Daydream College for Bards - Camille Ralphs speaks to Elliot Ruff

In March 2024, Camille Ralphs’ debut collection After You Were, I Am was published by Faber and Faber. It is a collection where ‘charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world’, from the opening metaphysical rewritings of poems and prayers to the Pendle Witch Trials and the diary of Elizabethan magus John Dee.

After You Were, I Am followed the Daydream College for Bards box set published in 2023 by Guillemot Press, featuring four connected pamphlets that respond to WH Auden’s proposed ideal education for poets. They are split into ‘Constraints’, ‘Imitations’, ‘Translations’ and a ‘Journal’. 

In the following interview, Elliot Ruff speaks to Camille about the Daydream College for Bards and its intersections with After You Were, I Am.

ELLIOT: In the Daydream College for Bards how are you adhering to form, and in what ways are you attempting to transform and deform?

CAMILLE: I think the thing about received forms is that, like any human tool and expressive symbol that we have, they’ve evolved over however many centuries of usage and each one has established itself as ideal for a particular task. For instance, if you want to write about obsessive thoughts you might lean towards a villanelle or terzanelle, and you could say you’re adhering to that a little bit. But you might also tweak it in some ways based on other things that you’ve tried and that have worked in your experiments. Although I do think some adherence to form is necessary: in the same way that you wouldn’t play a wedding march on a kazoo (unless you were doing it with great ironic skill), you wouldn’t compose a heartfelt elegy in limericks. Or if you did, people would be very upset and confused. Something I think about quite often is how Byron switched from the serpentine Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the ottava rima in Don Juan, which is sharper and more predictable and therefore better suited to comic timing, and how that enabled him to slide into the satirical voice for which he’s probably best known now.

E: How did you choose who to imitate, or at least who to spend time trying to imitate? Are there any poets who are inimitable, either for yourself or more generally?

C: I think I chose the poets I wanted to imitate based on a few different motivations. The first being if I have an affinity to them already and just want to try my hand at their kind of thing - with Hopkins for instance. Another being if I admire their work but have some distance from them, and wonder why that is and whether I can possibly approach the kind of thing they do, and that was the case with someone like Adrienne Rich. Or in some cases if I felt like I hadn’t read enough of their work and I wanted an excuse to get to grips with it better and to sit with it and to get inside it in some way, as was the case with my slightly mad John Skelton imitation or some versions of Tennyson and Jorie Graham not included in the pamphlets. There were some imitations I struggled with, like cummings where I found my sensibility wasn’t really suited to his. And I think there are, of course, some poets who you wouldn’t try or if you did it would be a bit silly. Just as Western philosophy consists in a series of footnotes to Plato, English literature consists in a series of footnotes to Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer. Although we’re all imitating them at all times to some extent, for anyone who tries to write a new Shakespeare play … good luck. I did try to write a version of a new, short Chaucer lyric, but it didn’t work out. There’s the language barrier there as well as the attainment gap – it’s very very difficult to do that kind of thing.

E: The poems in After You Were, I Am seem to occupy a space of many voices speaking at once throughout history. I’m wondering if you feel your approach to poetry through historical voices came about from practising with those ‘Imitations’, ‘Translations’ and ‘Constraints’?

C: I think the interest in history is quite long-standing for me. The poems in ‘Malkin’ and ‘from the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’ sections were written, or at least drafted, before I did the Daydream College. But my interest in history, and the poet as a conduit for history, comes from a respect for the legacy of people who came before, and for what they put into literature and language – language that we use without thinking about it, full of other people’s contributions at all times. That definitely contributed to my wanting to do the Daydream College for Bards project. There’s a quotation from G.K. Chesterton where he says ‘tradition is the democracy of the dead’, which ‘refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around now’. Which is a humbling thought. But a useful one.

E: This educational structure, as you point out, is similar to the one that informed many writers of English literature’s first “golden age”, but it’s unlikely to be similar to how most contemporary poets are going about learning poetry.

C: I think it’s often not young, contemporary poets’ fault that they’re not being given this kind of guidance. In the teaching of poetry at the moment there seems to be a lot of emphasis on inspiration and expression, and not necessarily that much on composition. This isn’t true of all poets and teachers of course, but I’ve heard horror stories of teachers telling their students off for asking about form or telling their students they shouldn’t read anything from more than fifty years ago. It feels to me almost tyrannical and self-protective; a way of avoiding being challenged. I think younger poets would probably benefit from knowing about this kind of thing, even if they weren’t interested in it, and at least thinking about doing it and seeing what might be missing in their own work.

