cute entry // yellow tulips

cute entry / / yellow tulips
London, April 2024

I was out somewhere reciting my love for Adidas with wishes thrice – décolletage! – and music, the train arrived on time. I wanted to ask about your shoulder and you said there was so much Guinness after the football, the rest of the world was a rumour. We had all these non-sequiturs to like, communicate the fizzy little spirals. I was like an ice cream sky for you! A spring-rush blossom you! Tapering, tapering. Went to buy salad from downstairs, went to run around putting jeans on. New jeans. Matte suede lips. Blue Sunday. Covent Garden was glistening with consumerism and the new good weather. Every time I’m in London it’s sunnier, warmer, more deniable; so much the smell of pollution & impossible flowers, pollution & impossible flowers
the city I really learned to love was so expensive you could only love so much before the money felt
mouth garbage
of gorgeous surplus:
What I kept feeling about London was…what I had kept of something & nothing a type of ‘neutral metabolic beverage’ bought at room temperature in the clothing store – spontaneous purchase!
Questions to fall in love to……what’s your favourite checkout compulsion? To shoplift gum? To flirt with cashier? To buy an oaten flute and play it to god? I was so concerned about the woman in Asda with the bleeding nailbeds and I kept recommending apricot oil and lots of sleep, I’d been through it too, and my Nan from the chemo. What our nails tell us. Mine used to be silver striped and blood-let-violet, now they are cracked with the memory.

The rain came out the day I went home. Lucky I got to bring my book to London. Oh god it was beautiful the matinee I was nervously also on Guinness and lots of intersections of arrival, read first, took ponytail out like to say she is me now. Cinders. The night before, D. and I had gone to see some bands at the George Tavern and we talked through a few sets just because it had been so long since we’d talked and I wanted to know all about work and love and she said something amazing about how it gets better every day, like you just want to find out so much about the person, you want to figure out the total every degree of how they think and what they feel about something – this plenitude. I said that to my friend last night like the thing about a successful relationship is surely that every day it gets better in that you change together, you change each other, you discover things about yourself that would irrevocably not be possible to discover unless you met this person and you change each other’s day and daily and that’s not like tree branches curled around each other it’s more like mycelia underground, so much unseen, more like alchemy. So when you break apart, you never really sever. You are cellular bonded. Their energy surges in you – what – a bus ride home, a voice note, a quiet cry in the night. Something said, something unspoken. Unexpected holding of hands. Curly little yes.

*

I reread The Hour of the Star over breakfast sauerkraut and the flicker of lighter-light out at the end was it. So easy ideation; not to say I made plans, just that the impulse had become my little sister. You have to find your light.

I was lighting up to go to the next thing.

‘Beautiful though it is, it’s just walking really,’ said the woman behind me on the train, talking about the countryside.

She also said:

  1. 99% of people who study to be dentists end up being dentists
  2. 99% of people who study art don’t end up being artists

My brother and I stay up til 2am listening to hardstyle and reminiscing 2000s absurdism like it’s our good soft history and I suppose it is. Castles in the sky, pretty green eyes, quiver, save me, braveheart, moonlight, sunshine after the rain, bits and pieces, concrete angel, true love never dies.

I want to exhibit gelatinous entrails of everything we ever said.

*

Someone not new I met again talked about making love in a cornfield, listening to Sting. That the not-not-new of it all shared love for Eva Cassidy broke a little nerve platonism so much that I would melt into what we made awhile. Nightcap. Fortuitous timing of trains.

J. said I looked about twelve in the picture. I said this is my heartwood: surly, surly.

The readings:

Jane’s brilliant poise – poetry delivers the body.
Ellis’s infinite – I was so elated to meet them finally ❤
Rob’s plasma poems enamoured and the fuck devastation of elegy.
Karenjit’s percussive grace.

The readings were gems I will live with. I took videos but for some reason couldn’t upload them anywhere, but I have them.

Noodles at Silk Road backscattering miso. Hospitality stories. Stafford yellow fields. Lambs around Penrith.

Intimate fish tank of the Zoom reading with my Krupskaya label mates. I nearly read with the AR halo. Two in one day.

I slept thick treacle.

