Tag: covid

I don’t have things to tell you

There’s a new book coming out. Ribbons of collaborative epistolaries with Mau Baiocco, presented in skinny columns, writ between 2022-2025, the years of emergence from lockdown and still in the viral fug of Covid, its long durée and continuous shaping of economic, social and poetic relations. On the 23rd March 2022, Mau writes to me: ‘I don’t have / things to / tell you but / to run along / it’. The shaky glitter of that ‘it’ can be traced across the whole collection, morphing in what it refers to — a French horn, an original thought, a flower painted by Degas. It’s a bit like a syntactical kaleidoscope where the grammar changes according to voice, something to look through, the long telescopic look in (to another’s brain) that’s poetry. Blink and you’ll miss it. We wrote to each other with the initial burst of correspondent excitement: back when I was a graduate teaching assistant working in one university and a part-time, fixed term lecturer in another, striking intermittently at both as part of a long campaign that began before lockdown; back when Mau was working in a gallery in Leeds and metabolising observational extremes into playful meditations on value, art and human behaviour. In the course of the book we get sick, have birthdays, fly transatlantic, witness resigning cabinets, respond to so much art and music, write of many friends and loves, muse on various colours and substances. We run along.

To run along the length of a fabric is to cut, move, align parallel to the selvage, the warp yarns of the textile’s spine, along the grainline, running parallel, threads with the least amount of stretch, the highest strength — could this be our poetics? In the book, I write about a task I was given at primary school: to untangle the long streamer ribbons or dance wands we were given to play with at breaktime, in an effort to curb presumably our violent outbursts and bullying. O how we loved our e-numbers! And how we loved colours! These streamers were thick, luxurious, brightly coloured: red, green, yellow or blue. We would wave them around like it was May Day, loving the euphoria of colour until it got boring and then we’d joust with them, whacking the long plastic sticks against each other like swords. Why am I telling you this? For to write one another yielding the giant streamer pen would always result in a sort of euphoria, now to bounce into jousting, pretending that we were on ponies. As I write this, people are jousting on Lime bikes in London Fields and once again medievalism is trending.

However, there is or was no fight in us. Only energy of neon, some knots, a sing-along strong or louche. Our jousting wands become streaming rivers in möbius formation. Mau and I are gemini twins, having nurtured a sort of telepathy from years of exchanging gossip and poetry (including, with Luce Lovell, our sonnets for hooch), from years of standing in front of art, finding our painterly doubles, eating curry at the indoor market, flicking through chapbooks, reading Lee Harwood in the rain. The fight was to have this space to think, it slivered into the work of email, analogue in a perverse way to have this medium which didn’t expect an instant response. We found energy from what was around us. The little things to notice, plus: all of our friends. This was a book co-written in a way by a whole collective, wayward and not nameable. Joey Frances writes of this so well in his foreword to the book, ‘the conditions that mediate the possibilities of writing’, ‘comparing notes on all the shit we did and all the shit we could yet do’. Yes — I love the provisional curve of the ‘yet’, how future possibility spirals outwards in these poems because we needed to write with dream all the time, daydream and nocturnal slumbercore of the narrative variety, episodic flashes of light that tell us dull life could be otherwise. Our ribbons fray into threads of everyone.

We connect via the internet constantly, something worth saying and saying again. In lockdown, Mau and I would show up as wide-eyed UK poets in various international poetry Zooms — readings in New York most often, dreaming from face-tiles a city of stoners and sleepless lights. We kept a sidebar discussion going on a secret poetry Discord, blue-dark-deck that became the afterparty, the dingy bar. Mau would go to two events simultaneously on different computers. Now we would call that poetrymaxxing. I write of feeling ‘like the goddess modem / of puerile form’, somehow fused electrical to a higher grace via the tenement broadband that served my days. I am childishly silly and yet talking to gods, poets we love so much, the domestic dreameries of Bernadette Mayer, the ‘singing / perspirative’ of Jason Molina. Asking Peter Gizzi a question about light and speed via ~the chat, nervously in 2020. Our poetry metabolises that experience not as diaristic self-reflection but as chatty missive, epistemic flirtation. I like that now I know what you know, as you know I for I.