E: Was there anything that made you reach for Auden’s system?

C: I’d read that essay years ago and it had floated around my mind as an ideal. Then when lockdown happened, I just had no excuse anymore. I had to do it. I also thought about the way other poets do things quite a lot, and I mention a few of them in the journal. Robert Lowell camping out on his mentor’s lawn. Theodore Roethke writing various imitations for eleven years, trying to get himself into shape. Quotations from poets like Walcott talking about how imitation is the best way to find your voice. But it all seemed to me to just support Auden’s idea.

 E: When you started the Daydream College, did you have any notion of publishing the process?

C: I started working on the project because I had this terrible inner critic that wouldn’t leave me alone, and if I tried to write poems in any normal way, I just wouldn’t be able to do it. I thought overwhelming that critic with quantity would be a good way to shut it up and potentially draft some publishable poems along the way. When I was writing the journal it did strike me that this is the kind of thing that might be a good memoir at some point, but it was a little too niche in the end, I think. As writers’ journals are, it was a bit repetitive and a bit too much about me. So, I decided the best thing to do was to have a more bespoke version of the publication - the version Guillemot produced, which contains a selection of the most useful or curious entries from that journal.

E: The diary seems important in both books, as poetic form in your Dee poems and as the first section of the Daydream College text: has this always been an important practise to you? 

C: Yes definitely. The writer’s notebook (these days supplemented by the writer’s Notes app) is an absolute necessity because there are so many ideas or reflections that you could completely lose if you didn’t write them down. Often things come in handy later on, or you go back through things and find something that sparks with whatever you’re working on at the moment, and it comes together in a way you don’t expect. It’s also very important to have a reflective practice in poetry, as much as in life, to figure out what didn’t work, why, how you can make it work next time, and whether there’s any skill or knowledge that you don’t have and that you could benefit from gaining. It’s a good way to tease out big questions slowly and allow things to cohere over time in surprising ways.

E: On the Faber podcast you say that you ‘find writing a normal lyric poem very difficult’. Was this something you found during this process? Did the Daydream College open a way around the lyric poem in any sense? 

C: When I said, ‘normal lyric poem’ what I meant was a poem that seems to spring from the hand unbidden and the watchful heart of the poet, and that looks in a unified and conventional way to be of that writer when it’s on the page. I struggle with that because I struggle with the idea of a unified self. I think I’m probably more a sort of human vapour, possibly a flammable one, and there are lots of different versions of me that would like to try themselves out in life and on the page. I think the Daydream College imitations appealed in part because they’re another way of wearing masks. And when you are forced into another person’s identity or style for a moment, you are essentially forcing yourself to look at a particular aspect of yourself, or your lyric self, more closely and singularly.

Daydream College for Bards was originally published in a limited edition box set that sold out very quickly. The text is now available as part of our Offcuts series, available here. The images presented alongside this interview from the original box set edition

Threadworks - Ceda Parkinson speaks to Elliot Ruff

Ceda Parkinson’s Threadworks was recently published on Guillemot Press. It’s a work that weaves together the biology of spiders with a satellite view over the web-like patterns of a sprawling, fragile world. In the following interview, Elliot Ruff speaks to Ceda about her new book.

ELLIOT: Is writing a kind of threadwork?

CEDA: I think most creative work is a weaving of different threads. When it came to materializing this project, I’d been collecting those threads for quite a while, probably about a year before I started writing. I was really interested in the feeling I would get from spiders. The energy they emit triggered my imagination. So, I had this big document with pages of things – quotes from books, poems, scientific journals – and that was so helpful as a resource to keep coming back to when I was writing Threadworks. I found I was able to link them together. It wasn’t just words I was collecting; it was also images and music. I kept coming back to these things, and that is how the weaving aspect started.

E: You write that: ‘in order to know a creature, we must first turn around and meet it. If this isn’t possible [...] we must allow ourselves to be tangled in the web it has spun around us’. Is this a good description of how you went about researching and writing the book? 

C: That was a line that came quite early on. I definitely feel like that was the process – I think the natural world is full of entanglements. There are no borders or lines that can’t be crossed – so that’s what I wanted to achieve. I wanted it to feel vast, sprawling and intertextual.

