Tag: writing

Intro for Maria Hardin 1/11/25

Pamphlets titled Sick Story spread into a spiral on a wooden table

Last night SPAM Press hosted the wonderful Swedish-American poet Maria Hardin at Mount Florida Books, Glasgow, alongside readings from Kate Paul and Jane Hartshorn. Here is the intro I read for Maria.

I want to begin by reading a poem by the late Rhiannon Auriol, who was a kind, talented and sharp-minded poet. She had a voice that felt genuinely fresh and we were always excited to get something new from her in our inbox. We published her in the Plaza and our online magazine several times and when it came to putting the lineup for tonight together, both Kirsty and I had the thought: I wish we could invite Rhiannon to read with Maria. Rhiannon forever.

Here’s the poem, which was published in pif magazine back in 2021.

I drop into this poem and I am petalled. I have put my hand in the new burr grinder of how I am learning to read in grief. This self-petalling is a relief. I will soften! I will become rose water, distilled into essence! Energised by short lines! There is something ugly-beautiful about my becoming rose-water of the nominative. Yes I was born with the middle name ‘Rose’ and also the first name Maria. Rhiannon writes of ‘the moon particularly / at sea’. Maria and I share a name meaning ‘of the sea’. We found each other via the kismet of poetry, and her poem called ‘Mariaology’ which features ‘a cascade of every maria’ which I first received as an iPhone photo. Last week I was researching something and stumbled on the phrase from the website MindBodyGreen which said, perfectly: ‘caffeine can disrupt your hormonal cascade’. I don’t know what a hormonal cascade is but I know I have felt it in poetry. Yes, for you I’d drop everything.

By some miracle of the ether Maria is now here in Glasgow tonight and we are launching her pamphlet and I am CAFFEINATED. My being caffeinated will never truly replenish my energy. There is a tale here. Rest without respite. Sick Story. I like to think of this as a sister pamphlet to Maria’s earlier work Sick Sonnets and also a cellular cascade of the voltas played within them. We have dying bees and the premise if not promise of healing. In Maria’s sick sonnet ‘Glossolalia’ the Steinian rose becomes a rat becoming also a rose and the speaker reads ‘emotional responses to the end of nature’. I have always loved the general mood of melancholia in Maria’s work, the way a speaker can latch, mutate and render ornate a feeling, an image whose origins remain mysterious. One never feels quite settled; there is a rat-like restlessness. Is that it? But also the still, slow burgeoning and wilting of the rose. Of devotion. Hours of languishing. The void is decorated all the better to feel it. The void is remixed. If there could be endless Proustian bedtime there could also be a pain psalm and a ‘baited lamb’. 

Sick Story looks for alternative narratives in its telling of chronic illness. It asks ‘what is the shape of a sick story?’, with an eye to Bernadette Mayer’s Story and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ by way of explanation. For Le Guin, the carrier bag narrative is shaped like a bag, not the arrow of phallocentric linearity. Mayer’s Steinian Story bundles riddles, matter, anecdote, the stuff of ‘things’. Nothing feels pre-determined, destined for an ending; rather, all times rub their quantum shoulders in the bag. Have you ever rummaged in public for your medicine? Have you ever written notes on the back of your hand, worried the ballpoint would seep beneath your skin and stain something irrevocably navy? Have you ever shaken your life up so much you could almost smell its perfume? 

Here is a snippet of Mayer’s Story:

Voices fall.

It may be seen feeding on this under one of those tropical things.

The time or place of starting. 

He throws a hat on a seal’s head and a piece of his pack into a whale’s mouth, marking their characteristics. 

Lamp, lucite and plastic. 

I saw one once in a book, but I didn’t rip it to shreds, or even divide it, as I could

have (snap), but left it whole (shot), which it could never be unless it were left 

that way. 

Will that have anything to do with this? (67)

Mayer’s storied ingredients are packed upon each other like the storeys of a building. She disrupts the assumed causality of narrative with a prompt — that of the child’s or editor’s: ‘Will that have anything to do with this?’. I am at the soft mercy of every bedtime story. Once gathered into the bag, is everything relevant? And where does it take us. Details are listed like precious cues. Lamp, lucite and plastic. The pronoun ‘it’ bears wild liberty in its free-kicking materiality. I trample ‘it’ under the ‘perfect lucite heel’ to which the speaker of ‘Mariaology’ prays. I sub ‘it’ under light, lux, something solid and transparent — the supposed clarity of what I am trying to say, what does it all mean. What is the ‘time and place of starting’ when it comes to illness? From where do voices petal and fall? Are they, like rain, a kind of interference? Mayer asks ‘What did the rose do?’ after the word ‘History’. I think Maria is answering that question in her remix. We invent from adjacency some kind of story. Is the rose sick, is it guilty? How to place these scenes. I think of something Jane wrote in the same issue of SPAM magazine where we first published Maria: ‘Houses appear / where once there was marshland, a thin burn threading / between them.’ My imagination shrinks these houses to the size of pages and now I want to live in them. And you can too.

Here’s Maria Hardin, thanks everyone.

🌹

You can buy Sick Story from SPAM Press here.
It is SUCH a cute edition (A6 pocket-sized) and the writing will stay with you a long time. Carry it with you!

You can buy Maria’s debut collection, Cute Girls Watch While I Eat Aether (2024) from Action Books here.

Here is a long essay I wrote about roses, via Idlewild/Stein/Lana Del Rey/Joyce et al, back in 2017.

A second smaller heart: on writing The Indigo Hours

The first song I was ever obsessed with was Suzanne Vega’s ‘Marlene on the Wall’. It was on a compilation CD called Simply Acoustic that I’d found somewhere in the house. I’d listen to it over and over again on the CD player in my room. What I loved about this song was its narrative possibility. The protagonist triangulates her love affairs under the watchful eye of ‘Marlene’ looking down at her from the wall. My child’s mind made up all kinds of stories about this. Marlene could be an older sister, a mentor, maybe the lover of one of the men that passed through the life of her. Marlene seemed cold. She was not a jealous lover, she didn’t act out. Anything advised by Marlene is provisional, ‘what she might have told me’. I imagined her having very thick eyeliner.

