Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
mariaology 