E: You’ve described the book as ‘poetic non-fiction’. I’m wondering if you were reading or writing poetry as part of your practice?

C: Definitely, I was reading a lot of poetry. I was reading a lot of Peter Redgrove and Erin Robinsong. And I was writing poetry as well. I was intrigued by this idea of ‘biomimicry’, which I’ve read about in the context of architecture, where natural infrastructures are used as a template for buildings. I wondered if language could be used in the same way and if I could recreate a spider web using language.

E: Did you have to spend much time around spiders for the writing? And are you afraid of spiders at all and did you have to pull on your own fear of them whilst writing?

C: A good thing about spiders is that you don’t need to go far to be around them – they are everywhere. So I definitely spent time with spiders when I was writing. There was one under my desk and it was interesting to watch what was going on in that web. It was through watching that spider under my desk that I learnt they shed their exoskeletons. I thought this spider had died, but I then realised she was somewhere else and she had just left this form behind.

Spiders didn’t bother me at all as a kid. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that suddenly they became the most terrible thing I could ever come across. I felt frustrated with myself. And it was the same with my friends; suddenly spiders were bringing up these intense reactions.

I guess I was frightened of them, but also curious as to what was going on here? Why was this tiny creature creating such a hysteric response in people? It was interesting and quite gratifying to do some research on this, and then to find out about tarantism and all the mass hysteric reactions that people have had throughout the centuries. So, I was afraid of spiders, but through this project and researching them I found that I actually enjoyed being around them again. Writing this book kind of cured me of my fear of spiders.

E: The book seems to celebrate poetic imagery – finding new angles and views – new ways of seeing things.

C: That’s definitely something that excites me about nature writing – finding new ways of seeing. I’m interested in the ways the natural world is constantly entangled and how we can use language to tap into that. I watched a talk by Silvia Federici, and she talked about language as a way of being in disruption of narrow ways of thinking and being. And to me that’s really important, and what I will always try and aim to do. To use language to disrupt stagnant and narrow ways of being and thinking. It feels important in these times.

E: And did you practice with textiles and that kind of thread-work at all for the writing?

C: I was interested in weaving, so I started to learn how to weave on a loom, which was fun and definitely helped to inform my thinking. I can’t say I was very good at it, but just working with thread as a material is gratifying. And that helped to inform my ideas of creative work as threadwork.

E: What do the intricately woven comparisons say about the ecological divide between human and spider? 

C: What struck me after doing all this research was that the divide is not as big as we think, and how closely we live alongside each other. We exist in the same spaces and there’s something intriguing about that. This creature that is often hated and feared, also lives alongside us. I think there was a study that said in an average house there’s probably over a thousand spiders living there. So, I guess the divide became a lot smaller when writing Threadworks.

E: You talk about how in the context of ecology the thread is a powerful image for ‘considering how far-reaching and impactful a threaded network can be, as well as the consequences of destroying even just a section of this network’. Was there a politically ecological drive behind your use of the thread as imagery? 

C: It wasn’t conscious, but what I’m most interested in is shifting between ways of seeing and framing things. So, if we can find ways of seeing and exploring nature that could fundamentally change the way we think and be then I think that’s what I’m most intrigued and excited by.

Threadworks by Ceda Parkinson has been illustrated by Martha Harris and is available here.

Elliot Ruff speaks to Genevieve Carver

Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins, by Genevieve Carver was written in response to the poet’s engagement with research and researchers at the University of Aberdeen's School of Biological Sciences. During her residency here, Genevieve was in Eynhallow, Orkney following a study into breeding fulmars, and in the Moray Firth following the passive acoustic monitoring of dolphin and porpoise populations in and around offshore wind farm sites. In the following interview Elliot Ruff speaks to Genevieve about the process.

 ER: What was your day-to-day like in Eynhallow and North-East Scotland during the residency?

