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 Hornjust 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.
Maddie reads!Zeo and viola!
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.
Charlie & Texture Texturescattered poems & tartan carpet
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
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 TheReality 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 Informationand 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.
One of the exciting things about running a small press publisher is discovering new forms of poetry at the same time as totally falling in love with them. Like finding a long, lustrous hair at the end of the pencil and falling in love with it so much to spiralise your day around its protein. Like hearing a song on the radio first thing in the morning brain. What I mean to say is, poets are shedding all the time and sometimes you really want to be there, hospitably, in the moment of language leaving itself beautifully there.
Growing, shedding.
On 31st January, SPAM are releasing Thirteen Morisettes, a transatlantic communion between Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood, a 60-page book of lyrics and epistles which centre around the poets’ love of Alanis Morisette. Our eponymous chanteuse haunts the lyrical plazas of Woolwich Market, university corridors and Starbucks. It’s great to have a collaboration which feels like a true collaboration: the interweaving of voices, in-jokes, playful telepathy.
The Morisette itself is a new form developed by Jack and Courtney. The authors define it as:
The primary constraint of the Morisette is that its lines are formed out of the deliberate mis-transcribing of Alanis Morisette lyrics. The Morisette is (usually) comprised of two mis-transcribed verses, followed by a mis-transcribed chorus to end the poem.
The epistolary, then, is not just a mode of transmission but of listening. At the light speed of however many G’s we wish to bestow upon the airwaves, Jack and Courtney have made an ambience of their poetic communiqué and like the desire for better worlds we sublimate in the village of our most familiar coffee chains, typing away into elsewhere, they form a sort of pop-chorus-corridor across the Atlantic. I fucking love it. I hope you will too.
The book is available to preorder for £8 now.
SPAM TOUR:
Courtney and Jack will be reading on the following dates:
6th February – Instagram Live (@spamzine)
13th February – Glasgow (venue tbc)
15th February – Peckham Pelican, London (along with Eve Esfandiari-Denney,Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, Jack Young
16th February – Bookhaus, Bristol (Courtney only – along with Jack Young, me and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir)
I just saw you play in Glasgow last night. One time back in like 2017 I wrote a poem that compared some kind of narrative flip of my speaker’s life to the flip of your hair, back when it was longer and so mid-2010s nothing else compares to it. That whole decade followed the narrative arc of a terrible prom date, seriously, culminating in the good morning after vibes of the curly girl method. After your gig, which we arrived late for but still in time for everything, I got home and watched you on youtube talk with Zane Lowe about the various loves and how you used to want them all at once, all the loves of 10,000 people and your lovers and the love of a friend, but they’d be in conflict so the ‘malady’ of one love would taint the rest and you didn’t like them to bleedthrough each other. How you wanted to make the loves exclusive as possible. I wondered about that as a kind of ars poetica for what we are supposed to do with creation. How the song changes once someone adores it. When you pour all love for one person or many people shining into the same thing and each time someone reads or listens they replenish it with their love. Sincerity is scary! One time I walked through Manchester in semi-lockdown the rain was incessant, my love and I sheltered in shopping centres amidst the paramount sensation of repeating our steps, one of us was half without vision the other depressed in white lace like willows drooping in winter etc.
I learned from Chicken Shop Date that you’re an Aries. The only other Aries I know are poets or massage therapists. People with fire in the tips of their fingers.
You said your favourite lyric from the new album is I’m in love with you for me it might be Central Park is Sea World for trees…
*
10k Loves
O prince of the internet climbing the stage you want to dismantle every night in the city sets itself ersatz sun inhalations of metamodernism I am twenty nine for the last time being twenty nine in your song many lambent americas remember you some guys behind us screaming “CHANGE OF HEART YA CUNT” all night until security confiscated their vapes and their jumping excesses I think your ardent excesses are ascent to attention, this gelatine of the early set nodding to lockdown makes me jealous she’s turned the weans into a kind of wine against us sucking a stranger’s thumb Scott and I debate what’s in the vessels is it water, true wine, lemsip or lucozade various Platonic essences mid-century realism never looked so good as you peeling back the paint of the not really wood or having a cold thrusting up from the job opportunity of being a pop star’s Harold Pinter pretence smoking fake cigarettes around too many scented candles after your shift at the financial centre of everything what’s a fiver kids want the same dream supremely whole crowd shouting I took all my things that make sound the rest I can do without right back at you in the common heartbreak fake smoking out the window where the stars of a trillion iPhones are When he came around to switch off the lamps, gently I silently recited my cloud password in the hope of being swallowed in the play of the warm, exterior moment omnicringe to believe lust songs are still possible how earlier I had watched a square of you playing ‘These Days’ on guitar for Lucy, Phoebe, Jack and Natalie all in a moment’s notice becoming a teenage rationalist addicted to ballads like Caroline going live to eat pasta you’re like our favourite band in the world is The Blue Nile singing the present gift I fucking miss once imagined myself lost in the rain of sleeping lightly sugar guitar coming so far I used to walk around in the love made myself into a sound walking around helps to be happy wintering too many lines You’re like even remembering the original camera shot always saw you remembering to almost die a lot in the same dream fuck it everything tastes the same when you can’t be enlightened trying really hard to try silver hairs newly sprung from my skull in the metafiction of being a genuine person ringfencing fresh crush superlatives The outside is horrible I grow shyness in expensive monstera to never water it better than when I am kissed This is still a review of your gig! Talk of the fourth wall fell for it inside the house beat of collarbone I feel like shiny roadkill At what point did the feeling thaw more jumping, climb the rig inside its precious oil only knows you want folk influence like I want to be guys augmented on stage to climb through a video saxophonist of the lonesomeness inside all brass of the bar turning the lights off marrying a new year to the same way it felt I can’t forget
mariaology 