Maria Sledmere and Ian Macartney, languishing, cute is a collection with all its push notifications turned on that still finds headspace to pay attention on the DL to form and poetic inheritance. There’s Sledmere’s elliptical take on William Carlos Williams’ fridge raid (with Kylie Minogue R osé instead of plums), the odd sestina, and plentiful nods to that Scottish experimentalist Edwin Morgan range from embedded songs of the Loch Nes[s]presso Monster to Macartney’s predictive geographies in time-travelling poems indebted to Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland.

With spins to further Scottish topographies from Maybole to Lerwick, Sledmere and Macartney are often found shuttling east and west ‘w/ eloquent glitches’ across Scotland’s central belt, heading increasingly into CAPITALS when Macartney’s voice announces us into Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley/Edenbruh/the London of Scotland.

The internet’s vertigo is never far away from poems presenting like listicles. Sadly for any wannabe monetised content, in languishing, cute these poets may be trading futures, but their hacked hypernature is funding nobody’s wellness retreat.

– Iain Morrison

ORDER HERE FROM THE PUBLISHER

LAUNCH EVENTS

24th April, 7pm — The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow (free entry – details)

11th May, 5pm — Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh (arrive promptly! – details)

Every book I read in 2024

In loose order of reading. This year I made a vow to not let work ‘get in the way’ of reading. I was talking to a colleague about how every subject/specialism has one thing they are supposed to be really good at and actually kind of suck at. We agreed English & Creative Writing staff are often pretty bad at this thing that should be their lifeblood: reading. To prioritise reading is to affirm the necessity of thinking. I felt so burned out with the circuitry of the 2010s and the zoomageddon of lockdown, all those screens. Reading in scroll-time. I still love reading in scroll-time, but on the move only. Or in the midst of something else doing. It took me three years to get back into immersive, situated, FOCUSED reading again. I mean staying up all night to finish a book, crying at sentences, holding something to the light and putting it down and stopping and starting because you want to savour something and all the world of it following you into dreams. All reading started to plug into work. Good work. Channels. If I’m honest, I haven’t written a lot this year. I needed a break from concepts. I did a lot of editing and proofing and reading. I wrote a lot of emails and did a LOT of marking. I think of marking as writing time. It eats into writing time but it’s also a practice of sentence-making, observation, editing, rewriting. Eileen Myles says somewhere that when they write people recommendation letters and do interviews etc that’s a form of writing. So really there are very few ‘fallow’ periods. You’re always writing something to someone, for something or not. I have written over a monograph’s worth of student feedback this year, maybe more. Each paragraph of feedback is a micro-essay, a snapshot of orientation, a patchwork sample which stitches multiple discourses (genre, criteria, instinct, history) in ascent to encouragement and improvement. So all that feedback, I’m trying to say, means I also read a hell of a lot of student work. Hundreds of scripts. Marking trains my eye as a reader and writer. Still learning to toggle between different kinds of reading. Refusing the active/passive binary in favour of a continuum of generative involvement. A lot of what I read below was in-between other reading, but some of it is more explicitly ‘work’ reading. Or: reading as a way of connecting with friends, colleagues — their beautiful brains. Or: preparation for something as yet unknown. Working through personal syllabi. Refreshing the palette.

Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (2006)

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, Sebastian Truskolaski, Antonia Grousdanidou (2023)

Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, trans. by Penny Hueston (2021/2023)

Joey Frances, Takeaway Night (2024)

Teju Cole, Black Paper (2021)

George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)

Megan Ridgeway, The Magpie (2024)

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. by John E. Woods (1924)

Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies (2021)

Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)

Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (1986)

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)

Oli Hazzard, Sleepers Awake (2024)

Courtney Bush, Every Book is About the Same Thing (2021)

Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahic (2016)

McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)

Rachael Allen, God Complex (2024)

Elle Nash, Deliver Me (2024)

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2021)

Andrew Meehan, Instant Fires (2022)

Michael Eigen, Ecstasy (2001)

Noah Ross, The Dogs (2024)

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death (2024)

Barbara Browning, The Gift (2017)

Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class (2021)

Courtney Bush, I Love Information (2023)

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)

Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist (2011)

Hilary White, Holes (2024)

Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances (2024)

Deborah Meadows, Representing Absence (2004)