For a long while, Marlene was a kind of angel to me. I saw her wherever I saw people on the wall. A Picasso print of a woman drinking coffee on a balcony. I haven’t been able to source this painting except to remember there was long dark wavy hair, the colours purple and yellow, coffee. I remember thinking it looked a little like my mother. It’s not something we kept when we had to clear her flat this summer. Maybe I took a picture, but I don’t want to look for it. Marlene showed up in my dreams. Marlene was there in my imaginary stories. I could never tell if she was the protagonist of a life or someone to whom things were done. She seemed to encapsulate a distant sexual maturity while also representing ‘the impossible’ and so, the untouchable.

*

I see 2018 as an apex year in my life. I remember dazzling summer nights, two kingfishers, kissing in the midst of cinders, hiding, my phone pinging constantly, no homework, sparkle emoji. This was the year I wrote the novella that Broken Sleep are publishing next week. I started writing The Indigo Hours partly in solidarity with a close friend who was writing a novella for her Masters degree. I was a year out from my MLitt and waiting to start a PhD. I don’t think we shared any work in progress; we just swapped manuscripts when we’d got to the end. I don’t remember writing this book. I don’t remember if I wrote it on my phone, a library computer, the Chromebook in the restaurant I worked at. Maybe it bounced between these locales. Maybe the bouncing was painful. It involved data loss. When I meditated today the AI-generated female voice said ‘find a point in your breath and this will be your anchor’. The point in my breath is a ‘flashing’ spot in my chest. It is an anxiety motor. It cannot be my heart because it is too centred. But of course it is my heart. Sometimes I think I have a second smaller heart lodged in my sternum, where I used to get an ache from purging. This heart is blue, a mottled and gold-streaked blue, and it is rare like the blue version of the rose, my middle name. Semi-precious.

I wanted to tell this story about two people kissing illicitly in a garden, surrounded by white poppies and mystery. I wanted to write about the indigo hour of midsummer dawn, when you are up all night with someone, the breath before a comedown, before it’s all over. I wanted to write about a relationship that felt like that and whose dramaturgy was always the dawn. I wanted to write about something that was ending over and over again, and the ending wasn’t the point. There was a life and people drifted in and out of it. I wanted to write about arousal and attention, sentiment and giving up.

The summer before The Indigo Hours took shape, I was writing a thesis about the curatorial novel, about object-oriented ontology. I was interested in what Ben Lerner says about fiction staging encounters with other art forms. For that to be embodied and taking place in a credible present. I was interested in the refrain of unseasonable warmth that haunts his novel 10:04, the way the narrator might have these hotspots of medial feeling owing to places in New York City where he received such and such a text. I was reading a lot of books that take place in the disintegration of some kind of love affair — Joanna Walsh’s Break.up and Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story (also loaned by the novella-writing friend). I don’t remember the plots of these books at all but I see them essentially as ‘novels that walk around, receiving and metabolising messages’.

Turning to write myself, I wanted to create a fictional world in the aperture of indigo, the special hours of Scottish nights in June and July where it never really gets dark — there remains this blueish glow to the sky. I knew these hours to be indigo because I didn’t really know what indigo looked like, only that it was some kind of shade of blue and everyone seemed to disagree about how light or dark it was. A morning and eveningness, a not quite. More like a mineral or texture.

How deep in the woods to go to get this indigo. How deep in love did we go, or in druggy reverie. It all felt so subjective, translucent. The love I was writing about was already belated, collaged and distributed unevenly through various places, fantasies and timelines. What could I say about it? This love that made an ‘I’ into both subject and object. That distorted the closure we had been raised on to believe was love’s destiny. It was an ambient intimacy, then. It was in medias res, ongoing. The midtone of indigo. In the process of editing the raggedy manuscript (what I referred to, in an email to the poet Callie Gardner, as ‘the trashy wee thing’) a couple years later, I discovered the phenomenon of indigo children. Since then I have learned more about what it means to be an indigo from the writer Laynie Browne. I relate this to a phenomenon of emotional & intellectual hyper-attentiveness my ex and I used to refer to as ‘shine’, also to a feeling of hyper-empathy and sensitivity not just to the mood of a room but to the mood of anything more-than-human. If you are capable of shine, if you are inclined to indigo, your presence might follow a gradient opacity. In Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon has a chapter ‘Melting’ which talks about what it feels like to have ‘no glue’ and no security: ‘You could melt into another person, or melt into a place like this [a psychiatric hospital]’. This melting is akin to what Stephen King calls ‘the shining’ or what others call ‘sensitivity, insecurity, shyness. Fragility’ (Scanlon). I’m interested in how to put that kind of melting character on the page. What would her voice sound like?

A vessel, a leaky container…a watercolour palette smudging ceaselessly in stroke after stroke…Being an indigo is a lonely experience but one that lights up at the world. Pure indigo has a high melting point; when heated, it will eventually decompose or sublimate. For some people, reading indigo must surely be excruciating. For others, it is true. I think indigos come from elsewhere, they remember other times, their memories mutate and take form in their dreams, they bear an awful gift, they don’t belong to any fixed thing. What could be their future, is it possible. It doesn’t have to be something that makes you special. There is a kind of love that makes you indigo, opens you. For a lot of my life and even now, I walk around like an animal or an open wound. These are cheap metaphors. It is more that I walk around like the weather. No, I walk around like indigo. I freeze-dry experiences into crystals and exhale them on the page. I can’t say whether this produces realism; it’s very smudged.

Trying to put Marlene on the page was an act of transmutation. I read Timothy Morton on beauty’s perception as an act of ‘attunement’. I wondered if my attempt at fiction was really just an attempt at sensing beauty. But there is a lot of horrible stuff in this book. A lot takes place in the shadows. A lot of the scenes are decontextualised and in a sense ‘free-floating’. We don’t get heightened climaxes and denouements so much as vignettes melting into one another. In Reading Machines: Ambient Writing and the Poetics of Atmospheric Media, Alec Mapes-Frances talks about the ambient poetics of Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin as a ‘vaporisation of the lyric subject or self’. I saw Marlene as a soluble force more than as a coherent character, a stable subject. Marlene was a problem to be solved; she was able to be dissolved. I needed the temporal mode of fiction to play this out over time, place and encounter. Ambience refers to the surroundings of something, the environment, a kind of base existence (there is light, it is blue; there is this mood; the room is cool) tinted with some accompaniment, encompassing. Can we plot ambience the way we might plot time? This was something I was concerned with when writing the book.

