I’m on the twelve-hour CrossCountry from Penzance to Edinburgh. Penzance is the most westerly town in Cornwall and being this close to the edge of something calms me. I always sleep better by the sea. On my way here, on the Great Western Railway, a woman gifted me a glass sculpture with a rainbow inside it, as thanks for helping with her bags at Truro. ‘It’s for stirring your drinks’. For the past week, I’ve been writer in residence at The Grammarsow: a project which brings Scottish poets to Cornwall in the footsteps of WS Graham, who was born in Greenock but spent much of his life down here, making a home of Madron, of Zennor, of the moors. To say this has been a magical week is to say it changed me. I first came across Graham when the poet Dom Hale sent me a voice note of his elegy, ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, out of the blue; I immediately went out and bought another bright blue, the Faber New Collected Poems. There was something about that foxglove on the wall and the hum of some memory in childhood, watching the bees.
Graham grew up in Greenock, on the Inverclyde estuary. A town where I used to teach writing workshops at the Inverclyde CHCP, taking weekly, then fortnightly trains with our chitty from Glasgow. That time in my life is a blur of shift work, seasonal overhaul, hopeless crushes. I’d get there early to look at the lurid flowers in Morrisons with Kirsty, my co-tutor, or visit the docks alone. Sometimes, I brought my little heartaches to the docks because the air felt smelted, or salt-rinsed, excoriating. The nature of these workshops was that people would share their life stories of such intensity we’d bear them home. I remember one woman writing a story about the moon, ‘we share the same moon’: the one thing connecting her, unconditionally, to her estranged daughter. Many people with stories of recovering from addiction through returning to childhood pursuits: the fishing taught by their fathers, the harbour walks, the musical grammar of language. Graham was trained as an engineer and spent some time on fishing boats, but dedicated most of his life full-time to poetry. The more I learn about this, the more I pine for the shabby romance of that clarity of pursuit. Not as a sacrifice but a great generosity from him, like a penniless rock star.
I’m sure it took a toll on his friends. Graham sent many a letter pleading neighbours and pen pals for the loan of a pound or a pair of boots, once thanking the artist Bryan Wynter for a pair of second-hand trousers. His letters are documents of a life lived in gleaning, bracing the elements, enjoying his wife Nessie’s lentil soup and of course, drinking. On a ‘bleak Spring day’ in 1978, by way of a quiet apology, he pleads with Don Brown, ‘I was flippant in the drink when you came with your news […]. Please let me still be your best friend’. He was often full of fire, a real zeal, taking poetry so seriously but life a strange lark, ‘speak[ing] out of a hole in my leg’. He wrote to his contemporaries — artists such as Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon, Edwin Morgan, along with family and friends — with bags of personality, a man self-fashioning in the long blue sea of ‘I miss yous’. As he wrote to Roger Hilton:
We are each, in our own respective ways, blessed or cursed with certain ingredients to help us for good or bad on our ways which we think are our ways. What’s buzzin couzzin? Love thou me? When the idea of the flood had abated a hare pussed in the shaking bell-flowers and prayed to the rainbow through the spider’s web. I have my real fire on. I am on.
The real fire may have been a woodburner, sure, but it’s something lit within him. The letter as a turning on, turning towards: we see this spirit of openness and address in the poems. The real commitment to Lyric. I love the hare that shakes in the flowers with its rainbow religion. I love the flush of arousal from walking uphill at speed. I saw many a spiderweb and two hares chasing each other on dawn of Thursday. On the train home texting many friends as if to have the rush of being held again, ‘Love thou me?’, could I be so vulnerable. A foxglove shook in the wind. The line as a tremble is lesser felt in the steady verse. Clearly, Graham wasn’t afraid of sincerity, though he always took pains to remind his addressees of his roots. ‘No harder man than me will you possibly encounter’, he assures Hilton; elsewhere, after the death of Wynter, he writes to his Canadian friend Robin Skelton of the coming funeral: ‘Give me a hug across the sea. […] I am not really sentimental. I am as hard as Greenock shipbuilding nails’. In a way, the infrastructure of space inflects the language as its face. I’m reminded of a quote by Wendy Mulford which Fred Carter shared at the recent ASLE-uki conference in Newcastle, where she talks about ‘attempting to work at the language-face’. I wear the face of the land, Graham seems to say, and the build of it. At West Penwith, we face the end of the land, literally Land’s End to our west. It is sometimes a silver gelatine, other times a bright blue, a fog grey thicker than thought. A granite-hard land that nonetheless sparkles. I recall a rock on the beaches of Culzean, in South Ayrshire, we’d come across as kids. Mum called it a ‘moonrock’ or a ‘wishrock’. It was a perfectly huge dinosaur egg of white granite. I find this particular rock showing up in my dreams, even now; as if having touched it, I become complicit in a deep time that doesn’t so much store the past as bear its promise. What could hatch from within a rock like that? What could move it, or hold it?
Graham had the idea of poetry’s ‘constructed space’, what I’d call a lyric architecture for reassembling something sensuous in memory or emergence. That this space isn’t just designed (as in my idea of architecture) but constructed points to that emphasis on building. What kinds of muscle, time, effort of spirit and will go into this? The poet Oli Hazzard writes that one of the effects of Graham’s poetry is ‘that I feel like it allows me—or, creates a space in which it becomes possible—to see or to hear myself’. Graham’s poem ‘The Constructed Space’ opens with the line ‘Meanwhile surely there must be something to say’. I always hear it in the lovely vowels of his Inverclyde accent, assuring. Like he’s sitting with you in the poetry bar, two pints between yous, and the poem gives this permission to talk or make space to listen. I think of Denise Riley’s ‘say something back’. My own need always to blurt, interrupt, muse out loud what mince is in my head. It continues:
[…] at least happy
In a sense here between us whoever We are.