Holly Pester, The Lodger (2024)

Terese Marie Mailhot, Heartberries (2018)

Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015)

Lauren Levin, Nightwork (2021)

Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins, trans. by Philip Roughton (2016)

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024)

Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019)

Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia (2024)

Joanne Kyger, On Time (2015)

Jean Day, Late Human (2021)

Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (2003)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)

Ben Smith, Doggerland (2019)

Ricky Monaghan Brown, Terminal (2024)

Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (2023)

Joseph Mosconi, Fright Catalog (2013)

Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)

Haytham El Wardany, The Book of Sleep, trans. by Robin Moger (2020)

Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere (2022)

Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (2024)

Brian Whitener, The 90s (2022)

Jamie Bunyor, A stone worn smooth (2022)

Lucy Ives, The Hermit (2016)

Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (2001)

Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)

Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (1973)

Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth (2020)

Lindsey Boldt, Weirding (2022)

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970)

Hannah Levine, Greasepaint (2024)

Joe Luna, Old News (2024)

Maggie O’Sullivan, earth (2024)

Ian Macartney, sun-drunk (2024)

Sébastien Bovie, Longing for Lo-fi: Glimpsing back through technology (2023)

Steven Zultanski, Relief (2021)

Lionel Ruffel, I Can’t Sleep. trans. by Claire Finch (2021)

Noémi Lefebvre, The Poetics of Work, trans. by Sophie Lewis (2021)

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (2019)

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker, Spoilers (2024)

Ed Steck, David Horvitz Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2021)

Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, Joanne Kyger: Letters to & From (2012)

Lyn Hejinian, Fall Creek (2024)

Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, trans. by Ethan Mitchell (2024)

Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)

Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)

Miye Lee, Dallergut Dream Department Store, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee (2023)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 1 (2006/2010)

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Ian Macartney, Darksong (2024)

Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl (2000)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 2 (2007/2017)

Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes (2014)

Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega, trans. by Saskia Vogel (2022)

Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (1985)

Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006)

Daniel Feinberg, Some Sun (2024)

Maria Hardin, Sick Story (2022)

Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, trans. by Sophie Collins (2022)

Nadia de Vries, Thistle, trans. by Sarah Timmer Harvey (2024)

Rodge Glass, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024)

Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (2024)

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica (2024)

Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists (2024)

Andrew Meehan, Best Friends (2025)

Courtney Bush, Isn’t this Nice? (2019)

Meghann Boltz, Cautionary Tale (2021)

Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood (2024)

Dalia Neis, The Swarm (2022)

Ian Macartney, Secret Agent Orca Twelve (2024)

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night (2010)

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1982)

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

Molly Brodak, Bandit (2016)

Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986)

Anna Gurton-Wachter, My Midwinter Poem (2020)

Midsummer Song (Hypercritique)

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

These were my original research questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In s(w)ervice of attention

I wanna show up for poetry every day for the rest of my life. There’s this word for when food continues to cook itself — carry-over — like tortiglioni warm and slippery in the colander needing to be eaten. I wish poetry could do that. A. says it does, doesn’t it? When you remember a line sometime down the line and it occurs to you: a new meaning. Or when the poem you wrote marinades in the background all to be felt with alternative pressure. I guess to write then is to throw out your salt or chuck a glass of water behind you as you leave the door of the document. Poem to set out for the day each day.

When I say I want to show up for poetry it’s not just that I want to hear or write or feel it live. Is it that I want to pay it attention? Who or what is poetry and where do I go to do this?

Right now, I’m going to fiction.

Recently I attended a joint book launch at Waterstones, Glasgow with Elle Nash and Kirsty Logan. Nash said the thing about fiction, her philosophy, is that she wants it to bring the reader to their knees. Logan said she wanted fiction to be like telling the reader a story. Both are forms of surrendering and/or attention. I don’t remember being held in the cosy space of storytelling at school because my brain was off on its own adventures. I categorically could not pay attention. Or maybe I practised another form of attention. I had it for free, and didn’t need to pay anyone anything. Something I was scolded for. Maria, pay attention. Was I failing to pay some kind of respect to the storyteller? Part of me wanted that form of listening attention so badly, to be wrapped up in the words of another and so in the folds of the room, but I just couldn’t surrender like that. I would look around the class and be hyper aware of a hundred things at once. The pins and needles in my feet; the subtle vocal inflections of the reader; the question of whether or not this teacher had sex and surely they had because they said they had kids but could I imagine them having sex and then when I tried I could not stop imagining them having sex and it was awful; what would there be for dinner tonight and would I have to cook it; does anyone in this room have a cute dog; when will I be old enough to smoke; which of these characters should I care about; why does my nose itch; when will I get my first period; why does my friend think everyone’s a lesbian; is everyone a lesbian; what does the word bedraggled mean; I think I know what lethargy means; what is the word for….; when can we go outside; I hate going outside; wonder why the publisher gave the book that cover; wonder why there are dots in the ceiling tiles; whose body odour is that etc etc etc. I’ve already forgot what this paragraph was supposed to do or say. At some point in my school years I would just nod off.