My friend Stuart read an early version of the manuscript and said something about it being constructed around several pillars or towers. I think he was referring to place, as it stands in the story. The central (unnamed) city, Berlin and the prairie. I imagined these towers as constructed of fragile pixels. A little data moshed and crumbling. The movement through the story might be closer to a dérive or distracted wandering (I imagine readers skipping over, revisiting, forging microloops as I did in the writing). Insofar as I can remember writing the book (which I cannot) I was doing so in order to ‘read’ a relationship. This took place in a series of loops and compressions. Similar things said, the same mistakes, rotations of closeness and distance. My towers were constructed to make something semi-permanent of a very dissolving time. Aaron Kent’s cover for the book invites you to choose from various alcoves and passageways, or drift onwards into mise-en-abyme. All the while, in the company of clouds. I recently rewatched season 2 of Twin Peaks and the finale, in which Agent Cooper slips in and out of red curtains while seeking Annie, or answers, resonates. Disorientation. Passing through thresholds. Trying to save your love from evil. And what if it was not one love, but a concatenation of shadows?

Evil was also the ravages of shame and depression, the doubling of seeing the dark in yourself. Or, depression was a particularly sensitivity to evil. I get into these loops about it. There is so much evil in the world. For much of my life, I have not felt like a person. There are clouds drifting in that part of my soul that is supposed to feel warm and full. “I am okay” etc. I am like a child, lily-padding over the clouds. The same child that needed Marlene to guide me. I experienced love as something annihilating and so bright. The blue-heart anchoring pain in my chest. Hawk tells Cooper that if you go into the Black Lodge ‘with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul’. What does it mean to give your narrator courage? I wanted her to have the courage of suffering and to see that in others. To suffer what would never work out. A constellation of burst blood vessels around the eyes. To have the strength to look in them, for that look to be a holding place, then a continental shelf, then nothing.

A foothold, even. For someone climbing the tower, trying to get to the kissable moment again and again. For the tower to be a text. I go to the tower, I spiral in stairwells, I see a prairie stretching farther and farther, I get so thirsty.

*

Are such towers architectures of refuge or incarceration? Here’s a passage from Hélène Cixous’ Hyperdream, a novel about grief, love, friendships, telephones and mother-daughter relationships (I will never not be obsessed with):

We don’t stop killing ourselves. We die one another here and there my beloved and I, it’s an obsession, it’s an exorcism, it’s a feint, what we are feigning I have no idea is it a sin a maneuver a vaccination the taming of a python the fixing-up of the cage, it’s an inclination, we don’t stop rubbing up against our towers touching our lips to them

Haunting the novel is this allusion to 9/11, but the towers as totems seem also to be something else, much more imaginary: ‘I saw it shimmer in my thoughts’, Cixous says of her ‘dearly beloved originary tower’. In an early document for The Indigo Hours I had this epigraph I haven’t since been able to locate from Morton, something about beauty being a homeopathic dose of death. I see my love go out the wrong door, I see a certain look, a turning back. Towers of collapsing sand. I see Marlene on the wall. Marlene from a tower. Marlene as the mother-tower, no, the sister. All my life I have said, who is she? She whose name means ‘star of the sea’. I rap at the door of Montaigne’s library tower. It survived a fire.

The homeopathic dose of beauty, like Cixous’ vaccination, prepares us for exquisite loss (and so soaring, to tower over). In a way, The Indigo Hours quite simply plots the disintegration of a what is now called a situationship. But really it is a book about everything happening in one plane, each shifting tense another groove of growing older. Growing into the old you were before. Essaying through this experience via encounters with art — everything from installations to Lana Del Rey (on whose early albums the narrator delivers protracted sermons — this being a book loosely about finding meaning in the spiritual emptiness of the 2010s). No, it is a book about things and time and pleasure.

Only recently did I look up the meaning of the song ‘Marlene on the Wall’. Apparently Marlene was the German actress, Marlene Dietrich, whose heavy gaze looks down from a poster. Maybe this is why my protagonist so frequently visits Berlin. Vega talks about writing the song for Dietrich after turning on the TV one night, her ‘beautiful face in close-up’. ‘Marlene on the Wall’ is a coming-of-age song, it’s also about power and violence, beauty and changing. There’s a butchershop but also a rose tattoo. I saw the song as an eternal love story with destruction as its anchor point. ‘Even if I am in love with you’ being the parenthesis through which to begin the working backwards of what Joanna Walsh calls the ‘fresh and terrible’. If I carried around that song I also carried the ghost-image of Marlene’s televised face in monochrome. How alien those brows, the beauty of another time. When I read fiction, when I edit fiction, when I approach a story, so often my question is ‘so what?’ I am looking not for answers, but for experience. Fingerprints.

Vega’s opening: ‘Even if I am in love with you / All this to say, what’s it to you?’ could be the central premise of The Indigo Hours. So for this book to be ambient is to be deeply interested in the ‘it’. Of love, of the being-in, of melting into the world, being washed continuously in its blood, its indigo, its chlorinated swimming pools. To look for explanation is one of many reasons for fiction. If Marlene peeled off the wall, I saw her growing along some trellis as a rare blue flower, a wallflower but livid and shedding, changing. I would write to water her, I would coax my clouds for a little rain.

Blurbing The Indigo Hours, Amy Grandvoinet (brilliant critic of Surrealist & avant-garde psychogeographies) writes generously of ‘a languageful love pulsing constant’. A blue heart plucked and buried in the book, behind some cloudy curtain. This heart is sequined to the rhythm of life. If there is a cadence to the book it is love and love’s chaos sewn into patchwork. Marlene returns to Berlin to see her friend. She sees an old friend and cannot bear to reach him because there is this substance between them. She paraphrases T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, she almost leaps the mirror fence. There are indigo seeds in these stories. I hope whoever reads it finds their own pulsing constant.

