For a few months now I’ve been working as lead editor on Leo Bussi’s debut pamphlet, Life-Sized. I just wanted to say a quick word here about how awesome that’s been. I felt pretty jaded about running a press for a while because I was holistically exhausted and sick of the admin oblivion that is a non-profit tax return. This project has got me back in the game.
Leo’s work has charmed me ever since he read at the SPAM launch of Cocoa and Nothing (listen here) and we bonded over shared appreciation for a certain universally loathed, candy-named song. Editing Life-Sized has been energising because Leo is someone who kind of just comes with a fully formed poetic. And that’s informed by art and conversation and what Sue Tompkins calls ‘muscular sculpture’ and what Oli Hazzard calls ‘gorgeously goofy bathos’. He really has an ear for a line break which is sometimes comic timing and sometimes it’s object erotics and sometimes it’s the trompe l’oeil of the poem’s own jouissance. The poem feeling itself in cereal or nightfall or some kind of membrane.
AI-generated visual absurdism may have diluted the power of surrealism in culture but Leo’s poetry reaffirms the sharp gasp of the paranoiac-critical method. Here we have fused realities and toy scales – ‘Barbie version of Mount Rushmore’– played out in the synaesthetic poetics of a Jeff Koons expanded universe. If this is lyric then it’s also ‘Art-breath’ and everything might be desire but it’s also the agency of the brush and a line might be a gentle brush with erosion or it might be social realism i.e. ‘cucked and living in Britain’. My autocorrect tries to make cucked sucked and I want to tell my computer, you should be so lucky.
We are launching Leo’s book at Good Press on 20th March. It’s at 6:30pm, free and you can just show up.
SPAM Plaza is reopening submissions for Digital Dreamland.
Ever had déjà vu, not knowing if something happened IRL, online or in your dreams? As screentime and sleep time increasingly clock similar hours of the day, we’re turning our attention to the acute relationship between dreams and the internet.
We invite critical work inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following topics:
☁︎ sleep procrastination and social media
☁︎ cloud hoarding
☁︎ the return of the (digital) repressed
☁︎ the memetic unconscious
☁︎ distraction as dream economy
☁︎ ghosting (and the metaphysics of digital presence)
☁︎ sleep texting
☁︎ hyperreal environments & nonspaces as dreamscapes
☁︎ online dream journaling communities
☁︎ targeted ads as unconscious desires
☁︎ chaos edits as dream realism
☁︎ artificial intelligence and dreaming
☁︎ interactive & lucid dreaming
☁︎ digitally-induced parasomnias
☁︎ dream imaginaries and political im/possibility
☁︎ neural net neurosis
☁︎ image spam and cyber garbage as psychic discharge
☁︎ oceanic feeling online
☁︎ dreams in augmented and virtual realities
☁︎ video game realities and dream framing
☁︎ online shopping and astral projection
☁︎ cognitive timelapse and digital intimacies
☁︎ corecore and collaging the cultural unconscious
☁︎ dream scanning as the next cyber frontier
☁︎ avatars, dreams and shadow selves
☁︎ (rip) twitter dream sharing
☁︎ movie and/or fictional representations of dreams and the internet
☁︎ typographic parapraxis (poetics of the typo as freudian slip)
For more inspiration, read the inaugural editorial for this series written by Maisie Florence Post. We always love to see work which engages these themes specifically in relation to poetry, but are open to work that touches on any aspect of texts, media and internet culture.
Submission guidelines:
We will be open for submissions between 15th January and 12th March 2025.
All submissions should be sent to spamzine.editors@gmail.com with subject line SUBMISSION: DIGITAL DREAMLAND.
Please add a brief note to your email explaining how your work fits into our theme.
We aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks and some people will hear back before the submission window closes as we will be publishing pieces on a rolling basis throughout 2025.
This is an open call for critical work. While we appreciate the line between creative and critical can be fluid, we are looking for work that fits overall a more critical angle.
Unfortunately neither the editors or contributors of this series will receive remuneration. Copyright remains with the author.
We don’t have capacity to give feedback on unsuccessful submissions and the editors’ decision remains final.
Please send submissions that are previously unpublished.
You can submit up to TWO pieces in any of the following categories:
Flash essays – 400-1000 words
Full essays – 1000-2500 words
Theory fictions – up to 2000 words
Verse essays – up to 100 lines (we have very limited formatting options however, so please get in touch if you’re not sure your work will be suitable)
Visual essays (photography, memes, illustrations etc – max limit of 15 images)
Audio or video essays (with text transcript provided – you must already have the link hosted elsewhere rather than send it as a file – we need to be able to embed it via a link)
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You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
It’s been a while since we recorded an episode of Lunch Club over at SPAM HQ, but I was really excited to join Jac Common and Ian Macartney in the studio to discuss the 2020 spamphlet Bad Moon by Samantha Walton.