“kept swelling with the sense of this year as the best, it keeps getting better”
“wonderful”
“Oh rly?”

The other maria.

Upcoming Sleep Curricula

My research currently centres on sleep as a nexus for thinking about energy transition, low carbon pleasure and chronodiversity (the way our circadian rhythms differ).

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk titled Our Amazing Bed Is the Future Garden: The Poetics of Dream Ecologies. It emerges from a chapter in my DFA thesis which will form part of a book forthcoming with NoUP Press next year. If you would like a Zoom link please drop me an email at maria.sledmere[at]strath.ac.uk.

This autumn I’ve got three upcoming workshops, two of them with the brilliant experimental composer Kevin Leomo.

Civil Twilight: Carving Dreamtime – workshop with Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere
14th October at 5:30pm, Civic House, Glasgow

Get your brain sticky in the pumpkin meat of the circadian and join Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere in carving dreamtime as an expression of creativity and low carbon pleasure. As the nights draw in and the clocks go back, we’ll be thinking about how darkness affects mood and slumber. Civil twilight is the brightest of the three twilight phases, where stars and planets might be seen in the sky as the sun dips just below the horizon. By attending to the ‘nocturne’ as a form in poetry and music, we’ll dwell in the possibilities of liminal experience for cultivating ecological imaginaries.
Please bring: Preferred writing materials, If you have one, a reusable coffee cup, headphones and phone.
Tickets are offered on a slide scale: £15 / £10 / £5.
Part of Civic Harvest at Civic House – an Autumn themed day of family friendly activities, workshops and market stalls with lunch from Parveen’s and seasonal cocktails at Civic House Bar!
Tickets

😴

Design your own sleep demon – workshop with Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere
24th October at 5:30pm, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow
While sleep is a source of rest and recovery, many of us wrestle with disturbed sleep. If you’ve ever had nightmares or found yourself sleepwalking, you’ve encountered oneirodynia. The word comes from the Greek oneiros, meaning ‘dream’ and odyne, meaning pain. Sleep disturbance may be caused by a number of factors: from stress to stimulants, environment, illness and temperature. The eponymous protagonist of Donnie Darko is often found sleepwalking or experiencing some kind of nocturnal anguish. In this workshop, which serves as a primer for the film’s upcoming CinemARC debut, we’ll explore hypnagogic states between wakefulness and sleep as premonition, vision and disturbance. Together we will produce a ‘sleep bestiary’ of our (least) favourite nocturnal nasties, and present our findings before the screening on Friday.

Tickets

😴

The Poetry of Somnolence – weekend double workshop with Maria Sledmere and Beyond Form Creative Writing
11th and 12th November at 1-4pm (GMT), Zoom

This 2 part series of afternoon workshops prioritise the relationship between writing and sleep. Exploring cross-genre writing, visual and sonic art, we will look at how daily writing practice can recentre our circadian rhythms. From hypnagogic poetics to dream writing, nocturnal missives, dawn songs and notes on twilight, we’ll consider experimental approaches to writing somnolence. All creatives welcome.

Workshop format will combine reading, writing, listening, optional discussion and two nap breaks.

Tickets

Kevin and I have also been working on this somnolent playlist for your melatonin delectation:

Playlist: August 2022

It’s almost autumn and I can’t stop listening to The Corrs. Something ringing in the falling rain a leaf-lorn runaway, never gonna stop falling, wish I could play the strings and not cry over a snapped shoelace that Saturday, wish I could never need name this. A fresh nostalgia for Flash player, a bad new year, kneeling in the car dirt of roadsides to fix my bike, the air all gone out of each tyre it’s tiring to be here /  wish I could change. Not into other people but into the person I was, rosy-fingered sleepless rolling cinnamon skins and talking on the internet while in the other town this guy throws a mattress out of a window. If memory serves to fall out with it. Black lace and white corduroy out to the woods I’m happiest on the hill where I see this deer, evidently a teenage stag and I’m calling angel androgynies the very next stray. Fucked up salads of affect, afraid to go outside. Emma says everyone’s a poet. You just go.

Crying in the cobblers for other omens.

Girls in the nineties with strands of dark hair, box-dyed. The electricity all gone out. I was supposed to be planning a workshop, writing a lecture. The universe owns me, doesn’t owe me. 