As I write this, light dances on the opposite wall of my tenement flat and it’s prettier than anything given to me by the window. Sometimes my love says I am harsh when they need delicacy, and so I soften the heather of my voice to listen. It’s true that I was happy while reading that poem, a happiness or lightness in the brain as precarious as the light is. Changeable and easily blown further west to let in what fog, or dimness. I don’t mind my brain when I’m in Graham’s poems. By which I mean, it’s no longer a drag to be conscious or sad; things move again, their metaphors in process. There’s a lightness to quietude, its intimate premise, that holds me. Nothing extreme is promised here, ‘whoever / We are’: lyric address sent through ether to find that ‘you’, held in the future’s new ‘us’. It’s better than a page refresh, reading the poem to think something Bergsonian of the self’s duration. I’m more snowball than the first maria who read this. It’s a kind of exhale, in a sense, like Kele Okereke singing ‘So Here We Are’ from an album named suitably Silent Alarm. Imagining my loves at the same time, out in Stirlingshire lying tripping by the loch, their eyes skyward, the high or low. I cherish that wish you were here / so here we are. I can look out from inside the constructed space of the poem. Wheeeeeeeeesht, you. You’ll find constructed spaces everywhere in Cornwall. The lashing blue skyscapes of Peter Lanyon, the abstract panoramas of Ben Nicholson, the ambient plenitude of Aphex Twin (especially ‘Aisatsana’ and most things from Drukqs). I want ambient or abstract art to give me the clouds in my head back to myself, with the light of it. Colours, gestures, fractals, lines.
~
I’ve spent the past week schlepping around the moors and lanes, reading Sydney Graham’s poems and letters, cooking veg on my wee stove and eating simple marmite and butter sandwiches. I have this grandparent on my mum’s side who shared his name, who died of cancer before I was born. Sydney was the name Graham tended to go by, signing letters. It’s not that I’m looking for literary fathers but I stumble into their charismatic arms all the same. Is it guidance I look for, or perspective? I love the rolling enthusiasm, pedantry and chiding of his letters, as well as their cheekiness and charm. His dedication to writing and reading, his swaggering or boastful tendencies after an especially successful performance (coupled with an irresistible gentleness and warmth). His big sweet expressions ‘THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS IS CONDENSED – TTBB)’, ‘IMPOSSIBLE TALK’. TTBB is the slogan of Grammarsow and a familiar exhortation in Grahamworld, meaning Try To Be Better (the title of an excellent anthology of Graham-inspired poems, edited by Sam Buchan-Watts and Lavinia Singer). I summon my voices, I try to be; used to be; want us to be.
There’s a quietude I love about the work, which suits the land and mind. After a summer of working three paid jobs, and two voluntary, I was ready for a gearshift into something relaxed and focused. I’d had enough of my own ‘impossible talk’. Being here was like being given permission to play and explore. Quickly I realised my time didn’t need to be ‘dedicated’. I lived by the cruising whim of the big sky, its scrolling clouds and moodswings. Saw the moon at two o’clock in the afternoon. I watched dragonflies dart between the lanes, listened to my neighbourly ravens at night. Watched big jenny long-legs make flickery silhouettes on the walls. Slept peacefully with spiders above me and the ravens being craven. I wanted all these things in my poemspace, and the poems themselves were initially scarce, then they began a familiar elongation that was comforting, with the swerves of a bus but also the tread of a walk. Some poems wanting to hide themselves between logs where I might later try and find them.
~
A grammarsow is the Cornish name for a woodlouse, or what we’d call in Scots a slater. I remember growing up and having this internal argument about language: was I to go with what my English mum said, or everyone at school? Aye or nay, yes or no. At some point I realised it wasn’t a question of scarcity and elimination, but abundance. The words became barnacle-stuck from all over the sloshes of life, swears and all, and I cherished their stubbornness. Even those gnarly, uncommon words and spicy portmanteau like ‘haneck’, ‘gadsafuck’, ‘blootered’ and ‘glaikit’. And yous: the juicy, plural form of you. Addressing the crowd, the swarm or many. A woodlouse is a terrestrial crustacean drawn to damp environments. I grew up with woodlice crawling out from under cracked kitchen tiles, unearthing raves of them hidden under rotten logs, finding them in tins of old paintbrushes or sometimes a bag of flour or sugar. I always liked the way their little legs seemed translucent, a little alien, and was especially seduced by their darling tendency to curl up into a ball, for protection, like Derrida’s idea of the poem as hedgehog.
Across the English language, there are many amazing names for the humble woodlouse, not limited to:
armadillo bug
billy button
carpet shrimp
charlie pig
cheeselog
chisel pig
doodlebug
hardback
hobby horse
hog-louse
jomit
menace
pea bug
pennysow
pill bug
roly-poly
What is this penchant for lists I share with Graham? I want abundance from something other than products. I’m dumbly monolingual and lists are one of the few ways I can accumulate nuances of meaning. My attention-disordered brain collects lists as procrastination for the Thing itself, what is it I should be doing, always on the tip of some other event horizon bleeding through the last and first, so nothing is really finished. I like that in West Penwith, to look at the Atlantic you don’t see any islands, so there doesn’t have to be an end. You have the illusion that there can always be more time. The sea as this list of limitless light, colour shift, unbearable senses of depth. You are here.