This book tries to pull everything in and yet still maintains the feeling of attempt, desirous of almost; a kind of delirious voice note written down, not quite getting to the point. A poetics of incomplete documentation and utopian meta-commentary on what we would need to fulfil our commitment to this undefined Project. A chemical obsession with what would be the right conditions to read each other, how to curate the perfect take, correspondence — a word that means to pledge, promise or to answer, with prefix of together, with, together-with-this-promise was to write a skinny poem. ‘I do not always understand what you say. / Once, when you said, across, you meant along. / What is, is by its nature, on display’ (Schuyler). Oh how we love James Schuyler. This poet at the window, embraced in the mortal combat of syntax, to paraphrase something Stephen Yenser wrote of Schuyler’s line breaks. We wanted the skinny, the crop of the day, for someone to bring us the lilies; we broke lines because to do so offered a sense of autonomy, almost like eating.

The first phase of the book has the heightened bubbling of new correspondence, moving quickly along, the feeling of having found a form. Curious and exploratory, performatives of witness and ‘psychological androgyny’ borrowed from the Romantics. The second phase of the book occurs when time jumps across from 16th July 2022 to 23rd April 2024. I’m back into Mau’s inbox with tales of the softest breakup. We ask if it’s worth trying again, we indulge into a leisurely to and fro, the poems feel different, there’s a shift in the language and from Saturn’s return, so much has changed and now we are both teaching, feeling out ‘life in the ashes’ and ‘the starry shared / humiliation of reading’. Is there a new self-consciousness in the form? Now it is something we move across…

…and we shape it into a book: I don’t have things to tell you, a title whose premise is refusal. Like the gemini tendency to answer the phone in burnout, saying I’ve got nothing and then launching into love’s digressive everything. The poems are presented mostly chronologically, excepting a centrefold poem of sorts, Mau’s poem on the occasion of visiting California, the aforementioned foreword by Joey Frances and a closing essay by me, ‘The skinny on the skinny’, followed by an index which collects the book’s referential whimsies.

We have continued the emails since finishing this manuscript, something submitted to the Strange Region open call at the start of the year and now being graciously published by Joe in Bristol. Joe has been amazing. He’s typeset the thing beautifully in triple columns, taken our linguistical quirks as a necessary poetics to preserve, found us a cover image of illustrated Martians worthy of the aspiring Spicerean forms within. In the book where the cover images originally hail from, Psychical Research and the Resurrection (1908), James H. Hyslop writes: ‘We went all around. The people are different in different places’. Yes, the kaleidoscope changes. That’s this book. The two of us swapping hats and cities.

You can preorder it now from the publisher, or catch us at our Glasgow launch on 21st November at MF Books. More dates to be announced soon. Please invite us to your city!

who can smell the tiny garden

drawing w/ Santiago Taberna

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Lyric Solarity

‘Notes on Lyric Solarity’ at Summer in the Way, Birkbeck University of London, 9th July 2022.

Video of a creative-critical paper delivered over the weekend at Birkbeck, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the87press and the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Below is an extract from the first half of the paper. A lot of this thinking is developed more fully in a forthcoming academic article.

As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. 
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. 

Today, I’m going to move fluidly between poetry and essay to present some nascent thoughts on lyric solarity. I want to suggest lyric solarity is a poetics in which solar imaginaries are linguistically mediated and refracted through the close rhythms, affects, sensoria and arts of noticing associated with the focalised energies of lyric poetry. Lyric solarity enacts an embodied poetics of dissolve, exposure, surplus, saturation and excess/residue: it offers a way of turning towards the sun, while helping us make, in the words of Imre Szeman, ‘commitments to reshaping’ the ‘existing infrastructures’ which underpin access to and distribution of energy. While the anthropocene, a contested epoch defined by humankind’s ascendance as geological agent, is often understood as an issue of scale, attending to the solar helps us think about planetary crisis in terms of distribution and density of harm, resources and changes to climate or energy. I take energy to mean both the power derived from physical or chemical resources, the property of matter and radiation manifest as a capacity to perform work, but also in the sense of an organism’s energy – their metabolism, vitality, ongoingness within the world, and its working demands or desires. What follows is less of an argument than a set of propositions and possibilities, a selection of field notes in search of lyric solarity.

  1. Sans Soleil

In Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil, often translated into English as sunless, we begin with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ash-Wednesday’: ‘Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place’. It begins again with an image of three children in Iceland, ‘an image of happiness’ accompanied by black film leader. The voiceover suggests that if viewers can’t find happiness in the image of the children ‘at least they’ll see the black’. The film is itself a kind of lyric documentary on human memory, how memory is fragile and so our recall of personal and political histories – especially on a global or even planetary scale – is inflected or reworked in the present. In the spring of 2020, I approached the film as a kind of memory place. I had never seen such spring sun in Glasgow, but due to Covid I was locked down inside my own sunless temple, or tenement. What follows violates, perhaps, Eliot’s insistence on the essential containment of space and time. Eliot, I guess, never used the internet. 