Across oceans of static, watching you typing…

I cycled past the cathedral and saw the sycamores blush orange as if in real-time metabolising their chlorophyll before me. I google the phrase ‘fall splendour’ in guilty luxuriance. A man on my street pisses against the wall, daylight screams; he pisses for so long I think he will disintegrate in dumb liquid gold. Can’t concentrate on this Zoom call. I’m missing something real of the days before me. Girl in old man bar is singing a ballad. Can you drink a black hole if you can’t drink a Guinness? Colin says Brian says you’d have to suck through a straw at the speed of light. Girl in old man bar is wearing tartan, a velvet headband, recently expired lipstick. I like her.

Singing Eliza Carthy, singing Amen Dunes…

I always want autumn too early and pine for spring. Trillions of magazines tell me it’s not cool having holes in my tights. It’s not cool having ragged cuticles. 

Ten years of sleazy beauty.

A paintbrush yellowing in sordid water.

Forever down Cathcart Road.

Incurable bed mornings of limb ache and long illness, it’s fine like to say it’s totes, bring myself coffee in bed and emails filling me with autumn leaves and the fly infestation fed upon fruit and air…a red car rolling backwards up the street…

It used to be so easy to write these like it never mattered to write at all. The sky is still whey and there are new routes to get to the same old temples. I swirl my tongue in the google doc long enough to know how I’d touch you; the hopescape bristles with city pollution. My friends have been to Greece and Bali, the Hebrides. I have been to Edinburgh for work. Come down the wrong side of the hill among gorse and scramble, the rocks coming loose and my heart gone trash-eating in the nights of bad sleep again, all again, falling awake with the light on, spilled ink in my sheets. I met the same America on Netflix checking my brain, my gag reflex. 

I heard the blood blister in that guitar riff and it was like vomiting behind the shopping mall in Kilmarnock, drunk on bus wine and the Alice in Chains of my arteries…you awake, say the word clavicle, touch my spine…

The Corrs – Breathless

Alice in Chains – Tears

Hand Habits – No Difference

Beth Orton – Weather Alive

Belle & Sebastian – Working Boy in New York City

Sharon Van Etten – Darkness Fades

Baths – Tropical Laurel

Doja Cat – Love to Dream

Adios Nervosa – cloudcover

Drugdealer – Madison

Thee Oh Sees – Chem-Farmer

The 1975 – Part of the Band

June11 – Who is Still Dreaming?

Regina Spektor – Loveology

New workshops: Epistolary Experiments and Pop Matters

Thrilled to announce I’ll be working with Beyond Form Creative Writing again this autumn to offer two new workshops. The first, Epistolary Experiments, begins on 28th September and is a monthly, four-part series designed to explore the arts of letter writing and correspondence across different forms. We’ll be thinking about how the work of address, posting, description and all its intimacy and triangulation can tell a story, evoke fantasy scenarios or perform an expansive, relational lyric. The second, Pop Matters: Our Songs, is a one-off workshop on 23rd November and offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. How do we write through and towards pop with all our devotion or ambient dwelling in its neon glow? Both workshops will involve a mix of reading other work, discussion and structured individual writing activities. There will never be any pressure to share work, although you will have access to the workshop threads on Experimental Creatives Collective, a closed forum space where further discussion and sharing can take place if anyone wishes.

For both workshops, there is both a full price and two concession rates.

Epistolary Experiments

4 Sessions Starting Wednesday September 28th

6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom

‘I write you a letter to make eyes at a reader I don’t know from Adam’ (Kay Gabriel). From Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Sean Bonney’s incendiary Letters Against the Firmament (2015), letter-writing or ‘the epistolary’ has inflected all kinds of writing, including novels, poetry and manifestos. Taking cue from Kay Gabriel’s ‘The Purloined Lyric’, we’ll explore the possibilities of letters, address and communication in all kinds of writing, practice and performance. While the literary letter has an established tradition, we’ll look at contemporary artists/authors who shake up the form of correspondence and in turn reframe desire, play, identity, sex, intimacy, domesticity and the political. 