~
The grammarsow crops up in Graham’s letters. In a missive to Robin Skelton, he muses:
And what are we now? Maybe better to have been an engine-driver in the steam-age. A sportsman a shaman a drummer a dancer rainmaker farmer smith dyer cooper charcoal-burner politician dog bunsen-burner minister assassin thug bird-watcher poet’s-wife queer painter alcoholic ologist solger sailer candlestick-maker composer madrigalist explorer invalid cowboy kittiwake graamersow slater flea sea-star angel dope dunce dunnick dotteral dafty prophesor genius monster slob starter sea-king prince earl the end.
Again the ‘steam-age’ of other infrastructures interfacing language. Better to have been a wave engineer in the renewable(s) era. I find myself somewhere between the ‘ologist’ and the ‘angel dope’, strung out on critique, measure and the promise of sensuous oblivion. Not sure if the dope is connected to the dunce or angel, but I’ll claim it spiritually as something good: an enhanced performance. As in, those are dope lines I’m reading. Do you want some? ‘And what are we now?’ not who, but what. A question I want always to ask — it’s almost Deleuzian — with someone in my arms or the sea swishing up to waist height, a sea-star clung to the hollows behind my knees. What’s possible when shame is gone. I love tenderly Graham’s list of possible existences and wonder how many I might retrain as (O genius monster), keeping in mind Bernadette Mayer’s old quip that all poets should really be carpenters. I love the raggedness of letters, which is why I love blogs (letters to the idea of being read). Who are they for? We’re so lucky to have these old ones, bound for us, evidence to the material conditions for our wild imaginaries.
~
In Cornwall, I love falling asleep. I love falling for new poems, stumbling a little on the rugged paths, falling for the air and water, for a little more mermaid’s ale or Bell’s, a blackcurrant kombucha or 100g of coconut mushrooms. In his essay for Poetry Foundation, ‘This Horizontal Position’, Oli Hazzard writes about a time Graham ‘went for a walk on Zennor Hill in Cornwall and fell into a bramble bush’. This falling was a repeat pattern: in 1950 he drunkenly fell off a roof and complained of his three-month hospital stay, ‘I hate this horizontal position’. In my DFA thesis I wrote extensively about lying down as a beginning for writing, the horizontal as a form of refusal when it comes to the upright requirements of an assertive ‘I’. It’s no secret that I prefer poetry in the mode of dreamtime, but that’s not to say I’m also a rambler. It’s a poetry of breath and of steps (of vigour!) I enjoy in Graham. Zigzagging and winding down well-trodden moor paths, stumbling upon bridleways that lead around the hills from holy shrines.
I was the lucky poet to first bless a new writer’s cabin that my host, Rebecca, built on some land near the Ding Dong Mine. From the garden, you can see right out over Mount Bay. The skies are huge here. I’ll say that a lot. I saw a seal down by one of the zawns on the north coast, felt the fear of losing the moon in you, let my lips chap on the telepathy of remote secrets. I try to be better, regardless. My poems become languorous obscurities. All of the land has hidden depths.
~
There was a summer before secondary school when we were gifted an unlimited pass to Historic Scotland, meaning our holidays involved camping across Dumfries and Galloway, the Trossachs, the Highlands, in search of abbeys, monasteries, castles and holy sites in various states of decay. I was turned off by leaflets documenting the actual details of history, emerging sleepy-eyed from the car where I’d been navigating the turgid sentences of fantasy novels or playing platform games like Super Mario. There’s a particular form of carsickness that produces electrolytic effects conducive to imaginative ventures. What I mean to say is, instead of vomiting I overlaid the real world with the promise of portals to elsewhere. In Penwith, I walk off my city sickness and sit by the standing stones, quoits and old ruins of industry. What do I imagine but a ‘news of no time’, still to come? Zennor Hill is both poem and place. The more I’m here, the more a sort of aura thickens.
Swap Zoom for the view from Zennor
On my last morning, I wake to sunrise over the sea. Dew shimmers the rosehips. The air is earthsweet as ever and I don’t know how I’ll go home. Travelling is an experience of dislocation: here, I find home again in language, its caught habits, Graham’s words sluicing Clydewards. There’s a poise to his poetry, steadfastly composed as ‘verse’ and often by iambic measure. Making perfect prosody with the chug of the train. I was pleased to roll into Glasgow having bumped into my friend Kenny, the whisky god of the Hebrides, attuned to the flight-pulse of conversing again. Hungry, ‘putting this statement into this empty soup tin’ to say cheerio as Sydney would, lighting up poetry to finish it, the best thing of all, a warm scaffold to hold up how we missed each other. A quiet disintegration of cloud. What are we now?
With thanks to Andrew Fentham, David Devanny and Rebecca Althaus for kindness and hospitality. Long live The Grammarsow!
On 27th August 2022, Kirsty Dunlop and I performed our glitch singularity, fuelled by Doritos, tiredness and cheap lager, to manifest arpeggios of shimmer poem. “My favourite powerpoint in the world”, someone in the audience said. “The band” is called Lossy Compressed and this is an extract from our first performance. In this extract of the set, I’m reading from my book String Feeling and Kirsty is improvising on the harp, it gets slow and fast. Thank you to Craig and Ruthie from the brilliant King Wine for inviting us. Video footage is by Shehzar Doja.
Accompanying the performance was a one-off pamphlet (edition of 20), SLEEP FOREVER IN FLARFLAND LIL BABY DOLPHINA, published by Mermaid Motel. pdf version may drop on the internet sometime soon.