I have never been someone who could digest a book, slowly and thoughtfully, and then be able to recount the significant actions and characters and narrative highlights back in a considered, ordered and clarified way. I come at it sideways and can’t talk about it without finding a new angle each time. I need to talk to people about books who can work with the zig zag.

I need writing to ‘strike’ like a match or lightning. I need to read to fall off the edge of reading.

Piece of feedback from a student: you know you teach better off the book.

Been thinking a lot about what that means and what the book is and how to cultivate a kindness towards an open style of teaching.

Been thinking about the way Emma Stone drives that aubergine Dodge muscle in the new Yorgos Lanthimos movie, Kind of Kindness (2024).

Sometimes I can’t pay attention to my own teaching. It happens on auto-pilot and I’m saying things and all of a sudden it’s the breathless bell supplement of the passing hour and people are packing their bags, and bizarrely I’m starving and it’s over. What does it mean to trust the other self that takes over? To walk into every classroom unsure of what will happen?

Sometimes, crash. Often, swerve.

I would describe my reading style as lackadaisical, dyspeptic, errant, passionate, half-awake. Why would I expect my students also to listen with 100% unadulterated attention, when this is how I go about my own learning?

At her recent Good Press event for the launch of Lessons of Decal, Sophie Seita spoke of asking her audiences to ‘absorb [her] words like a piece of music, where the words come in and out of consciousness’. To be given permission for that form of drift and daydream to be okay is a huge relief. If I’m at some event where it feels cool to whip out your phone and notebook, I usually enjoy it a lot more. It’s relaxing to pay attention by not paying all your attention. Allowing my attention to go stereo is sometimes the best way to listen (this was one of the things I loved about the poet Callie Gardner, the way they would often whip out a notebook during a reading, and by extension granting a kind of permission for others to do the same). Seita spoke on what a non-extractive form of attention might be, and might it be that more ambient, absorbing, blurring and responsive mode. I sometimes let the sentences snake around me, other times they cut little jewels, hardening and cleaving and polishing the soft matter of my thoughts. Sometimes I mishear, overhear. In lockdown readings and lectures, I’d participate heartily in the flowing ticker-tape of the Zoom chat and its various overspills onto group chats and discords. I liked the sense of multiplying conversations happening simultaneously, emoji splurging.

⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ⟡﮳﮲✧﮲⬫꙳⋄﮳⋆꙳⬫꙳✦﮳⋄⋄✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳﮳⋄⋆꙳✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ⟡﮳﮲✧﮲⬫꙳⋄﮳⋆꙳⬫꙳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳﮳⋄✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳﮳⋄⋆꙳✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ﮲

I went recently to Inside Voices, a free night of ambient music and poetry held at King Tuts and hosted by anoraq. I love these nights because I always fill up my notebook. There were readings from Medha Singh and Ian Macartney, a performance by Dronehopper. While listening, I pondered especially what the percussive parts of language were. Little coughs, plosives, hovers of breath while the performer altered their pace of attention.

I want a manifesto for ambient attention. The closest I have found so far, aside from the classic 1978 Brian Eno piece, is a university project: ‘A Manifesto for Ambient Literature’ (2017) co-written by the Ambient Literature team. Here’s a snippet:

I take this to mean affirmation of porosity between texts, but nonetheless one that holds true to the material reality of a text’s construction.

There’s an iPhone that crops up in some kind of poem and whatever it’s doing there, I start to see it running the whole text, a little monstrously. The poetic subject becoming a mediating interface. When I asked the jetpack AI to give me more emoji string, it granted me a handful more stars.