In this four-part, monthly series, we’ll look at several key areas: the love letter, the political letter, the fantasy letter and the postcard. A letter can triangulate writer, addressee and reader in endlessly generative ways, not to mention the origami of folds between art, life and writing, and this series is designed for creatives of all kinds to think about the epistolary genre in their own practice. Whether you want to incorporate the letter form directly into your work as source material/form, or simply use it as an extra tool in your research, reflection and development process, this series offers a generative starting point. Workshops will combine reading and reflection with individual writing activities, with some opportunities for collaboration including optional pairing of participants as ‘pen-pals’ for the duration of the course.

Open to all skill levels and writers and creatives of all mediums. You can sign up for all or just some of the weeks!

​♡

Session 1 September 28th: The Love Letter 

An iconic motif in the history of film and literature, the love letter conveys acts of noticing, clandestine reflections, confessions, embarrassment and desire. The love letter might be a plot device, a poetic ode, a pop song, a frank or coded material expression. The love letter tells a story, obscures a truth, embodies connection; it might concern romantic, platonic or comradely love. Sometimes a love letter goes beyond the intended beloved and forges all sorts of new energies and worlds. We’ll write into all these intimacies and frictions. 

Key writers include John Keats, Jane Campion, Kay Gabriel, Jo Barchi, Diana Hamilton, Frank Ocean

Session 2 October 26th: The Political Letter

By reading unsent letters, letters to everyone, letters to no one, we’ll consider how the art of writing letters is a radically social form. Playing with the art of address and description, this workshop explores how the letter form can explode and disseminate ideas of presence, identity, desire and political (im)possibility. 

Key writers include Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten and Sean Bonney

Session 3 November 30th: The Fantasy Letter 

Sometimes we write to someone who might never read our letters. We write to fictional characters, other writers or artists — some of them lost to time. These epistles might take the form of fan letters, speculative letters, epistolary letters or fantasy missives — defying the limits of time, space, the living and dead. In this workshop we’ll engage with such letters to consider voice, the intimate arts of reading, communication between forms, the body and queer temporalities. 

Key writers include Dodie Bellamy, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Jack Spicer 

Session 4 December 14th: The Postcard 

‘A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending’ (Derrida, The Post Card). What does it mean to send, or be sent? This final workshop takes the pithy form of the postcard as a figure for the literary possibilities of posting. What temporality does a postcard hold? What happens in the relationship between word and image, expression and constraint, public and private? Could we write postcards to the past or future, to the more-than-human? Can thinking postcard help us rethink other kinds of ‘posting’ and (un)delivery in our daily and writerly lives?

Key writers include: Postcards from the Anthropocene project, Jacques Derrida, Kiraṇ Kumār

Register


Pop Matters: Our Songs

Wednesday November 23rd

6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom

Building on the success of the 2020 Pop Matters series, this workshop offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. We’ll focus mostly on pop music and love/devotion, making space for writing which borrows from the form of pop music or writes to specific pop artists. We’ll consider how pop can offer the emotional and structural inspiration for other kinds of creative output, the role of pop in everyday life/life-writing and the mythologies we give to pop icons in writing. Designed for anyone who wants to flirt with a bit of pop in their practice, this workshop will feature music, free association, reading and stimulating activities for writing.

Key writers include: Kevin Killian, Dana Ward, Anne Boyer, Ian Macartney 

Register

New course: Writing the Everyday

Writing the Everyday

Pleased to announce that I’m joining the Beyond Form team as a tutor and mentor, and about to begin my first course: Writing the Everyday. If you’re interested in poetry, hybrid forms and journaling, in how we attend to everyday life in writing and think critically about time, work, ritual and habit, capitalism, technology, sickness and health, rest and dreams, then this course is for you!

Official descriptor:

This seven-week course takes everyday life as an abundant field of study. Following the rhythms of work, leisure, the body, technology, desire and play, we’ll explore various approaches to writing the daily. What forms of ‘extreme attention’ (CAConrad) can writing access, and to what effect? How do we break, queer, slow or sabotage time? What kind of writing could hold, shrink or expand the day? We’ll read a range of contemporary experiments in the quotidian and engage with journaling, poetry and hybrid writing. 

