Anticipatory grief, sleep and spiderwork come together in my prosimetric pamphlet, Scar Code, the first from new pamphlet press Weather Band (produced by Robyn Skyrme of the Crisis Crystal reading series). Originally written for the Ek Symposium and exhibition hosted at Glasgow Project Room in September 2025, I developed it into a fuller sequence at Robyn’s invitation. It picks up some themes on threads, spiders and entanglements from my monograph Midsummer Song, and responds ekphrastically to Chiharu Shiota’s installation Sleeping is like death (2016).
A more formal abstract:
What happens when ekphrasis is conceived of as performance in the context of artwork concerned with sleep and dreams? Commencing with a verse description of Chiharu Shiota’s thread installations, I take my cue from T.J. Clark to consider the limits of ekphrasis as tool for ‘converting’ visual into verbal representations as a possibility for recreating the ‘experience’ of ‘thinking in’ the artwork (2022). As Shiota’s elaborate, sleep-themed threadworks, notably Sleeping is Like Death (2016) evoke an interwoven neural net, whose nocturnal scenes are withheld from the viewer via webs of abstraction, I offer sentences of hypercritique as ‘drawings in space’ (Shiota) whose weaving is a dreamwork: enacting via intuition a space for the unknowable. This intuition is partly premised on the rhythmic, affective and imagistic affordances of poetic language.
In the ward, three patients lie asleep.
The spiders entered them long ago, not
by the usual oral route, but via the silk of sleep itself.
36pp. • 50 copies • £7.50 UK / £12 INTL
To order: https://crisiscrystal.net/weatherband