GC: The two parts of the project were different, I guess. For the Eynhallow project, because it’s an uninhabited island and you can only get there by charter boat, you go there for one solid chunk of time. So, I went there for a week in May, the start of the breeding season for the birds. And you’re living in a little old house, which is bare bones in terms of the water is on a pump and there’s a generator. It’s quite idyllic. I was really lucky as well because it was good weather while I was there. But it’s just you and the birds on the island, and I kind of took the attitude of getting as involved as I can in the fieldwork, and to save the actual writing for when I got back, so I could immerse myself in what they were doing. They’ve got records of every nest site, because the birds tend to go back to the same nest sites every year. So, they’ll go round and record is there a bird in that nest site, are there any new nest sites, is it the same birds as last time in that nest site, because you can tell which birds are which by the colours that they put on their legs. So, it’s an inventory of who’s back and who’s breeding, and who’s got an egg. Sometimes they would catch birds with what looks like a giant butterfly net to put trackers on them to figure out where they’re going. They only hold them for about a minute and then let them go.

There were two artists there as well as me. One was a painter and illustrator called Joan Gabie, and she did all these one-minute sketches of the birds when we caught them. Afterwards, you go back and they input everything into a computer.

What I’ve tried to do in the poems is really capture that scientific process. I didn’t want to just be like: here’s a load of poems about birds and how nice they are and look at them flying. I wanted it to be about the science.

Some of these poems won the Moth Nature Writing Prize, with judge Max Porter highlighting their ‘hybridity’. Is that hybridity something that was consciously important to your writing?

I don’t know how conscious it was. It was a really fun way to write because you have a lot of base material to play with. So, in the other section of the book about the dolphin monitoring work, that’s a different type of fieldwork. When we were on the island with the birds, it’s like you’re right there in it, you’re picking them up. But the dolphin work all happens underwater, and you’re listening, and it’s all to do with sound. So that process got me into thinking about all the equipment and all the processes. There are so many steps we’ve developed to study these animals. So, thinking about the hybridity, that’s why I used things like the ‘Risk Assessment’ and the ‘Method Statement’. They were fun primary sources to play with. The dolphin stuff took me ages to get into. I couldn’t figure out how to approach it and everything I wrote was just a cheesy poem about a dolphin. It was really the machines, equipment and kit that made me realise at a certain point that I was going to have to start writing as if I was writing about space, not as if I was writing about animals. You’re exploring the unknown.

Did the fieldwork experience give you a notion of where the place of the machine is in the environment?

Yes, because that’s what you’re working with. You’re not actually working with the animals. That’s what all the conversations revolve around, so they kind of became my subject. And also, technology is not always reliable, it’s not always fit for purpose and it goes wrong. So, I liked the idea that these bits of equipment had little quirky personalities.

 Alongside the ‘Machines’ section you have the ‘Humans’ section. Was this a difficult voice to place at all?

 I can’t remember when that section came. I think it might have been the last one. But I guess it’s not that human. What I mean by human is the way that humans study animals and their processes. I became really interested in that. The dolphins and the birds do not care that we’re studying them. It’s such a human thing to go to extreme lengths to observe these creatures that really don’t care. So I wanted to get across some of that, the complex processes and methods people use to understand things. I think the human section could have been called ‘scientists’.

There’s often a dichotomy between biological and mechanical, but they feel close in this structure.

I think I play with that quite a lot. In the very first poem in the book the humans become the island, become part of the environment. In the machines section there’s definitely a playing with the idea that they’re animate. In the poem ‘Hydrophone’ I describe the electronic cable like an umbilical cord. So, I’m definitely playing with the idea that biological and mechanical are not necessarily distinct.

What decisions were you making regarding the form of the poems moving between bird, human, machine and dolphin? And what about those postcard poems?

 A lot of it came from me, but it was also massively enhanced by Guillemot. I’m not sure if I was aware of it at the time, but I noticed that the bird poems are full of space and air, with a lot of space on the page and very little punctuation, and the machine poems are more dense. This is probably the work that I’ve written that plays with form the most. I don’t know if I thought about it consciously, but it seemed to make sense.

The postcard idea is from a particular piece of research about one of these birds that had a tracker on it. They tend to fly to the same feeding grounds, and this one got really lost and ended up about five hundred miles from where it was meant to be, but still found its way back to the island. They’re homing birds, so they go back to the same nest every year but go on these huge voyages. So, they’ve got this incredible homing instinct, and I liked the idea of it going off on its travels and writing postcards.

In the final ‘Dolphins’ section, how were you translating the dolphins - subjects without human language - into poetry?