Open to writers of all backgrounds and practice. This course is for anyone interested in exploring everyday life in their writing, reflecting critically on the poetics and politics of daily writing and encountering literary issues of time, intimacy, objects, environment and the body. Extracts from all texts will be supplied on a shared Google Drive and linked through Experimental Creatives Collective.

Here’s a breakdown of the course structure:

Week 1 February 24th: Today

Exploring ‘today’ as a unit of experience in writing, rhythms of repetition, return. What do we mean by an aesthetics of ‘everydayness’? How does literature encounter everyday life — its things, feelings, tempos, bodies and motions — in form and content?

Week 2 March 3rd: Work

In what ways can we explore the rhythms and demands of work, and make space for play and dream? In what ways is writing a form of work? How can our writing critique the conditions of labour which variously structure our daily lives? What kinds of interval, escape and resistance might it offer?

Week 3 March 10th: Ritual Attention

How can we practice forms of attention that estrange us from the familiarities of daily and domestic life? What forms of collage and screenshot experiments help us make sense of the chaos of daily life under late capitalism?

Week 4* Tuesday March 14th: Consumerism and Desire

What are the political and poetic potentials of our everyday desires? How can we think beyond the desires of capitalism? What is the significance of gender and sexuality within daily life, and how is this negotiated through consumption?

*please note this class will take place on Tuesday 14th March not Thursday

Week 5 March 24th: Technology and the Post-Internet 

What is the relationship between writing and technology in our daily lives? How does experimental writing explore, and intervene in, the forms, genres and platforms of Web 2.0 — from social media to texting and digital objects/systems? What are the everyday politics and poetics of the internet and its various temporalities of labour, desire, data, communication and self-presentation?

Week 6 March 31st: Sick Time

How can writing explore personal and societal experiences with sickness, from chronic illness to pandemics? How does illness alter our sense of time, space, work and embodiment; how does it change our sense of the ‘day’?

Week 7 April 7th: Rest and Dreams

What forms of rest and relaxation can writing offer? What is the relationship between writing and dreaming, and how can dreaming help us imagine better worlds, or access hidden portals in writing? What are the politics of rest and how might we pursue it through creative practice?

Week 8 April 14th: Optional Open Mic

Registration

Prices are on a sliding scale and you can choose to enrol on the full course or to attend individual workshops. Most of the workshops are focused on individual writing, with room for open discussion at the end of sessions. You will not be expected to share work or give feedback on others’ work, although there may be occasion for this informally throughout the course, and through the Experimental Creatives Collective workspace which you will gain access to upon registration. There will be an optional open mic, held online, at the end of the course.

If you want further feedback on your work, I am available for one-to-one mentorship through the Beyond Form mentorship scheme.

All classes will take place on Zoom. How-to videos for using Zoom can be found here.

If you have further questions about registration, accessibility and Beyond Form more generally, please email Tawnya Selene Renelle at info@beyondformcreativewriting.com.

For more information and to register, head over to the course page here.

This Place is Rammed

It’s Aries season and here’s a poem for Colin Herd’s birthday last week.

🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈

This Place is Rammed

The canteen was a dream canteen. No, it wasn’t on Mars!
I sat beside Colin Herd in a supervision that seemed to exist
horizoned on the kind of table I want to call cherrywood
is the word for anything darker and 
sweeter than pine. He asks
if I’ve been writing lately. A poem, “The old 
acid pit of the heart.” I turn sideways 
to offer him a Ready Salted Walkers Crisp.
We talk publishing. I am courageous and yet 
worry about waiting for lunch.

“O happy birthday!” 
it occurs to me
that I am a day or so late. 
I know he’s an Aries because 
everywhere in the dream I see red. 
It’s so busy. We’re not even
just a vibe. The packet 
of crisps is obviously red. The flames
in new-lit candles. The irate cadmium
aura of waiters, who should get better pay. 
I’m wearing red corduroy flares 
like in the Bob Perelman poem 
we heard last spring on Zoom. I’m showing 
a loss. Is cherrywood red?
I’m stuck in my chair. The sound of the crunch of
the crisp is red. Colin’s drinking 
a bright red thing with Campari & grenadine
Denise would approve of. Everything
is totally youthful. Will Colin eat
the big slice of blood orange? 
Tell me a glorious story!