You can order the book from the publisher here. It is out on the 31st October.

New book: The Indigo Hours

🦋🌫️🍋‍🟩The Indigo Hours…forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books

In 2018, I wrote a novella about erratic romance/Romance and the lyrical space-times of its (im)possibility. The fictional ~situationship at the heart of this work is stretched into, over and through various places — real and imagined — which the narrator digs into as pockets of presence and meaning. With its wandering, non-linear plot, I’d describe The Indigo Hours as ambient fiction. It’s a little eclipse of a book. It was ambiently written (leisurely, over one summer, as a dare) and may invite ambient reading. Which is to say, a textual experience more inclined to ‘going round’ a thing, attuning to its surrounds, getting lost, adjusting the frequency of (dis)interest. This is like dating a semi-transparent person. To adore the ghosts of both of you. How might love halo or envelope one’s personhood? How might love’s presence be felt ambiently in the objects and subjects of everyday life? The work tests love against memory, song, travel and friendship. I was interested in the phenomenon of blue — specifically indigo — as a desiring filter. Indigo as a singularity. Indigo as language of variable opacity. Denim wash (to go someplace). The supernatural inflection of indigo children (as a vocalised attempt at performing divergence of attention, durée and feeling). The book is full of aura, fleeting connections, music, art, intimacy and loss. It will be out on Hallowe’en, 31st October 2025. 

Some nice things people have said: 

The Indigo Hours’ lyrical prose, daubed from a free-associating palette of sensory psychedelia, becomes a portal into a ‘blossomy blossomy realm of the possible,’ where sadness is a sexuality, jealousies cause for celebration, and love a drunken texture. Painterly, tender, and spatially generous, this affecting novella rewards re-reading, like a magic eye that reveals a new image, and perhaps new self, with every glance.

— Poppy Cockburn

The Indigo Hours is watery fortification. Beneath li’l triads of asterisk constellations, Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports, where feeling wretched wandering midnight miles is a complex freedom, as exposure on cobalt-lit webcams, dozing/dosing to dub deep trap techno, bruises so Blühen. Yet under cosmic circumstances that augur heartbreak, Maria gifts us the deep assurance of ancient-blue auras and a languageful love pulsing constant. For insomniacs-or-otherwise against analgesia’s ‘“who cares”’, a most vital and tender-prone tonic.

— Amy Grandvoinet

Preorder now from the publisher.

x x x x x x x

Grand Parade (SoundEye, 2025)

Grand Parade (SoundEye, 2025)

I don’t know if it’s summer or just plain warm
for walking around in search of dark-bitter
reprieve
pulled the Ace of Pentacles
in Maureen’s
the pledge of a seed
planted in manifest pasture
walking up the Grand Parade to have Mau
grab my arm and pull me into due embrace
since they were just getting breakfast, sloshing
                                                         oysters with Dom
I keep saying it’s good to be with everyone
the neighbours are rehearsing a play
I sit on the floor and arrange paperwork
phoning it all back like
I failed to see the love in front of me
fertile and with selenium

wishing I could have bottled
the birdsong of Brace Cove
so much to trap myself in notes also
reeling around the English Market with poets
wishing we were Irish
ordering whisky with Luce
if you ever want to talk, we say
if you ever need whatever

the Beamish flows easily
it is less than five euros. I have yet
to burn my fingers on ice, to go home
into caring situations with dutiful infinite
replenishment of ice
instead I run up Shandon
arriving late for Maggie O’Sullivan, early enough
to catch her words as Eden-variety everafters
flying around our garden of poetry
I was locked from initially, outside
in the street awaiting my call

that poem about a mother opening her belly
that poem
incants a fact, you are present
sometimes being born
you will always be able to talk to me
I weep through the reading, it’s easy
to constellate far away suffering
in greener syntax
just across the sea
to afterwards hug Maggie, thank you
we have no idea how powerful words are
to leap, mutate and glow
in defiance of the law
how hard it was for all of us
just to get here

everything we’ve been through will be again
but I don’t have a generation
we see wagtails on the lawn
sonograms of gathering voice
what is it
to be intimidatingly full of life
Gloria singing of sailing
Carl making faces at the baby
making faces at poetry
as we remember Callie
being smart and funny and so singular
as to outlast all of it
eating dosa while watching
Ellen Dillon’s killer reading
then a cuckoo went off on
someone’s phone, hello pastoral

those oysters were universal
tell me about your shoes

guess I will inherit
my father’s spiral cutlery

all the better to eat what
cannot be stomached
of home-cooked nowheres
rich in cortisol

what I want is raw
and clear

saw a little grey dog
at my feet
during Keith Tuma’s performance
not a real dog, offhand
come to comfort me because
dogs smell cancer
even when someone else’s lives
like a phantom accord on your aura
and in the forever ward of poetry
who will get away with autumn

my life is a spatiotemporal displacement
filtering love’s dimensionality

I want to go back to Dogtown
rose petals steeped in promises

Languishing, cute is in the world!

In August 2022, which legitimately feels a whole fat wormhole ago, Ian Macartney and I found ourselves working in Edinburgh for part of the summer. We met up at after-hours cafes (more prevalent in the capital, what you playing at Glasgow?) and walked around the Botanical Gardens where the staff promised ~*’Instagram flowers’*~ and we talked about our hopes and dreams and struggles as booksellers and teachers. Part of the emergent narrative concerned utopian ideals of Scottish infrastructure, where one could zip to Lerwick in a hyperloop heartbeat (all élan, not El*n) or at the very least catch a local bus on time, or unlock a hidden realm below the loch of Linlithg(l)ow. Part of it was about friendship, love and pop music. We were listening nonstop to Caroline Polachek and feeling okay about it. Pretty good actually. There was her vocal flipping over the crags, at sunset. I remember purifying my heart with orange liquor. Wearing a lot of lilac. Bleeding ink into industrial bedsheets. We were thinking about pivotal points where our childhoods overlapped with culture. We wrote things in documents and met in the months ahead. I did a lot of chaos cycles, late, trying to meet Ian at say, the Mitchell Library to go over some edits. A lot of awful things happened in the months intervening but there was this document we could splash land into and like turn on the light. Poetry’s coy ambience zonked up to warp speed. I liked doing this project a lot. I’m glad it’s in the world.