These poems all focus on sound, and I took each one of the different, categorised sounds that dolphins make. But everything came from the research and what I learnt. I thought the echolocation click was really interesting. We know echolocation is how these animals navigate, but I loved the idea that what they’re doing when they click is listening. To listen they’re making a sound, so they actively listen using their voice, which is completely different to how we think of listening. The whistle was also really fun to write. The different sounds have different purposes, and the whistle is how they communicate. If we did talk about dolphins having language, that would be the whistle, how they’re sending messages to each other. Some of the lines in the poem are things that have been suggested that they might have been ‘saying’, like for navigation with a dolphin saying, ‘go this way’. But most of the lines are just me thinking, I wonder what else a dolphin might say to another dolphin. They all have what’s called a signature whistle, so every dolphin has its unique whistle that it and others will call, almost like a name.

The sequence is also accompanied by the EP that you made. Music is a key part of a lot of your past writing, but was there anything that made you want that musical accompaniment this time specifically?

I think because they’re so focused on the sounds, and the way that the scientists study these animals is using sound. For example, they put a hydrophone underwater and get these recordings, so it made sense to use that. The music that Lucy Treacher has created uses the actual hydrophone recordings of dolphin sounds alongside instruments, with human whistling and human breath as well as dolphin whistling.

Is music almost a way out of the high risk of anthropomorphising that comes with language?

I learnt to accept that I’m an absolutely guilty anthropomorphiser. I would be lying if I said that isn’t what I’m doing in a lot of these poems. I think it can be bandied around as something you shouldn’t do, but I think you can’t avoid it, so we might as well have fun with it and try and be true to what we do know.

 Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins by Genevieve Carver has been illustrated by Antonia Glucksman and is available here.

Seabirds and Genevieve Carver, by Elliot Ruff

On the 3rd of July, 1844 a group of fishermen killed two large, flightless seabirds on the shores of Eldey Island, southwest of Reykjavik. These birds, and their single incubating egg, were the last of their kind. As one of the men stepped down on that last egg, the Great Auk was, in a momentary misstep, extinct. The auk family survives today most famously in puffins, but also auklets, murres, murrelets and the guillemot.

There is a long history of writing seabirds which both precedes and proceeds this date. Coleridge’s albatross is at the centre of his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, bringing about the crew’s cursed fate; Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope’ is the ‘thing with feathers’ which makes its home ‘on the strangest Sea’; and W.S. Merwin’s reference to the Great Auk one hundred and twenty-three years after this event becomes a harbinger for a ‘Coming Extinction’.

image by Antonia Glucksman

Poetic waterbirds are especially reached for by poets, such as Ted Hughes’ post-Crow curlews in ‘Remains of Elmet’, ‘a wet footed god of the horizons’, or Derek Walcott’s ‘White Egret’s, which stand in for the ‘pen’s beak’ with which Walcott writes his final book. These birds serve their poets well as symbol. But what can poetry do for our seabirds?

The recent RSPB Seabirds Count shows that 11 of the 21 seabird species declined since the year 2000, with birds such as puffins and the common gull seeing especially high losses. Writing seabirds is, for Genevieve Carver, a new, poetry-infused ornithological method for documenting and preserving these birds. Her new bookling Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins features (in the section titled ‘Birds’) a sequence which takes the fulmar as its ornithological occupation, inspired by the arts-science collaboration of Genevieve and the team on Eynhallow.

Genevieve’s poetic evocations of the fulmar are most salient in the sequence ‘Postcards from a Fulmar’, described by Max Porter as ‘such an interesting and surprising hybrid, which manages to be deeply funny and very sad at the same time, an unusual feat in both science writing and poetry, even more unusual when the two are blended’.

Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins by Genevieve Carver is out now and available here.

This Seabirds article was written by Elliot Ruff

Chi Low speaks to Jessica J. Lee

In January 2024, Guillemot Press in collaboration with The Willowherb Review and The University of East Anglia are publishing three new writers of nature and place. In this feature Chi Low speaks to Willowherb founder Jessica J. Lee. 

Imagine you’re sitting on a train. It’s been delayed so, naturally, you pull out your phone and begin scrolling. You notice an outcry. It’s caught your attention before, but now, here, in this suspended sense of time, it’s unavoidable. It would be easy to get angry, to feel frustrated, and, well, you do, but rather than allowing that frustration to consume you, you use it to ignite your cause. You speak up.  