Galina Rymbu, Life in Space (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, trans. Joan Brooks).
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) public domain.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii.I
Aiskhylos, Agamemnon in An Oresteia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Anne Carson)
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992).
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
Fred Carter (2022) ‘`Crude Oil Shaping Forms of Writing`: Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, Ecoes, 4, 56-65.
Esther Leslie, Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial Matters in Substantive Atmospheres in Electric Brine (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021, ed. Jennifer Teets).
Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Enquiry, link
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (New York, London: Duke University Press, 2021).
Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
July was such a busy month but one of its delights was working on the design for this book, With the Boys by fred spoliar. I’ve been so buzzed about upcoming SPAM releases (more to be announced soon) and what better way to kick off our 2021 roster than with this vivid purgatorial rush of a book. The cover design is a collage layering of illustrations, colour effects and old woodcuts (including those vomiting sun battle scenes which divide the book into sections and contribute to the faux ye olde vibe) which gesture to the book’s primal scene (imo): the confrontation with the boy laying down >insert meme here: “you winning son??”< as the OG basis for all the boys, are we for or against them, might we let them rest? As fred reminded me at a recent reading in Crystal Palace Park, “masculinity is no joke maria” and this book explores how the cascades of climate crisis, austerity, property relations, ‘fake news’, ongoing colonialism, racial capitalism, transphobia and pandemic are all bundled up in the ancient, ever-mutating violence of patriarchy. The demands the boys place on us and those placed on the boys, we understand them in a camaraderie of the here-and-now that is our future ancestral citation, cracking a cold one for the world that is burning ice and going online. With the Boys is a book of post-internet poetry, an adventure story, a lyric dalliance with historical epic in synchronic form. It’s a book that refuses linear models of transition, progress and accumulation, and ideas of history as a totality; a book that finds residues of love and care among masculinity’s ‘trashfire’ (in Al Anderson’s words). I want to think of it partly in the realm of Keats’ ‘negative capability’, the idea of lyric identification as doubt, the pluralism of the boys as a quivering flame or rippling plasma, capable of being more than what essentialist gender ideology would deem the boys. Your ‘brain on elegy’, your ‘stupid hurt’, your ‘buzzcut chorus’ and ‘apple products’ – humming, ubiquitous, they belong to all of us, in a way.
Process sketches for the book cover.
There is something about a (re)birth in this book; fred has called it ‘a purgation’. Something been set on fire or released, the way of touching abysses of sleepless thinking and facing up, fuck, to the impossibilities of work and not-work. To morph, mourn, join together, be commoning or calling out, be warm or hard or wet or sore, be there and gone. One thing that resounds is the refrain, the sonorous sense (something Verity Spott commented on at our recent launch, and something I love about Verity’s work also) of lyric in the book as a musical sprawl, fever, affirmation. For me, this is totally synaesthetic and electric, ‘a crucial magenta song’ and ‘like aleatory dance departing’ in the sacred gatherings of the rats — the animals that survived 2020 (their epic and terrible year) and will go on thriving beyond us. Like, we are not supposed to be here. Like, we crawl over the language that won’t want to hold us and we throw out this ask. Are we to be comrades? Sometimes you read fiery poetry that enflames and hisses (kisses) and makes you want to attend the protest, make the call, offer your body to the line (the book’s closing poem, ‘kludge time‘, was written in response to the recent Kenmure Street anti-raid action), and With the Boys summons this fire, but also sings in the muscly erotics of its cinders. These cinders which catch in the breath before and after the poem, which can’t be reduced to this or that reading; which burn with occasional satire, twinge and catch of meaning.
You want to say the boys are a folk knowledge, they are song, they are the startup code that ceaselessly reboots until lyric glitches in ‘fertile crevices’. They are a compost, the dregs of bad schooling, an institution of historical impotence, a gesture of care and play (‘I push you on the swings’), an orientation towards the vibe, a grammar of suspension ‘stopping by the interchange‘, a big fucking ‘nova‘ that hopes to find you well. Hi, hello, hi. *WAVE*. Everyone in some sense knows them. They are obviously so much more. I’m this hush-breath away from saying the boys are a hyperobject. You decide. The boys are shoegaze distortion all over capital’s weeping, the road less travelled, dazzling and pregnant and ‘wilding’. They will do your makeup and hum the ‘harmonic law to / love to leave to love’ — bright pink and chartreuse. You better have a go at them.
With the Boys is available for £8 from SPAM Press.You can get in touch with the editors for review copies or to stock in your bookstore at spamzine.editors[at]gmail.com.
mariaology 