I think it’s in the same universe as say, An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun and Ian’s 2024 essay for Futch Journal, ‘solarity, reclaimed’.

We’re publishing the full collection, Languishing, cute with the wonderful Tapsalteerie, an indie press based in rural Aberdeenshire. Ian’s worked with them before via their pamphlet imprint Stewed Rhubarb Press and they published some of my poems in the 2019 anthology, edited by Calum Rodger, titled makar/unmakar: twelve contemporary poets in Scotland. We’re big fans of Duncan Lockerbie, Tapsalteerie’s founder and editor, who does so much for Scottish poetry and beyond.

We’re also publishing, thanks to the exquisite printing of Earthbound Press, a separate riso pamphlet of b-sides titled The Gate. Look out for that at our launch events…

From the publisher

languishing, cute presents a collection of jittery missives that propels the speculative Scottish canon of Morgan, Gray and Mitchison into a maximalist ‘high femme goth surrealism’ via hyperpop, Celtic futurism and digital culture. Here the poets tend towards e-pistolary contemplations of retro-adolescence, fizzy ecology and mercurial slippy gurlhood to complicate notions of Scottish identity, nationhood, ecology, nostalgia and more.

Nice things people have said:

languishing, cute is the opposite of a flyting — that traditional bare-knuckles fight between two poets. Rather, the two poets here offer their worlds to each other in the gift of friendship and they listen back: it’s not a duel, it’s a jewel. Where they meet is in a place of Anglophone avant-garde stimulants — locating codes include Francesca Lisette’s Teens, Edwin Morgan, Tim Atkins and Peter Manson — and the dancefloor has Bunny Is A Rider pumping out in up-melancholy and autotune. At times this is glitch-poetry, funny, para-kitsch and mesmeric. At other times there are the amplitudes of tenderness and self-effacement in a palette of citrus and greenest day-glo. What’s also fascinating is the pressing together of the virtual and its tics with its mineral and viscose underpin, all via the very human. It’s a leap from body/mind to capital/digital and back again, flickering, a visit to Silicon Brig-a-Doon you’ll want to be the first to Insta.

– Richard Price

[…] Messy as a teenage tumblr, flashy as a strobe light, this is two exceptionally generous poets bouncing off the walls of the backrooms with the energy of a thousand monster energies… here ~The Glitch~ is not a glitch but a stitch between windows, the glue between a b2b set, the rhythmic green hills of algorithmic infinity … and yet these re-mixes and e-mails traverse an internet of metal and cable, the business of poetry is conducted by staples through sheets of reconstituted tree::: there’s something old-school, decidedly analogue about all this. It feels like you could feel it. It feels like the push of a button, the caress of a bright cool screen. Actually no it feels warm and coarse, a cosy transmission rumbling, re-tuning itself like you’re flicking from station to radio station, flickering between noise & dialectical noise, patterns emerging in the static as the ether unknots itself, and the stuff of life comes spilling out […]

– Dan Power

Endless aureate refreshment from Maria Sledmere and Ian Macartney, languishing, cute is a collection with all its push notifications turned on that still finds headspace to pay attention on the DL to form and poetic inheritance. There’s Sledmere’s elliptical take on William Carlos Williams’ fridge raid (with Kylie Minogue R osé instead of plums), the odd sestina, and plentiful nods to that Scottish experimentalist Edwin Morgan range from embedded songs of the Loch Nes[s]presso Monster to Macartney’s predictive geographies in time-travelling poems indebted to Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland.

With spins to further Scottish topographies from Maybole to Lerwick, Sledmere and Macartney are often found shuttling east and west ‘w/ eloquent glitches’ across Scotland’s central belt, heading increasingly into CAPITALS when Macartney’s voice announces us into Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley/Edenbruh/the London of Scotland.

The internet’s vertigo is never far away from poems presenting like listicles. Sadly for any wannabe monetised content, in languishing, cute these poets may be trading futures, but their hacked hypernature is funding nobody’s wellness retreat.

– Iain Morrison 

ORDER HERE FROM THE PUBLISHER

LAUNCH EVENTS

24th April, 7pm — The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow (free entry – details)

11th May, 5pm — Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh (arrive promptly! – details)

Submissions open: Digital Dreamland

So excited to co-edit this new series with Maisie Florence Post!

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)

☁︎ affective ecologies of the comment section

☁︎ recalibrating platforms/digital detournement

☁︎ dead internet theory as dreamscape

☁︎ online dream interpretation communities 

☁︎ folk hauntology and web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 

☁︎ somnambulist clickholes 

☁︎ liminal spaces and spaciality of dreams

☁︎ surrealist aesthetics

☁︎ online collective memories 

☁︎ posting as automatic writing 

☁︎ psychosomatics of the meta-nightmare 

☁︎ dreaming in digital interfaces 

☁︎ dream prophecies and crypto 

☁︎ virality as bottleneck alter-consciousness

☁︎ glitch feminism

☁︎ screen-induced hallucinations (shared hallucinations)

☁︎ I lost a piece of my psyche in geocities

☁︎ hyperconnectivity and dream symbolism

☁︎ we are (always already) living in a simulation

☁︎ rest vs attention online

☁︎ internet temporalities/(a)synchronicities

☁︎ social dreams as cyber commoning 

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)

ʚɞ

You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.  