It’s almost autumn and I can’t stop listening to The Corrs. Something ringing in the falling rain a leaf-lorn runaway, never gonna stop falling, wish I could play the strings and not cry over a snapped shoelace that Saturday, wish I could never need name this. A fresh nostalgia for Flash player, a bad new year, kneeling in the car dirt of roadsides to fix my bike, the air all gone out of each tyre it’s tiring to be here / wish I could change. Not into other people but into the person I was, rosy-fingered sleepless rolling cinnamon skins and talking on the internet while in the other town this guy throws a mattress out of a window. If memory serves to fall out with it. Black lace and white corduroy out to the woods I’m happiest on the hill where I see this deer, evidently a teenage stag and I’m calling angel androgynies the very next stray. Fucked up salads of affect, afraid to go outside. Emma says everyone’s a poet. You just go.
Crying in the cobblers for other omens.
Girls in the nineties with strands of dark hair, box-dyed. The electricity all gone out. I was supposed to be planning a workshop, writing a lecture. The universe owns me, doesn’t owe me.
Across oceans of static, watching you typing…
I cycled past the cathedral and saw the sycamores blush orange as if in real-time metabolising their chlorophyll before me. I google the phrase ‘fall splendour’ in guilty luxuriance. A man on my street pisses against the wall, daylight screams; he pisses for so long I think he will disintegrate in dumb liquid gold. Can’t concentrate on this Zoom call. I’m missing something real of the days before me. Girl in old man bar is singing a ballad. Can you drink a black hole if you can’t drink a Guinness? Colin says Brian says you’d have to suck through a straw at the speed of light. Girl in old man bar is wearing tartan, a velvet headband, recently expired lipstick. I like her.
Singing Eliza Carthy, singing Amen Dunes…
I always want autumn too early and pine for spring. Trillions of magazines tell me it’s not cool having holes in my tights. It’s not cool having ragged cuticles.
Ten years of sleazy beauty.
A paintbrush yellowing in sordid water.
Forever down Cathcart Road.
Incurable bed mornings of limb ache and long illness, it’s fine like to say it’s totes, bring myself coffee in bed and emails filling me with autumn leaves and the fly infestation fed upon fruit and air…a red car rolling backwards up the street…
It used to be so easy to write these like it never mattered to write at all. The sky is still whey and there are new routes to get to the same old temples. I swirl my tongue in the google doc long enough to know how I’d touch you; the hopescape bristles with city pollution. My friends have been to Greece and Bali, the Hebrides. I have been to Edinburgh for work. Come down the wrong side of the hill among gorse and scramble, the rocks coming loose and my heart gone trash-eating in the nights of bad sleep again, all again, falling awake with the light on, spilled ink in my sheets. I met the same America on Netflix checking my brain, my gag reflex.
I heard the blood blister in that guitar riff and it was like vomiting behind the shopping mall in Kilmarnock, drunk on bus wine and the Alice in Chains of my arteries…you awake, say the word clavicle, touch my spine…
A few weekends ago marked a whole year since my exhibition with Jack O’Flynn, The Palace of Humming Trees, curated by Katie O’Grady. It was the height of summer, electrified by lightning storms and rain showers which sent the city streets flooding my ankle boots. I sat in the exhibition watching the auras of animals, drifting in and out of presence, doodling, planning short fiction I’d never write. The rain came down through the ceiling, just a little, and caught in a bucket. I texted in streams.
Something of the exhibition magicked itself into existence. We were all ’93 babies. Making things happen felt so easy. There were synchronicities and invincibilities. When Katie and I hung out at Phillies, we won the quiz. Jack and I wove this hyperplane of fantasy from the gestures of clay and line, whittling and glitter cast wide across floorboard and spiderweb. It was a strange time, the summer of 2021. I was also partially in the numb haze of grief. There was a delta wave but not like the deep sleep of the sea. People brought champagne and flowers to the opening. I wore a long white dress and wished the days were as long as they used to be. The Earth spins too fast.
Partly I wanted to write in the choral voice of many creatures speaking to one another. The process felt like a lyric surrender to this collective, their hyperintelligence of humming and stammer that spoke through pores, chitin, liquid. I don’t know where they learned all this. There was a sun virus in the emails we sent the summer before it. Time freckled on my arms. I could draw out the muscle ache from cycling more. It was possible then.
Anyway, about this experience of writing. A porous voice. Here’s an artist’s talk from a recent conference.
First delivered at Hear them speak: Voice in literature, culture, and the arts 10th June 2022
K Allado-McDowell, ‘And they showed me that their life was a pattern of hyperspace’
Who might be the ‘they’ in K Allado-McDowell’s statement? Taken from Pharmako-AI, published in 2021 and the first book to be co-authored with the neural network GPT-3, a system trained on extensive web data (from Google Books to Wikipedia), the quote suggests voice, presence and identity are questions of patterning, replication, weaving, plurality. Recurrent in Allado-McDowell’s book is the figure of the spider and its web, in a kind of constant movement like thought itself.