Playlist: February 2021

you want snow, personally want to know will it end? The snow was a space it kept filling until the light went down and there was no song, just white in a sepia, sepia song. Was friday night, first night, and you could get a wine right now, a wish right now, you could fill it with wine. I do it all the time and there’s another card to prove it. Notifications softly accumulate in organic bright square. I have to stay awake; there are these bordered gardens I walk on the boardwalk I’m bored of walking I do it all the time; we stop sometimes (pensive) we watch each other not-smoke over the Zone. You want snow and I fill a glass of it, crisply; gushed from the tap but I still have precision, white grapes sour my organs hurting. We’re in the milk bar in some novel, some game, is it Clock Town? I am always taking you to Clock Town where the moon’s tears shimmer and there’s always a love affair to intercept with letters. Dearest…I meant, putting these shiny earrings in for you, quartz chips, I lost one? There is a proverb, a space; you fill it. Don’t fill anything right to the brim unless it’s coffee, I’ll drink it, overfull the stars and so on only as old as they think they are! We’re never too young for clubbing, the air is infectious you go out with mittens you glow — I am taking pictures of Kelvin Way, the avenue, the sorry trees. Likes of likes fill up like snow, like pc4pc like another moratorium on the heart react but you are bees. Drape inwards where the nape of a neck is pearl. We are weeping in the reading and we never were too young for this. Her version of treble mix in blackbird, favourite, a yellow call. Stereo. Some things a poem keeps secret. We’re in the milk bar and I am the tender of bar, a bar of milk (chocolate!) that gets you high, highest on wednesday’s the hump day pack it with double the sugar. Let’s grate hours upon hours, shredding plainsong, blackbirds, milk. The calorific value of daylight is only that you live it, don’t let anyone tell you they can harvest good will from the sun, it’s all watts, you know, I always fancied myself gentrified sunbeam for lunch but only on vicarious fridays, like I’m in love and it’s caused by coffee, something S. said once in a poem or essay, it’s easy, you take off your clothes and go swimming in the ice melt, SPACE, it’s sentence. We’re never too young for air, I’m greedy for oxygen like it’s 2014 and having moshed for sufficient number of hours in the outdoor crowd of this gentrified field I will take this body to the oxygen bar. You have the summer bod, the winter bod, the hot bod, the boy bod, the girl bod, the professional bod, the Zoom bod, the new bod, the non bod, the gains bod, the ghost bod, the fire bod, the ice bod, the willow bod, the swim bod, the shame bod. We sat in the oxygen bar anyhow, C. spent obnoxious amounts on a bottle of water that lasted forever, BPA-free, we cradled it all morn like our baby, she was, the clarity in that! Sparkling, milking, added vitamins. It is friday night on my desk there are innumerable pamphlets of poem, wires (no liquorice), f.’s glasses, a pink slab of crackle quartz, a coaster (forever unused) that says ‘please don’t leave’ inside a heart, melatonin pills (I will take one later), the bottle cap from a bottle of nye’s Classic Hooch, a lukewarm of tea (green), three-way pencil sharpener, hair clip, an orange pomander candle which I am horrified to say advertises itself as ‘Harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects’ — so in any case you won’t catch me throwing this fire in the sea! Special aquarium babies we are. It contains limonene, geranyl acetate – the candle, not the sea – and asks to be disposed in an appropriate disposal site. A film called Dive in which I am force-fed squid in the back of a taxi, now where have we seen that one before? A. has a vegan fridge a white shelf a row of spices. Tell me where do we all go lay rest our candles, how to elegise that which symbolises elegy, say prayer. Is this merely to blog or to bathe in pond life, gentle aquaria, I see through other glasses the reflective lettrism of darknesses unknown to us! And you’re still reading! Snow person melts into people. There is melt poetics. I clip back the starry excess to say wait here, we’re on the brink of something is it the beach in the email the long bright stretch of waiting, white sand, gold sand, brown sand, blue sand under the moon (!) how long it’s been I hope you’re okay and other famous online statements the daffodils wilt too soon is sun they want so much blush pressure it’s barely gone february, melt and blush. A year ago today we all kissed I did cartwheels the vodka was long and delicious, the room was huge, our hearts acidic. Monopoly for dogs. Sharing a space, you hold. Is it to never feel correct in the body, what is correction? Not lighter fluid or erasers, not rubber bullets, silver bullets, see that spray you put in your tea or under the tongue? It’s sultry. Tip-Exx the sky of its sentences: And the man at the station asking about rizlas; I wanted to be inside the movie somehow; grunge boys in their teens wearing mum dresses. On the phone elsewhere I cry on the way to vaccine because of the wind is alarmist and two days later my arm is bruised but something is glowing we call it glitchflu. More like, what do we have energy? I am carelessly humanist transition I walk on pavements I pin my life to the side I kiss your brow I am kissed regardless the stars are yes say here the waves a glissy sensation a wine or is it the dawn so aeropressed. How long? I want a dial-in thesis, drive-by thesis, dive-bar thesis. Double shot — What exists? This is going to argue [that] I don’t dare ask to hold my breath I am falling from air, extra shots, impasse, salted caramel, the jag didn’t hurt a bit but all night the ache and a glandular longing to be again born on the brink of full moon the wires and coming along the Clyde coming up was almost the sea or when the air hit my face it was a whip it was west; I saw you in the loch in july. There is a bird and curlew, bless you, how many times we had to admit this was happening and pangs for an X and cutely go as it does then stain us. How easy to forget a persona. The shape contains us. I was even incubated as a baby for what, for not being able to breathe or die. What remains is the sand and the wind alacrity then scrap matters for how a throat hurts get so leafy. Breath. Swipe here a useless space. E. says I look languid I am wearing all white my hair hurts my breath hurts the glass is apparent, scalp clip, red-lipped to say you are blocked and so far outside and the subtleties in difference between silence and mute. Ecru! Career poetess of the sea except. How to protect yourself and others. The comment section filling with memory snow as the sky is a mattress, let’s bounce from it. There is time after time after time last seconds ago the edit came down from the rain and your tongue and shining. Don’t say it? Don’t say it at all? The arrangement of tulips a mathematics what do people in American movies really mean when they say Do you want to come over we’ll do some trig? Mothers not mothers arranging the vase it is glass the atoms are careless. You see the one yellow tulip had flopped down in the window this is the yellow we are a very strong yellow a limp yellow a lip, equilateral, let’s count stripes or feel inside they are silk, the trestle, assemble the trestle, the trellis. I’ll grow across pink suns to see you, extra life of the indolent, a quoted splendour; the dinner we coated with rain, with lexical deference, with delta waves, with petals, equations. Pass me cigar. I am propped against sunset. The smoke is to say