Every book I read in 2024

In loose order of reading. This year I made a vow to not let work ‘get in the way’ of reading. I was talking to a colleague about how every subject/specialism has one thing they are supposed to be really good at and actually kind of suck at. We agreed English & Creative Writing staff are often pretty bad at this thing that should be their lifeblood: reading. To prioritise reading is to affirm the necessity of thinking. I felt so burned out with the circuitry of the 2010s and the zoomageddon of lockdown, all those screens. Reading in scroll-time. I still love reading in scroll-time, but on the move only. Or in the midst of something else doing. It took me three years to get back into immersive, situated, FOCUSED reading again. I mean staying up all night to finish a book, crying at sentences, holding something to the light and putting it down and stopping and starting because you want to savour something and all the world of it following you into dreams. All reading started to plug into work. Good work. Channels. If I’m honest, I haven’t written a lot this year. I needed a break from concepts. I did a lot of editing and proofing and reading. I wrote a lot of emails and did a LOT of marking. I think of marking as writing time. It eats into writing time but it’s also a practice of sentence-making, observation, editing, rewriting. Eileen Myles says somewhere that when they write people recommendation letters and do interviews etc that’s a form of writing. So really there are very few ‘fallow’ periods. You’re always writing something to someone, for something or not. I have written over a monograph’s worth of student feedback this year, maybe more. Each paragraph of feedback is a micro-essay, a snapshot of orientation, a patchwork sample which stitches multiple discourses (genre, criteria, instinct, history) in ascent to encouragement and improvement. So all that feedback, I’m trying to say, means I also read a hell of a lot of student work. Hundreds of scripts. Marking trains my eye as a reader and writer. Still learning to toggle between different kinds of reading. Refusing the active/passive binary in favour of a continuum of generative involvement. A lot of what I read below was in-between other reading, but some of it is more explicitly ‘work’ reading. Or: reading as a way of connecting with friends, colleagues — their beautiful brains. Or: preparation for something as yet unknown. Working through personal syllabi. Refreshing the palette.

~

Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (2006)

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, Sebastian Truskolaski, Antonia Grousdanidou (2023)

Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, trans. by Penny Hueston (2021/2023)

Joey Frances, Takeaway Night (2024)

Teju Cole, Black Paper (2021)

George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)

Megan Ridgeway, The Magpie (2024)

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. by John E. Woods (1924)

Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies (2021)

Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)

Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (1986)

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992) 

Oli Hazzard, Sleepers Awake (2024)

Courtney Bush, Every Book is About the Same Thing (2021)

Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahic (2016)

McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)

Rachael Allen, God Complex (2024)

Elle Nash, Deliver Me (2024)

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2021)

Andrew Meehan, Instant Fires (2022)

Michael Eigen, Ecstasy (2001)

Noah Ross, The Dogs (2024)

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death (2024)

Barbara Browning, The Gift (2017)

Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class (2021)

Courtney Bush, I Love Information (2023)

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)

Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist (2011)

Hilary White, Holes (2024)

Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances (2024)

Deborah Meadows, Representing Absence (2004)

Holly Pester, The Lodger (2024)

Terese Marie Mailhot, Heartberries (2018)

Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015)

Lauren Levin, Nightwork (2021)

Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins, trans. by Philip Roughton (2016)

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024)

Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019)

Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia (2024)

Joanne Kyger, On Time (2015) 

Jean Day, Late Human (2021)

Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (2003)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)

Ben Smith, Doggerland (2019)

Ricky Monaghan Brown, Terminal (2024)

Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (2023)

Joseph Mosconi, Fright Catalog (2013)

Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)

Haytham El Wardany, The Book of Sleep, trans. by Robin Moger (2020)  

Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere (2022)

Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (2024)

Brian Whitener, The 90s (2022)

Jamie Bunyor, A stone worn smooth (2022)

Lucy Ives, The Hermit (2016)

Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (2001) 

Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)

Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (1973)

Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth (2020)

Lindsey Boldt, Weirding (2022)

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970)

Hannah Levine, Greasepaint (2024)

Joe Luna, Old News (2024)

Maggie O’Sullivan, earth (2024)

Ian Macartney, sun-drunk (2024)

Sébastien Bovie, Longing for Lo-fi: Glimpsing back through technology (2023)

Steven Zultanski, Relief (2021)

Lionel Ruffel, I Can’t Sleep. trans. by Claire Finch (2021)

Noémi Lefebvre, The Poetics of Work, trans. by Sophie Lewis (2021)

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (2019)

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker, Spoilers (2024)

Ed Steck, David Horvitz Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2021)

Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, Joanne Kyger: Letters to & From (2012)

Lyn Hejinian, Fall Creek (2024)

Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, trans. by Ethan Mitchell (2024)

Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)

Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)

Miye Lee, Dallergut Dream Department Store, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee (2023)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 1 (2006/2010)

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Ian Macartney, Darksong (2024)

Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl (2000)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 2 (2007/2017)

Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes (2014)

Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega, trans. by Saskia Vogel (2022) 

Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (1985)

Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006)

Daniel Feinberg, Some Sun (2024)

Maria Hardin, Sick Story (2022)

Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, trans. by Sophie Collins (2022)

Nadia de Vries, Thistle, trans. by Sarah Timmer Harvey (2024)

Rodge Glass, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024)

Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (2024)

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica (2024)

Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists (2024)

Andrew Meehan, Best Friends (2025)

Courtney Bush, Isn’t this Nice? (2019)

Meghann Boltz, Cautionary Tale (2021)

Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood (2024) 

Dalia Neis, The Swarm (2022)

Ian Macartney, Secret Agent Orca Twelve (2024)

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night (2010)

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1982)

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

Molly Brodak, Bandit (2016)

Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986)

Anna Gurton-Wachter, My Midwinter Poem (2020)

1993: the birth of the Web

Daily writing prompt
Share what you know about the year you were born.
View all responses
My dad, brother and I at home in the 1990s, overlooked by a magisterial PC

In 1993, the World Wide Web was released into the public domain. There are many histories of the internet and this one is pretty idiosyncratic. I like asking people when they got their first desktop computer. The internet of 1993 could be navigated through bright blue hyperlinks and you would drift between websites. You would type stuff into AskJeeves and have no idea what to expect. At school we had a ‘passport to the Web’ certificate that could be obtained by completing numerous training activities on a twee little software whose name I forgot. It was something like ‘CyberKids’ though surely that is a New York City raver subculture from a time not yet captured by the sleazification of all things indie 2000s. I imagine it was superior to the present Cyber Security Training on offer, in which actors pretend to discover pen drives in the street, gleefully insert them into work desktops only to find their screen literally blowing up in front of them. Nowadays, cyber security training is less about don’t talk to strangers and more about change your passwords regularly. I have a lot of floaty metaphors for the password changing which seem to all include underwear or car parts. Passwords though are pretty boring, clunky things but they’re also gauzy ephemera. Pieces of secret unlocking. Recently I spent an entire Sunday trying to unlock a 2011 MacBook. The password, when I found it again, accessing the deepest recesses of abstract memory, was unforgivably cherishable. I’ll keep it forever like a pet (I’ve already forgotten it).