I like books for being (in)complete worlds perforated with holes (words and the gaps between them). A night (sky), variably rich.

My lover sees me drop the book and flop sideways three times before taking it off me and shutting the light. I try to read and the whir of sentences stirring up is somehow the kind of stimulus to send me to sleep.

When I wake early, as I often do, to the dawn screeching of gulls, I keep the light off and try to read by the dark. It’s every sixth or seventh word I miss. The full stops slide away, smudge into dimness, and I read sentences continually — sloshing into one another.

Sometimes I think I read off the book. Like, the reading comes not when my eyeballs are actually skimming the lines on the page but in some kind of preliminary or afterglow moment.

What about the content?

I once had to do a medical questionnaire that asked me if I ever struggled to understand the motivations and emotional behaviours of fictional characters. This was a fascinating question. I let it cook for a few days before answering on the numbered scale.

Hovering with my ballpoint, I kept thinking of that Virginia Woolf quote from ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924): ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’.

Maybe I didn’t know why characters did things, even as I sat in rooms and offices and Zooms with students, discussing with great sincerity and intent the mechanics and motivations of fictional bone collectors, world-savers, serial killers, suffering girlfriends etc. Maybe I could only attend, momentarily, their tendencies; and so fathom a pattern or path from there.

What does it mean to give your full attention, to pay attention or to offer it?

I’ve started to think paying attention means there might be such a thing as ‘attention debt’. Is that the same as ‘attention deficit’? If I were to somehow skip the NHS diagnostic waiting lists to find myself looking at a special time-release pill on a silver platter, would that pill buy me attention? And would I somehow have to give it back, eventually, foreclosed or with massive accruals of cognitive interest? I start to think about the speed of my heartbeat in time to attention.

When I press my ear to your chest, and it’s your heartbeat I hear: am I witnessing the cost of attention?

Paying attention = being a cognitive agent of capitalism?

Does the heart hold the indelible mark of other attentions?

I would save all my heartbeats for you in a heartbeat. I hold them back from work. I save them in service of love and its ghosts.

Sometimes I want to be sharp; other times it’s better to blur.

Why do we say ‘pay attention’ and not ‘give attention’ or ‘do attention’? There’s a pretty useful article on this over at Grammarphobia:

English acquired the verb “pay” in the early 1200s by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French (it was paiier or paier in Old French), according to the OED.

The Old French verb meant, among other things, “to be reconciled to someone,” Oxford says, reflecting its classical Latin ancestor pacare (to appease or pacify), derived from pax (peace).

As the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains, “The meaning in Latin of pacify or satisfy developed through Medieval Latin into that of pay a creditor, and so to pay, generally, in the Romance languages.”

Some of the earliest meanings of “pay” in English are obsolete today—including to pacify, or to be pleasing or satisfactory to someone.

But senses relating to handing over money—or whatever is figuratively owed to someone—are just as old, and of course they’re still with us.

If I say pay attention, I’m not exactly doing so in the service of pacifying or pleasing. Much more likely that you’d take the phrase the way you’d take ‘pay your debt’ or ‘pay your letting agent’.

I don’t want attention to be an extractable value, but it is. We know that most of presenteeism at work is about being able to perform your paying attention for the sake of appearances. It isn’t really about productivity.

What if I let go of that presenteeism in other areas of life which demand attention? What if we got much more into improvising what makes for good listening? What if I wanted to watch television as a way of processing a complex emotional conundrum while also laughing my ass off at another life?

Would I write more? Would I understand human character?

Would I ~frolic in the generative plenitude of non-instrumental value?

✦

In 2017/2018, I saw Iain Morrison perform some of his Moving Gallery Notes at Market Gallery, back when it was in Dennistoun. The video I’ve linked above begins something like ‘right now, the time is 97%’. I feel my attention brimming like a healthy battery. Morrison’s poetic works comprise notes made while at various gallery events and artist talks. He describes the project as ‘a sequence that samples a chain of events, encounters, conversations, meetings, empty spaces and all the other things that make up the life of an arts organisation making its way through changing contemporary contexts’. Listening to the work is less about being presented with ‘content’ and more about being provided a poetic architecture in which to indulge great reverie. The content itself is also fascinating. Morrison’s gallery notes encompass everything from embodied experience to the yield of eavesdropping. The initial ‘splurge’ or ‘stream’ of notes goes handwritten onto the page, from the context of an event, and eventually gets whittled into lineated poetry. I found this description from Morrison’s blog, Permanent Positions, particularly useful:

The reason ‘notes’ is in the title of this and my earlier series, is because my first step for each poem is to choose an event at the gallery and write notes during it. When I’m making the notes I mostly write continuously, allowing whatever I’m thinking about – whether it’s things people are saying, or things occurring by association in my head – to stream onto the page, at the speed I can write at. My objective while doing this is to not worry about the appropriateness or relevance of what I write down. I try to get material down on paper, and there’s a hope that I can use my embodied presence – a thinking body in the space – to make myself into a recorder, one that acknowledges its subjectiveness, of the event. So this stage of writing can be a splurge. It usually is. I will edit these notes at the next part of the process.

This seems to me an ambient method of composition. It is open to digression, refuses to ignore the body and sees the self as both subject and ‘recorder’. Not so much Spicer’s radio here as the ZOOM H1n versatile pocket recorder.

Moving Gallery Notes is of course also a work of ekphrasis.

For my birthday, K. gave me a copy of Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024). Halfway into this delicious compilation of fiction and nonfiction is an essay on ekphrasis which discusses, among other things, Rindy Sam’s kissing of a Cy Twombly canvas in 2007 and Eley Williams’ short story ‘Smote, or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley’ (2015). The idea of ekphrasis is presented as a kiss, a mark left more or left indelibly from one work to the next. Soon I will write a poem called ‘kissing cy twombly’ because aside from the brilliant parenthesis of the act itself, sullying a white canvas and paying one ceremonial euro to the artist for the privilege, it sounds like a CSS song or something. So I will commence the writing of the poem from the idea that I am speaking to Lovefoxxx or sprinkling tongue-glitter on crayola-smeared Moleskine.

I write this painting my nails Essie (un)guilty pleasures and trying not to leave such a mark on my MacBook keys. What shade of green is this? It’s too late. Everyone who has seen my laptop knows the key letters are tapped out beyond repair. Skin friction has caused the letters to smudge and blur into pools of acidic white light.

Milton writes of ‘th’ Arch Angel’, about to speak, in Paradise Lost: ‘Attention held them mute’. Meanwhile, ‘Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth’.

Have I cried on my laptop sufficient to melt its keys? Do I write from speech or silence?

The OED reminds me that one can ‘attract, call, draw, arrest, fix‘ attention.

Thou art to wink.

What if we wept for attention. Made its call. Applied the right fixative.

Now we say something like ‘oh that therapy session totally ate‘.

✦

What I like about blogs is that they are deliberately undercooked. You basically serve them up to the world before you’ve had time to stew, finesse and perfect the product. This one I wrote this weekend while procrastinating emails, on a rickety bus and then rushed with sips of coffee before heading out to a festival. It’s pretty al dente okay sorry you’re gonna have to chew on it. I like that I can look at a blog post and think ‘that’s a fucking mess’ and then immediately post it.

I do think I am capable of being floored by good fiction. When I read Nash’s latest novel, Deliver Me (2024), I was sick with flu but the flu was on a kind of continuum with the book. I kept texting everyone: ‘no one writes sex and the body like Elle Nash!’. I read it feverishly, dreamed in it and let certain scenes linger in my psyche long after I’d folded the last page. I read it with a curiosity I don’t think I’ve had since the way I used to read the internet. By which I mean: I devoured its voices.

Similar thing happened when I devoured Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) in January. I was listening to the audiobook version and continually would have to stop what I was doing (walking to work, cleaning, washing my hair) to make copious notes. All such fiction makes me weak at the knees. And you know, it isn’t the characters or the plot that do this to me, but the language. Its essaying of life, presence, intimacy, repetition. The way narrative is a temporal prosody conducting attention.

I liked hearing about Nash and Logan’s manifestos for fiction, what they hoped to give readers, because it made me realise my own liminal, elusive bar for contact. I think about the text as a space, not just for the conveyance of meaning but explicitly for bearing its im/possibility and by extension, its potential for ellipsis, disappearance. That’s where the fun begins.