I was travelling north on a train when I began writing The Palace of Humming Trees, a book-length exhibition poem which forges energy fields of dreamy relation between many species of animal, mineral and element. Late spring and the fields I could forget about, texting myself more poem. The motion of the train according inverse to the downward scroll of the document. All the while seeing spiders in the corner of my vision, emitting great clots of silk. Commissioned by curator Katie O’Grady and made in collaboration with the artist Jack O’Flynn (both from Cork, Ireland), the exhibition was to offer something of a ‘hyperspace’ to its viewers: somewhere in which voices coalesced, formed new modalities of being and relation, new webs. In a Tank Magazine interview with K Allado-McDowell, Nora N. Khan notes that hyperspace ‘is an abstract space in which we perceive patterns of information and then shape them in language in order to communicate’. Having a big, serial and open field poem adjacent to visual work premised on bold, ecstatic colour and texture was to perform multiplicities of voice within an otherwise abstracted work. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘dark ecology’, adrienne maree brown’s ‘pleasure activism’ and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’, I wanted to think about that communication as a form of attunement through which we gather, desire and coexist as ecological beings.
In The Palace of Humming Trees, the lyric voice is taken as that trembling spider silk assembling worlds. Spider silk is a protein fibre which embodies the inside of the spider woven on the outside for shelter, cocoon, courtship or the trapping of prey. It’s five times stronger than steel and is now being synthesised to make everything from body armour to surgical thread and parachutes. I began imagining the twangling of droplets on silk strands as the visualisation of a deep vibration, perhaps the wood wide web – something humming in and between trees. The world of the exhibition was inspired by the Irish folktale, The Hostel of the Rowan Trees, also known as Fairy Palace of the Quicken Trees. In the story, trees of scarlet fruit provide refuge, but the fruit itself (the quicken berries) are highly desirable to the point of despair. The rowan was brought from the land of promise, and its berries offer rejuvenation. With these symbolic undertones of danger and desire in mind, we wanted to explore a mythic ‘palace’ which merged the digitality of hyperspace with the organic textures of woodland and the chromatic intensity of dream, fantasy and ethical relation.
At the heart of our project was a notion of infinity. Hyperspace suggests that our ecological sense of world, surrounds, habitat, umwelt is always being reassembled. I wondered if infinity could somehow be voiced in a way that wasn’t just postmodern recursion or echo. What does it mean to be open to a state of infinity? To let many worlds pass through you all at once, making diamond-like instants and gossamer patterns of prosody?
Infinity became our figure for ambience. As spider silk is densely structured, and the neural net densely layered, so the notion of ambience captures, in Brian Eno’s words ‘many levels of listening attention’. To walk through the door of The Palace of Humming Trees was to enter a portal of multiplicity. You could take any route you liked around the room, moving between sculptures of hyperfoxes and sparklehorses, lichenous forms, ceramic butterflies of psychedelic hue and illustrated groves where trees shimmered green, orange, purple and blue. You could also scan a QR code and choose to listen to a recording of the poem, voiced by Jack, Katie and I and accompanied by Dalian Rynne’s sonic dreamscapes. To hear something ‘humming’ is to sense its presence, even if you can’t wholly understand it; humming implies electromagnetic vibration, birds and bees, a weather event or tectonic movement. We weren’t interested in translating the more-than-human voice so much as bringing it into the forcefield of lyric poetry, and through that expansive patterning achieve ‘infinity states’ of reassembled meaning, of felt experience that could not be crystallised into singularities of being. Visitors took pictures, sketched Jack’s sculptures, ran their fingers through the luminous plaster dust, placed to highlight the debris or excess of our clay animals. Something always in the process of creation or decay, incomplete. Corporeal, yet infinite.
One of the many voicings of this project was Letters from a Sun Virus, a correspondence between Jack and I that occurred over the first Covid lockdown, documented at the back of the exhibition book. While the email exchange had distinct senders and receivers, the you and I, over time in collaborating and sharing work between the visual and textual, our voices were beginning to mingle. Sometimes this co-voicing was painterly; other times musical, inflected with the characteristic intonation and energy of our respective speech patterns, moods, expressions. An entry from April 2020 reads: ‘…the wateriness of the poem. I had completely forgotten about all that blur. It’s like all the brush of the ocean and one which seems the idea to spill that way. Almost like a pressure, lines that go on and hair turning into the sea, each one of kinetic energy then finds all these points’. To assemble the correspondence for publication, I plugged it through text remixers, copying, pasting and rearranging phrases to enhance that sense of two voices repatterning one another. A ceaseless quest for points; for elements acting upon objects, emotions. Denise Riley has written of ‘inner speech’ as a strange oxymoron, where one hears voice at the moment of issuing voice inside us – a kind of running commentary that hums without actually humming. The letters suggest a kind of inner voice infected by the anticipated response of the other, rendering intimacies of collaboration which form a sticky substance, sentences and mobius formations holding time’s play and repeat – ‘Unending loop of my dream resins / not to complete the palace infinity of these trees’. Imagining the many of them speaking.
In Texts for Nothing, Samuel Beckett writes:
Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear, and somewhere a hand, it calls that a hand, it wants to make a hand, or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is made, of what is said, you can’t do with less, no, that’s romancing, more romancing, there is nothing but a voice murmuring a trace.
To ask whose voice in The Palace of Humming Trees is to hear sound bouncing as light, romancing, refracting in what Katie, the curator, calls a many-panelled ‘vivarium of humming thought’. To say ‘there is no one’ is to declare at once absence and the impossibility of presence as a singularity, there is no ONE. What if voice was infectious, modular, sporous, erotically charged, in common? Early in the project, I had this conversation with Jack where he told me that sometimes in the process of sculpture, he’ll try turning something upside down, or inside out, to revitalise the work. Make it strange or more-than. To sculpt by hand is to ‘leave a trace, of what is made’, and to write is to leave a trace ‘of what is said’. I wondered if the inner speech of the lyric ‘I’ could be turned inside out, to be exposed to the grain, the noise, the weather. A voice that touches is and is being touched, traced, smudged. I imagine this book as a glasshouse, somewhere between inside and outside, shelter and exposure; a chamber music of alchemical voicings, always repatterning, transforming each other. Sound and light. A place of invitation, ritual attention, metamorphosis. Many selves stuck to the web of a visual, expansive language.