I keep thinking about ressentiment as a sensation produced by the internet. I mean the internet’s failure. When I was a child, I adored the internet. Once we’d upgraded from dial-up, I would spend upwards of 12-14 hours almost nonstop on forums, games, LiveJournal, websites. I gravitated naturally from the virtual worlds of the Game Boy to the bigger screen of the laptop. Before I was even allowed internet access, I would simulate them by making endlessly complicated Powerpoints and Microsoft Publisher pages which connected to one another like a crude open world. I was beset by RAM crashes and Wi-Fi outages. We didn’t have broadband for a very very long time. My dad was one of the first in the village to have it. I would write letters to the broadband guy pretending to be my dad complaining about the speed of the internet. When I go back to the Shire now, I say things like ‘the internet here is ass’. I can’t get 4G at the semi-demolished and barely functioning station. We can’t find out if our train will come or not. We communicate as a brooding micro crowd, frowning and looking anxiously towards digitised screens whose flicker says only ‘delay’. There are no staff. The staff hide in a crisis. I can relate.

Ressentiment – deep hostility combined with powerlessness. The promise of an open world, a generous future, seems rotten. We hate it. It’s failed us. The sheen of that; it keeps nicking us like a pen knife writing sentences on the skin of our hard-worn feet. We can’t even quit the platforms, can we? The implied ‘we’ of a web community is now an absurdity. What have we seen of the Web in thirty years? Unimaginable horrors. Nevertheless, the perambulations continue.

Right now, I’m deeply interested in the dissonance between how we feel the internet ought to be structured, how it almost was, and what it’s become. The dream metaphors we might use for how it once felt to drift between websites, stumbling upon weirdness after weirdness, unlocking more zones of reality. This versus the algorithmic governmentality and corporate monopolies, ‘technofeudalism’ (Varoufakis) and the appification of it all. I think I got interested in poetry right around the time I fell out of love with the internet (2015). I would memorise passages of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets and learn to swoon over Keats. I felt there was something in the shifting stanzas, the intricacies of form, the dazzling surprises it produced and the infuriating difficulties of grasping the source code — a connection.

I still use the term ‘post-internet’ because I want to believe you can take what Tavi Gevinson in 2018 called ‘The utopian ideal of the internet’ and polish its ‘antiquated’ remains. You can still feel the affective charge of every Web-related signifier that has brushed your life. You can be desensitised to ‘internet discourse’ through the media proliferation of tales of digitality, its foreclosures of democracy, its moral flops, its proliferating conspiracies. But there are parts of you irrevocably brought alive by the internet. I am haunted by digital solastalgia. As a child who felt out of place, abjected from the beginning, I sought the Web as a place not for social belonging exactly but something more like beauty, information, elsewhere. I found little pockets of home all over the place. The web (I’ll stop capitalising now and step out of History) was an extension of the fictional landscapes I found in my dreams or when walking around, making up novels in my head which I did every day until I hit puberty and hormones ruined my brain forever (or whatever). I don’t really know where to find those places any more. They weren’t just artefacts and I know this because you can’t produce a screenshot of a website from 2003 and experience a sweet pleasing nostalgia in the way you could with say, a beanie baby. It was something about the world of it all, the navigation, the desire paths forged to get there. The post-internet, for me, is a lifelong quest in understanding that melancholia and homesickness of what comes after. What do I do with the feeling of ‘we can’t go back there, where do we go now?’. All this time, have I used the web itself as some elaborate metaphor for wanting more than a hostile, futile reality? It’s why I like infrastructure, databases, libraries: the promises of systems which take you somewhere. Which transit something. I also love loops, links and non-linearity.

What was the poetry that got me into poetry? It was Romantic in flavour, sometimes in era. Something between the locatedness and dislocatedness, the attention to daily life, the catapulting scale logic of the sublime, the dogged attempt to render the brain on Nature, the melancholy and mourning, the quiet adoringness, the slow accumulation of elements, the sense of quest, pilgrimage, the unexpected visitor at the door. The everpresence of something more mysterious than could easily be folded into waking life. The delicious fug of opium and promise of a language capable of killing pain. The shimmering excess. The imaginative extremities and morbid dullness of Romanticism were necessary supplements to what the web had done for my childhood.

I’ve been dwelling on this quote awhile, from a Spike article about ‘What’s after Post-Internet Art?’:

The technoromantic reimagines posting as liturgy, algorithms as messengers, and artists as saints. They reach into a glorified past for motifs and meaning that invoke the aura of life before memes.Their aesthetic flirtation with the materiality of technology is a double-edged sword, however, that blurs the lines between critique and commodity fetishization. The stakes for this ambivalence are high at a time when capitalist technology is threatening human dignity and agency. Do we really want to engender an emotional attachment to the internet?

Is the function of art to engender the emotional attachment or to transmute its energies into something other? In my day job, I spend almost a whole day a week dealing with academic misconduct cases relating to the plagiarism and hallucinations of Generative-AI. I am supposed to come up with ethical and interesting ways to engage new technology in the classroom, but I fantasise about whole server forms blowing up or quietly being sucked back into the toothpaste tube of Silicon Valley, as if none of this ever happened. At the same time, with two close family members currently undergoing heavy duty cancer treatment, I marvel at the wonders of modern medicine. I think about what Tracey Emin said when asked by Louis Theroux what she thought of AI, or whether there was room for AI art in the world. She says ‘thanks to robots […] that’s another reason why I’m still sitting here’ [presumably due to AI’s role in innovations in cancer treatment and her own recent experience of this]. She’s also like, ‘In terms of art, AI doesn’t really sit well with me, especially when I’m a compulsive, passionate, hot-blooded person who paints’. The contradictions of my feelings about machines get more extreme by the week. I feel born into this contradiction. It’s maybe why my former work twin Nigel would always leave old copies of Wired at my desk.