I was messaging the poet fred spoliar, and suddenly it was the solstice and we wanted to mark it. We began this remote collaboration, not in response to Marker’s film so much as through it, or some residue within it, a blemish or shine. A bright spot, a blind spot, a kind of fleck on its vision. We wrote remotely, wrote ‘live’ and in those hours of shared writing, we existed in a solar time: where solarity was a quality of memory, its absence our absence, and yet also speculation towards something better – waiting for rays of arrival. In that sense, the poem is about the uses and abuses of pastoral; about an ‘elsewhere’ to be written around, glimpsed, squinted at, but never quite accessed. It’s also about the temporal alignment of two people writing together. Lyric as a thought device for telecommunicating something of a paraworld hidden in language. I’d fall asleep with our phrases like film credits flashing behind my eyes. We wrote between the summer and winter solstices of 2020, we split lines with sun-cloud emoji. Here’s some of the opening sequence of the poem:  

Ultraviolet rose us

spilled into formless

unration of atoms

and we spend ourselves back, the day

extends pause,

folding up

in luxe ellipsis 

hills and hills 

of recessional cloud, cast debt 

between us, rolling one-sided 

to release it, all of I’m rain 

cast thru fierce aureate

disquietude, to not say 

hope this finds you, or 

nearest the soft motif of yr hair 

bright spots around the antisolar point

balayage of except champagne 

never sets. In a forest image / I cannot touch you 

or notify through light that drowsy reminder 

we are many. Something 

decorative / in the cold soak of sylvanshine 

gives up its entrance, the long day 

composed of such stills is lying 

back from its voyage. To say 

all of the land escapes / an exorbitant teardrop 

a teardrop. I have these ambient hands. 

I wring the leaves…

2. Solar Apocalypse

In Etel Adnan’s poetry sequence, The Arab Apocalypse (1989), the sun is variously a shapeshifting trickster, a totalising energy, an authority, a marker of time, a blinding force, a monster, a pool of blood. Here are some of Adnan’s lines taken from across the book: 

I took the sun by the tail and threw it in the river. Explosion. BOOM…

the sun is contaminated by the city

the sun has eaten its children

a sun rotten and eaten by worms floats over Beirut       silence is sold by the pound

eat and vomit the sun eat and vomit the war hear an angel explode

The brain is a sun STOP the sun is an eye

the sun’s atoms are incarnating in my flesh     STOP          STOP

The sun is a kind of virus, pulsing and multiplying, changing form and colour, nourishing and deadly, making things grow or die; a kind of white noise in the context of war, a vulnerable body, a weapon, a machine of surveillance, a carnal threat. In the American Book Review, Barbara Harlow says of Adnan’s poem that it ‘invokes a mythic past […] to presage a present that resists narration’. To presage is to be a warning sign, a prediction, typically of something unpleasant; in archaic meaning, presage is an omen, a feeling of foreboding. In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan writes back and forward to historical crises: as Aditi Machado points out in an essay for Jacket2, the poem was begun in January 1975 in Beirut, two months before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. But there is also a generalised economy of violence, exposure and replenishment which speaks to the twentieth century at large and indeed to the explosions, contaminations and environmental atrophying of the twenty-first century. As Harlow identifies, the simultaneous, coagulating, geopolitical crises of the times, what we might call the ~Anthropocene, are often resistant to narrative. The recurrent, modulating figure of the sun has more of a lyric quality, beaming and seeping, punctuated by telegraphic lines and signals of stop, break, transition. Language garners a lyric intensity which is elemental, saturating, overspilling the traditional bounds of a human ‘I’. Impressive and god-sized dramas of the stars and planets play out in a mythopoetics of Beirut, of Gilgamesh, of ‘grass snakes hiding in the texture of TIME’ (Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse).

3. More sun to consider in lyric

Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun

The music of Sun Ra

Sean Bonney’s ‘solar cop’

The shine sprites in the video game, Super Mario Sunshine

Georges Bataille’s ‘solar love’

David Schwartzmann’s ‘solar communism’

Alli Warren’s Sun Dial

The photographic process of the ‘anthotype’

Björk’s song ‘Sun in My Mouth’

Catherine Wagner’s line ‘If everything is from the Sun why praise it’

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun (1929)
Etel Adnan, Untitled (2016) Source: White Cube.