Hyperfox – photo by Sean Patrick Campbell (French Street Studios, 2021)
Last week I taught a seminar and workshop at the University of Glasgow’s Summer School: Urban Arcadia: Mythologies of the Mall. We explored how malls represent liminal spaces of urbanism and suburbia, public and private, the civic and surveillance. We reflected on the decline of malls in recent years, on the deadmalls archive project, on malls as institutions, infrastructures and emblematic locales of capitalism. I once wrote a phenomenology of my local mall, a shopping centre in Ayr, the site of teenage loitering, toil and trouble. I asked the students to write manifestos or plans towards new malls: public sites built into or out of a failing mall building. The more I write mall, the more I fall into it. The idea of plenitude. One student said malls are so prevalent in post-apocalyptic fiction because that’s where the resources are pooled. It’s only natural that when capital eats itself we go back to its crumbling temples to eat. Malls are for raiding, free-running, skating, squatting, paying disrespect to statuesque disgrace of billionaires, wishing in fountains, abolishing, raving, growing plants in greenhouses. Malls with solar panels, malls with turbines, malls with open canteens, malls where you take what you like. I want malls to metabolise the brilliance of dreaming the billioning of a generous elsewhere that yes could be ours, not like in adverts but actually in our hands, sticky with bricks and mortar and molten pennies the fountains spat back as lithium rainbows in the battery acid of plurality, nothing pristine, our shattering. It’s so infinitely worthless, warm and deplorable. The lyric I is a mallwalker. All of them. Open doors.
You have been tasked with reviving a so-called dead mall in your local town or city. The budget is limitless! In pairs, come up with a manifesto for how you would rebuild the mall or put it to new uses. You might want to share the different contexts of how retail works in your local area and think about a ‘solution’ that works for both of you. What values do you find important in urban architecture? How should public space be used in the twenty-first century and beyond? Is this mall just for human people or other creatures? What would the mall need to serve, withstand or endure?
Wet-leaved, walking up hills with chain oil on my elbows, knuckles, knees. We are on the eve of the ‘big climate conference’, which is to say, to be a host city of preemptive closure: there will be no more roads so that nobody can block the roads without authority, no more bridges for your tiny feet. I imagine a commute that takes me north to Kirkintilloch and back along the canal, an extra hour and a half of leg power and stamina and to arrive like of a beetroot complexion to the moment when somebody speaks. These streets are mostly broken glassed, and I see nothing to sweep that; I see buildings go up, see extravagant plant life grow from abandoned houses. I dream about bike punctures from enormous shards of glass. A mushroom sprouts in the brutalist building. I should have planned to do something. More tired than words can.
Imagine awaking beautifully at 5am each day, to actual birdsong and car sounds, still going through the night to Edinburgh or the general east as they do. I miss the ocean, which I have not seen since May. Sometimes I forget that its quiet, rhythmic hush is always in my ears, a tinnitus with the switcher dimmed. All summer I swapped the ocean for industrial estates, teeming with buddleia. If I go to a club, it gets full bright. The hush. At 6am I make atomic coffee, await words, say rain. I could tell you about the new university building and how I will never find a space to work there, doomed to circle identikit floors like airports in a suspended time that nonetheless eats into my time of work, a starship, doomed to fill a cup of hot water and carry it up and down escalators only to be cast back outside with scalded hands, cried into blustering autumn. A hazmat suit to be a student, studying the microparticles of your love in blunder. If I could study on the floor, in the street, with the leaves stuck to me. But I am a sufferer of frostbite and poor circulation, owing to damp homes, an unfortunate experience in the snow and damaged nerves, fragile metabolism. I am not there anymore, in the place we have been
Canned words taste better with more salt on them. Fuck you. Sitting on the curb in the 1990s surprised us when a plane went by, it was carrying my childhood. Remember we used to put each other literally in bins, until that wasp stung your ass and I was sorry. We prise open tins for the juicy bits of the story like, what would it take to get the attention of a virulent benefactor? Should you become a red squirrel enthusiast, or take up the statuesque hobbies of sportsmen? What beneficent largesse would require it?
Imagine not living by the anticipatory hormone storm of a coming menstruation, or like, the cramping wildness of the night and morning or blood gushed trying to have coherent thought in the day when your mind is fog. I want to transcribe some of that fog to writing, to remember how it was when again I am in clearing, to be like this is the place, it’s never gone. I was held in it, the tearing itself to shreds sensation to write this at six in the morning before work. Plants don’t have to go through this; is it that they’re always ‘working’? How do trees feel when they shed their leaves? Is it like an annual period and do they miss them? Should I develop fondness for shreds of blood in the toilet, abject bits of me and not? I saw a leaf blush out of my mouth and into a leaflet. Smoking kills. I watch the men in high-vis sweep up the dead leaves, more like dying, into black bags by the side of the road. Someone around here is always burning rubber tyres in secret. It’s kind of erotic to watch people do something repetitive and with great concentration, as if no one else could possibly notice this. To do your work that way. O your beautiful butterfly shoulders. Missed opportunities.
For instance, I could have lived through this moment to learn another language, write a curriculum vitae for the purposes of waged employment, called you.