Does all poetry written after the ‘post-internet moment’ also risk the commodity fetishisation mentioned above? Insofar as it betrays its own lovingness towards the technology it otherwise seeks to critique? Do we want an archness of superior distance or can we do something else with that self-awareness? I think the affect touched upon by Kat Kitay’s piece in Spike is Romantic irony, you know when you realise the narrator is caught up in the situation being described. The Romantic poet speaker discovers they are also a character in the poem. There’s a kind of turn. Timothy Morton uses Blade Runner as a classic example of this, you know when Deckard realises he’s a replicant. Being asked the question, what do you know about the year you were born, for me is like being asked what do you know about what happened to the web? My life is a character in the web’s and the web is a character in my life. What’s the poem here? The continuous mess of everything enmeshed, written, performed, dialogued, deleted, drawn and coded in my lifetime. I have a hot-blooded relationship to the internet. It makes my fucking eyes twitch.

Is transmutation an alternative to merely engendering feeling? I like the word transmutation because I learned it from the great poet Will Alexander. It’s also used by Ariana Reines a lot. We’re thinking here about alchemical transformations in the realm of language, feeling, sensing. I want a poetry that is able to metabolise impossible feelings and in doing so, fuel its reader to think anew. Do I reassign the pain of childhood, the loss of some otherworldly dream, onto the external scapegoat of an enshitified internet? Is that okay? I think about all the times our art teacher made us sit at PCs unconnected to WiFi writing about the design of vintage radios and speaker technology. We had no access to books, the web or other resources to find out more about the designs displayed to us. So in lieu of history or context, we wrote acute, proliferating descriptions of what we saw. What it reminded us of. We found endless vocabularies for edges, colours, surfaces, affordances. This mind-numbing two hours a week was a little oasis from digital supplementarity. A cool, replenishing retreat from external stimulation. We sat on hard, tall stools and typed on clacky keyboards. A tiny little art factory. I had only my brain and the image. I didn’t know it at the time but I was learning that ekphrasis can have a communicative and transformative function. I wrote through the notion of writing about radios to escape the moment where I was supposed to be writing about radios. This did not prepare me for my Art & Design exam so much as it prepared me for poetry.

What do I do with my hatred of the internet? My yearning for it? I write poetry because poetry is a cheap form of that dream architecture I so longed for, all of my life, and I felt good making/using/playing. Marie Buck has a poem that says ‘The point of reading is asynchronous intimacy, and hopefully it works forever’. I said this to my colleague Rodge last week, when we were having one of our regular moments of private despair, and he prints it out and now it’s on the wall of my office. When I look at it I think about all the books out there and all the interesting things I’ve read on the internet and how connected I feel to other worlds. I just have to keep that connection going. I will never know what it’s like to have not been online.

Hi Sorry

Hi Sorry

Hi sorry it took
so long to get back to you
we’ve been super busy here you know I
know am going there now fine
be with you in five. Not. Ten. Fine. Can all
support workers please email
in with completed timesheets by the end of the week before
right yes okay, did you
see the edinburgh rainbow I am
a bit confused as to where to find this building
you come pick me up right. Yes. In the morning. Yes.
It’s staff spa day I am a bit
nevermind. Right. So if you. Yeah I’m good it’s been
Ok let’s try this instead. Alright you know maybe
did you check the reference I think that’s
What was wrong no no one’s gotten
Their feedback yet have you considered.
I am going there now yeah that’s so true
The link seems to be broken can you
Hit resend yes it’s in the attachment not
This one this other. Sorry. Can I send you
the month again
I think I’ve been spotlighted and muted
at the same time
I mean if you want to you could always
no that one’s closed have you
checked out the right books
so sorry! I mean fine I’m good yeah
You know I am alright I can order another
So if you check on the library resources
Tab yeah you’ve got. I totally understand!
Sorry for your understanding
I’ll take care of that, would you. Ok.
Where’s my phone? So you see it does
Not allow for templates so what you do is
Put the big red box. Right. And then
The blue box and the green. Right. Could you…
It would be great to be in the big black box
Which you put in the bin. Totally! Uhm, the poem’s not
Opening are you sure you sent it yes
It’s not a PDF though it’s literally inscribed on the stars.
Right…. Do you have a skin by any chance
Can I put it in your poem? I think it’s in my pocket
That’s so fucked? I’m so sorry?
Can you put my head on the maintenance portal?
Okay. I need your help and expertise unravelling
One of the world’s longest standing misconceptions. Right.
So I think mobile view is a write off?
Have you tried emailing them? Yes they’ve sent in the letter.
Please hold the line for the council.
I am the council. I am the Queens Park Hello Kitty.
You could apply for a partial refund just answer
A couple of questions one
Have you. Yes. I am applying for emergency
funding for my damp lifestyle. Do you want me
To pin the window on the call so folks can have a better look?
Can I sit right next to you? Is it Ok?
I can stand where you need me hey Maria
The file is so corrupt
THERE IS NO AUDIO why is he
Making inchoate humming noises can you
Take over the cat from me? Haha it’s Ok I guess I’ll just
Fill up the bathtub with cat food. Are you in tomorrow?
Are you offering anything? New deal on flaking.
I am just totally zoomed out. Well, I’m a tiny speck
On the furniture. I don’t think the wifi is working
Why you ask. You see the password?
Let’s take it from there. Okay. Are you sure
You want to send it without a subject header
Like are you totally sure? No I’m sorry
It’s Mau but with like a ‘oooooooooooo’ at the end.
Think of cows! Happy in the field. Grazing on liberty caps.
Ma – ooooooo. Yes! You’ve got it. Not many people can do that.
Can you please ring me back. Hi it’s Amy
And Georgia. I’ve filled in your invoice for you
Sorry about the cuts. Hahahahaha
Love you! I want to get on my knees for you.
I’m on strike. Trust me I have a good reason
To look? Hello?
Hey how are you I hope