~

Hannah Diamond – Hi

SOPHIE – UNISIL

Janelle Monáe feat. Grimes – Pynk

CAN – Waiting for the Streetcar

Jeff Buckley – The Sky is a Landfill

Silver Jews – I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You

Judee Sill – Down Where the Valleys Are Low

Zella Day, Weyes Blood – Holocene

Porridge Radio, Piglet – Let’s Not Fight !

Julia Holter – Sea Calls Me Home

Dorothea Pass – Container

Cocteau Twins, Harold Budd – Ooze Out and Away, Anyhow

(Workshop) I Need to Start a Garden: Journaling the Crisis

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Running a workshop on Friday 15th May, 1-2.30pm as part of the Stay at Home Fringe Literary Festival. Free & all welcome.

In his book Modern Nature, Derek Jarman refers to his home in Dungeness as ‘the idea of my wilderness garden’. Suffering with AIDS-related illness, Jarman tends to his windswept crop of plants and flowers as a way of staying in time, planting for renewal, resilience and tending to the cycles of the seasons. As we find ourselves confined indoors, this workshop asks how we might cultivate our own wilderness gardens in writing. What arts of noticing can we practice to keep attuned to ‘nature’, our bodies and the tiny changes of daily life occurring alongside the monumental dramas of our contemporary moment? We will experiment with journaling, free-writing and asking what it means to write, dream and feel through crisis.

RSVP here for Zoom link.

Taster playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0jRnDh8vz7x1eNjPEutI74?si=9Ks_8pffRQyxX7o4oETSDA