“It feels so good to walk in nature.”
Blood drop in the shape of sycamore.
Where is Canada?
The revenge fantasy is only that trees are flirtatious as hell, winking pollen so that you watery-eyed have to look up at the stars sometimes and beg, like take me. Let me out of the forest so I might see
(fantasies of committee,
the ground to tie
my own laces in figures of eights.)
Authenticity!
The figure of eight in Karla Black’s sculpture which is pink-smeared recalling everything I used to put on my face. The idea is to find a sort of peace with it. School bathrooms where a face was pressed against glass and cruelly examined. I dream of rooms filled entirely with blizzards of eighties-blue eyeshadow. Angel Olsen, 2014, Pitchfork Festival. Having lived with the spirit not for resale, traded on a stark memory of that colour where every remembrance seems to intensify blue, until all I have is the pigment itself, ultramarined into oblivion. To wake into that blue and not see beyond it. I put my sore arm through the right-hand loop of the eight and pulled this out for you.
In the dream we pass an armed convoy and into the bakery with coins allotted to us by authority figures, and we buy pastries adorned by sugar ice drawn in mobius curlicues, and the pastries flake away as we eat them, greedily on the street, so many flakes falling before the guards. And we are butter-mouthed in the face of conflict, war and summit. A kind of shout chokes the air but the golden morning goes on, the falling leaves. I have these cramps and double over in the falling leaves. Men come to sweep around me, where I have fallen. One of them bends down — he is so young to be working — and pats my head tenderly and I see a leaf fall behind him and I know that leaf to be us, so we embrace platonically for one moment, as though I were his long-lost twin, before the foreman calls his name, which I can’t recall—
No, not that at all — he touches the soft part of my ear, goes “are you not young to be leaving?”
In trash, the language of trash, the trash piled up against the highway of your declaration. The men stopped coming.
Azalea, camilla, plum blossom, hydrangea.
Rizla, tin foil, styrofoam, gum.
The noise of vehicles pulling up around the city, emitting fumes.
The petals shed and I sleep on them, dreaming my blue becomes turquoise
Writing in the gloaming I would even call meadow, its scorched-out centre you can probably see from a helicopter, a drone, should you choose the option of aerial photography and remote capture in a time of social distancing. Should you have access to that tech, perhaps in a speculative way; should you have access, the way children have access because they discuss so thoroughly the possibilities, and they do this illicitly into the night. My excellent stenography skills, if we are calling this shorthand, were honed from adolescent hours on Microsoft Instant Messenger, affectionately known as MSN. Any one of us born in that particular bracket of the fin de siècle will understand what it means to spend time in one’s room alone, not quite as in ‘Adam’s Song’, but touching the void through sign-ins, statuses, emoticons, nudges. To live in the delirium of many glimmering windows. I wanted to call you up from my bower, listening to ‘Lime Tree’ on repeat because it carries me away; I wanted to call you up, but could I bear to put down my pen for this. You will never know if I am writing or typing; ‘this kind of thing’ bears no performative ellipsis. Had I known anyway what you would say, as someone who needs access to their own face to talk, something is coming away for free. We have been watching each other watch our own expressions: as with emoticons, each manner of the face feels curated. Some of us collapse on the phone. In the fractal reality of self-isolation, I divvy up zoomy contingencies of speech. When was the last time I talked without seeing my own face. Deleuze and Guattari argue that faces ‘define zones of frequency or probability’: the face ‘constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of’. Hoping to give you a meadow — multifarious and mysterious plenty — I yet give you the wall or the screen. A zoomy contingency that you are happy, that you had signed out of the chat. Against it I file down my voice to its lower registers, taking the edge off an earnestness. If you could measure the frequency of sleep, perhaps architects of the dream-state would salve the true riddles of twenty-first century expression. I wanted to call you up with a slow, perfected drawl, relay how I was hanging upside down from my bower. How I imagine the song to end is a very beautiful flower, floating down the river, but that is only how the song begins. It really ends with a daydream, ‘now that living is no good’, and the singer is lost and found as they enter the woods, barefoot like a child. Why am I telling you all this, barefoot like a child, now that I cannot tell the woods from the trees in my nameless life. And Coleridge sings, this lime tree my prison, my prison / feels like prism. If a wood haloed the meadow, if a moat, if a liquid loop — arboreal, molten, stupid. Walking in the scorched-out meadow an hour or more to be here, sometimes dreaming of this place, needing to be here — no longer a meadow for having been burned. What occurred to ruin the centre. I want to bounce, bounce, bounce with it. All my friends active now and forever. I stumble on the grammar of an instant; are you online, are you online in the meadow, I am calling you up to say this. I am checking-in, the way people used to on Facebook. What is the name of this place? The meadow goes undocumented. What is the probability that your face means the shape of a grassland, a patch of unruly narcissi, a noticing gesture that I would say I have been here before. At least in dreams. Someone is trying to brand the meadow. In quarantine, my old longing for those messaging days recurs. We all talked on that singular platform, confessed under pseudonyms, and ever since I have been lost in the trees of each channel — their foliage concealing the one true thing. Someone is trying to sell the meadow. Infinite recursion of memes and secrets and finance. There was a purity to MSN, something about its frequency. Namelessness. You see what I mean? Sometimes in the poem, I mean the scorched-out cindering middle of the poem, you take grace enough to say fuck it, hiya, wait, no, I can’t hear you. You hold ‘us’ in brackets. If I could timestamp the start to end of that, like debt. One time C. messaged me on Instagram to ask what is really meant by the gloaming. What time of day was