4. Shimmer 

In Paul Klee’s painting, Castle and Sun (1929) the castle is line-drawn in myriad geometry: its surface is of different coloured shapes, set underneath a bright orange sun. In proximity, the colours shimmer and vibrate. If there was a patchwork made of Adnan’s poem, it might be this; or indeed one of Adnan’s own geometric, brightly-coloured abstractions. Shimmer is to shine with a soft, wavering light. It offers a coming-to-knowledge distinct from the Enlightenment regime of ‘shining a light’ on your subject; it is a way of making contact, of existing in non-linear, non-narrative – that is to say, lyric – timespace. In her 2018 book Surge, Adnan writes ‘We came to transmit the shimmering / from which we came’. In this shimmering tautology we yet cross a line, continue transmission. Shimmer is instrumental in what I call ‘hypercritique’: a poethical form of writing which orients not to the capture of time, meaning or ecological reality, but to a beyond. 

Starlight & Bloglore

Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles (2003)

                           *

If you wanted to know, I’m from Mars, like men are, or in the order of things what a man doesn’t know the controverse of other waters, almost all of us exist as ice. Never to be ready for end, its artificial blush, to edit and close to the distance of light. 

That you await water or more, gone muscle of the month nothing happened, acres of pleasure gone and into the stadium, more or gone to wake pink and stinging the dream, everybody wants to. The many-stomached among us arrive and wearing lace. We eat bees, we half kiss

If it is a mall and if analogue. I begin to forget the difference between, how easy it is to order hard slushie, rewind and loop myself into the fretless moment, a whistle of football, a slow man. Test acids:

No cup of coffee is hot enough. You up, you accuse me of people, I seem to have revelled in the air for too long. Where did our liquid water go? The intriguing discovery of three buried lakes, surface bruises. Had I the famous grouse and soda of your eyes are bubbles, we sup on the luminous and blemish, generous language. “Lack of a substantial atmosphere” was our review. Not to advise a trip here. Wait.

But trip, you go. Sip peaches under the bleachers, three poems. Not up yet. Not bright, not early. Waiting on me for the thirst. Bloglore, blueness, periorbital circles. Why so much neon pigment, not sleep, you go bass it is sultry “just pretend they’re your friends”. Advantage of entering thirties is the austerity of early sanguine, no YOU go to bed at noon; I will iron your watercolour until it is warm. 

Victory to the internet so said privacy, party, my vice a nightly garment, smelt pain. At the left desk dream-amaze you save me, take pictures in natural formation, go see frog. Conflagrate lateral flow, high up in the sentence is forfeit, your sweat.

There is a courtyard on Mars where daylight, nay the leafminer, leaves scarification. No more raids. I have been here in flesh and blood to salsify, lightly the oyster plant is edible and does not grow. You do shrub mail, you don’t hot. Everything to do could else refuse. 

No more scare, cup ring, close your accent permanently. 

Plans for the Fall. Accounting.

Enrol to all that and wear a cloud, I want to write this you, to you, lower ourselves to parallel tarmacs; am I to speak the particulate deltas of this planet, no this one, you are a rainbow. We could be anywhere. Alice says ‘sad foam’, ‘Disappear’. 

The money forth comes, does not accommodate thought; it is the feeling that I saw a seal. Start your bitcoin emptiness and pyre of light; I wrote on afternoon this letter. Ocean goes away.

Fullness and not to floss sleep from prison but I think the Marxist rabbits are fucking released.

Maggie says of the urge to begin mistakes. A surprise that the flotsam arrived here, not of shape, are you the sleekit to enter say the sea isn’t real. 

We build whole houses with roofs of sequin. Desperado attic of saltheart, salvage flower. Meadow / Black / Wild / Yellow varieties. 

I deleted 54% of this article. 

Substantial genitalia of the not getting wet.

1.6% argon, we are gone
where softly the walls sag.

Knit you a fortress of seasonal transition. Khora my lame electron.

Martian quality relayed in me a voice, surface, can’t get a full-length mirror from you, get dressed, exit the internet. I exist in this flat and wait for the post. No more furnishing.

Lemonade also goes this way. 

How did I thinner the telescopic? Lop a water? Log into the apple? 

Well, it is Red.

Starfish suck excess from solar landmass. 

Sometimes gravity, shoots you up, does not come back. Inelegant hipbone blue and yonder. Sometimes very close to the ground I like spiders. Eat you up. You up. 

What did you think of your time alone?