Maybe what I wanna do is s(w)erve attention. Keep showing up.

cute entry // yellow tulips

cute entry / / yellow tulips
London, April 2024

I was out somewhere reciting my love for Adidas with wishes thrice – décolletage! – and music, the train arrived on time. I wanted to ask about your shoulder and you said there was so much Guinness after the football, the rest of the world was a rumour. We had all these non-sequiturs to like, communicate the fizzy little spirals. I was like an ice cream sky for you! A spring-rush blossom you! Tapering, tapering. Went to buy salad from downstairs, went to run around putting jeans on. New jeans. Matte suede lips. Blue Sunday. Covent Garden was glistening with consumerism and the new good weather. Every time I’m in London it’s sunnier, warmer, more deniable; so much the smell of pollution & impossible flowers, pollution & impossible flowers
the city I really learned to love was so expensive you could only love so much before the money felt
mouth garbage
of gorgeous surplus:
What I kept feeling about London was…what I had kept of something & nothing a type of ‘neutral metabolic beverage’ bought at room temperature in the clothing store – spontaneous purchase!
Questions to fall in love to……what’s your favourite checkout compulsion? To shoplift gum? To flirt with cashier? To buy an oaten flute and play it to god? I was so concerned about the woman in Asda with the bleeding nailbeds and I kept recommending apricot oil and lots of sleep, I’d been through it too, and my Nan from the chemo. What our nails tell us. Mine used to be silver striped and blood-let-violet, now they are cracked with the memory.

The rain came out the day I went home. Lucky I got to bring my book to London. Oh god it was beautiful the matinee I was nervously also on Guinness and lots of intersections of arrival, read first, took ponytail out like to say she is me now. Cinders. The night before, D. and I had gone to see some bands at the George Tavern and we talked through a few sets just because it had been so long since we’d talked and I wanted to know all about work and love and she said something amazing about how it gets better every day, like you just want to find out so much about the person, you want to figure out the total every degree of how they think and what they feel about something – this plenitude. I said that to my friend last night like the thing about a successful relationship is surely that every day it gets better in that you change together, you change each other, you discover things about yourself that would irrevocably not be possible to discover unless you met this person and you change each other’s day and daily and that’s not like tree branches curled around each other it’s more like mycelia underground, so much unseen, more like alchemy. So when you break apart, you never really sever. You are cellular bonded. Their energy surges in you – what – a bus ride home, a voice note, a quiet cry in the night. Something said, something unspoken. Unexpected holding of hands. Curly little yes.

I reread The Hour of the Star over breakfast sauerkraut and the flicker of lighter-light out at the end was it. So easy ideation; not to say I made plans, just that the impulse had become my little sister. You have to find your light.

I was lighting up to go to the next thing.

‘Beautiful though it is, it’s just walking really,’ said the woman behind me on the train, talking about the countryside.

She also said:

99% of people who study to be dentists end up being dentists
99% of people who study art don’t end up being artists

My brother and I stay up til 2am listening to hardstyle and reminiscing 2000s absurdism like it’s our good soft history and I suppose it is. Castles in the sky, pretty green eyes, quiver, save me, braveheart, moonlight, sunshine after the rain, bits and pieces, concrete angel, true love never dies.

I want to exhibit gelatinous entrails of everything we ever said.

Someone not new I met again talked about making love in a cornfield, listening to Sting. That the not-not-new of it all shared love for Eva Cassidy broke a little nerve platonism so much that I would melt into what we made awhile. Nightcap. Fortuitous timing of trains.

J. said I looked about twelve in the picture. I said this is my heartwood: surly, surly.

The readings:

Jane’s brilliant poise – poetry delivers the body.
Ellis’s infinite – I was so elated to meet them finally ❤
Rob’s plasma poems enamoured and the fuck devastation of elegy.
Karenjit’s percussive grace.

The readings were gems I will live with. I took videos but for some reason couldn’t upload them anywhere, but I have them.

Noodles at Silk Road backscattering miso. Hospitality stories. Stafford yellow fields. Lambs around Penrith.

Intimate fish tank of the Zoom reading with my Krupskaya label mates. I nearly read with the AR halo. Two in one day.

I slept thick treacle.

“kept swelling with the sense of this year as the best, it keeps getting better”
“wonderful”
“Oh rly?”

The other maria.

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

Tag: books