this asked, did that matter? I think gloaming would be different at four in the morning to noon; but what did I give as reply? A quick skim of the platforms comes up with nothing. Besides, soon my battery will die in the old archaeology of dissolving thought. There was a purpose in calling you up for this, and now ants are crawling all over my notebook. Nothing has touched me for weeks. I want to say I have a lascivious craving for seaweed flakes, tousled hair, disco kisses, regular breakfasts, offline status, cetirizine, romance and saffron cakes. I have been touching nothing; lately asking myself what is it we do that makes us fruit. The blossoms are stirring on Montague Street. And you click and collect, you drag us backwards. I know that faceless, somewhere you construct the wall. Last night I ran down Great Western Road, my Spotify shuffling back to ‘Adam’s Song’, ‘Tomorrow holds such better days’. I felt burdened by the days inside the days, their seeming neon-fold, ‘the time goes by’ in the flicker of your eyelid. Because my eyes are screen-burned, hot-taken, hypothetical, exhausted; because my eyes looked too long at the meadow. Its torrified heart reduced to this logo. Because your eyes held green astride creamy lindens, to only open the same elsewhere, ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life’, etc. I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of power chords, the lines about apple juice spilled in the hall, harmony, the burden of a loss the size of adolescence itself. St. John’s Wort doled in the morning, soft-bitter ersatz taste of the sunlight and sensitive. I have no heart for war but air. How did I get here, on the brink of my phone battery’s untimely death, filling my notebook in the moonless April? Otherwise it would happen, haze, my father posting endless on his wall, unbeknownst to the standard quota expected on the book of the face. This feels so banal and yet I am telling you the grass is beautiful, endless, strange. Marigolds cluster around glitching trees, impossible to reach. If I could I would give you a pool of marigolds. Only just realised pool is loop backwards. Yellow and / I drag into blue and backwards to call you. I’m sorry I’ve been listening to ‘Lime Tree’ again — it’s just that this song came out in 2007, I was only fourteen, yellow + blue make green, I was starving and ever since then I’ve thought of this story. Something you could cut out from inside you, could burn from the meadow. A little kernel of narrative you tap with your tongue and your teeth, you give to me slowly. I want to leave the message to assure you, ‘It’s done’. Would you know I was talking about the disease? I was coming down from my bower, coming down, breezeless and sleepy, wishing I could call you up and quote the line, ‘Don’t be so amazing / Or I’ll miss you too much’. I wish I could climb through a window to see you, smooth myself right through the glass. Could I miss what I had not yet touched, in April’s middling haze of something receding. All those years you had told me to eat. Oh you know and you know and you don’t. Remember those hours? If we could give them back, little gifts of death, as Derrida says, like an ethics. It’s only me. I’m sorry if calling freaked you out from inside the machine. What I wanted to say was, it made me ecstatic, on GWR, zoomy the song and the voice and I could see Venus so bright in the sky. And the sky was rich as ganache, thick filled with more sky; Matty would say like chocolate, or saffron, or debt. Such a spooky ecstasy! (<3) The calorific night…I write you this so as to cut into it, hazy, reflecting, give you a slice of my dreams. Whatever anyone says feels charged with history, so I want this to be utterly redundant, depletable, delectable, careless as crossing the road without cars in the city that now never wakes or sleeps, but only deletes. The adventitious device, zoning close to us, is taking a photo. Is this a kind of labour. There are such archives beyond access they try for. Here, I will be always the small green light in lieu of a meadow, the lyrical unfinishing of cringe to know this. A breath I took / You can just call me up.
Excited to announce a collaborative exhibition with artist Jack O’Flynn and curator Katie O’Grady, happening until 8th August at French Street Studios in Glasgow.
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The Palace of Humming Trees is a collaborative project between artist Jack O’Flynn, writer Maria Sledmere and curator Katie O’Grady which took place from April to August 2021. This collaboration will be showcased in an exhibition at French Street Studios, Glasgow, featuring new works from O’Flynn and Sledmere which travel through poetry, sculptural entities and dreams of impossible possibilities.
This project was formed in a concert – along mixtapes, Tarot readings, zoom calls and shared research. We present it here as multiple sensual journeys; to an exhibition of hyper-foxes and tenderly crumbling foliage, through a publication of lichenous illusions and rummaging thought and in a selection of music and voices which trailed our imaginings.
Intertwining themes of ecological thought, world building and re-enchantment we sought to un-ravel the question: how can we act and think in this present moment to ensure positive change to our relationship with the world around us? The action and thinking which we wandered became located in small and monumental formats – enacted in the everyday and in how we create and build the future. We were enveloped by uncertain certainty, whether apparent through non-human thought, the possibilities of visual art and poetry or the endorsement of magic. Living in a world brimming with unease by climate crisis and extreme inequality – brought upon by extractive capital, far-right strategies and carceral logics – we wished to communicate a different model of awareness that could refuse these structures and re-imagine being a Being.
Exploring this sentiment O’Flynn and Sledmere have created a body of work that opens a portal to a forest of vibrating thought. One of galloping states, lockdown meanderings and a lyrical suffusion through language and art that prompts how we can think and imagine differently.
Please enjoy this digital showcase of The Palace of Huming Trees and, if you can, come to visit its physical iteration at French Street Studios, 103 – 109 French Street, Glasgow. Open July 30th to August 8th 11 AM to 5 PM (closed Monday and Tuesday) with a preview on July 29th 6 PM – 9 PM. Book to attend exhibition via Eventbrite here and to attend preview here.
mariaology 