We’ve all been mobilised by a sense of injustice. The difference here is that Jessica J. Lee, who I had the pleasure of talking to recently, alchemised her feelings by creating an online journal, The Willowherb Review, providing ‘a digital platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour’. 

Jessica J Lee. (Photo by Ricardo Rivas.)

Jessica is an academic, a writer, and the founding editor of TWR. When I caught up with her, she told me the story of TWR’s conception. Jessica had been to a festival where many people were approaching her asking for recommendations for nature writing by other authors of colour. Around the same time, she had seen a surge in articles about the lack of inclusivity within the genre. After seeing that the Wainwright Prize Longlist for 2018 did not feature a single writer of colour, she wondered what she could do. She was stuck on a train and tweeted, asking if she should create a space where nature writers of colour could be published. The tweet received an overwhelming amount of support. Jessica looked out of the window, where she saw a large patch of willowherb, and purchased the domain name.  

Willowherb, a common rail- and roadside flower in the UK, known as fireweed in the U.S., is often treated as a weed. The contrast between its brilliant, striking appearance and cultural status was not lost on Jessica: 

I really love plants, but I also have such complicated feelings about hatred of certain plants in certain places. I’ve encountered plants in Taiwan, where my mom is from, that are gorgeous, and I love them. Then I find out that they’re terrible invasives elsewhere in the world. What does it mean for us to encounter something like that? What does that context do to the story? 

The Willowherb Review finished its course in 2022 after publishing over seventy different writers’ works, garnering support from many different sources, and providing a springboard for emerging writers, such as Nina Mingya Powles, Mya-Rose Craig and Michael Malay. The Willowherb was involved in many different collaborations. It formed an integral part of sculpting a space within the nature writing community, and the industry itself, which began to fulfil the need for inclusivity and representation. 

I was keen to pick Jessica’s brain to learn about The Willowherb Review’s involvement with the production of Pozow, A Naturalised Citizen and The Slough of Despond, which together form Three New Writers of Nature and Place essay pamphlets being released by Guillemot Press in January 2024. The project began at the University of East Anglia as part of a wider grant-funded project by Jos Smith and Hetty Saunders, Speculative Nature Writing: Feeling for the Future. The premise for publication was an opportunity for new writers to be mentored by The Willowherb Review in the production of a pamphlet series that explores topics relating to nature, place and identity.  

When I asked Jessica about her involvement in the project, she was emphatic – it was clear that she was excited about these writers and what they had to say.  

Part of the idea was that writers of colour, whose voices have not been as heard in the genre as many other writers, would be well poised to tackle this because of their positionality, due to their understanding of the uneven impacts of climate change in different ways and understanding migration and movement and how those shape our experience of the natural world. 

How can we prepare for what might happen in the not-so-distant future? This is the kind of question that speculative nature writing can look to answer. In these pamphlets, as in Jessica’s own work Dispersals (due out April 2024), we can see writers engaged in the discourse around how we treat the natural world and the impact that has on the way we treat each other.  

Since The Willowherb Review’s creation in 2018, a lot has changed. We’ve seen a rise in the publication and celebration of nature writers of colour, which is now better reflected in the Wainwright Prize as well as in the creation of The Nan Shepherd Prize (which has just been won by a Guillemot poet, Alycia Pirmohamed). I asked Jessica how the industry could continue to make important strides towards equality. One key factor, Jessica mentioned, that will help to generate change industry-wide is ‘more inclusion and diversity on the publishing side’. The publication of pamphlets like these, particularly by small presses like Guillemot, which might have more creative freedom than larger publishers beholden to data driven expectations, play an integral part, providing writers with the opportunity to write and to be heard. ‘The biggest barrier to inclusion,’ Jessica said, ‘is that people just don’t know how to start out.’  

Seeing these pamphlets come to life has been a huge honour for me – and part of what makes me feel lucky to be involved in the project is seeing how much Guillemot cares about the writers they publish, a care echoed in the way that Jessica talks about the writers she works with. A lot of love has gone into these pamphlets. They are a beautiful blend of academic rumination and personal, poetical ideation on nature, place and identity. They look at how all these things intersect and provide insight into a world of nature writing that is very different from what you might be used to. Each is unique, but the three complement one another in unexpected and wonderful ways.  

CHI LOW is an emerging writer with an interest in the natural world, surfing, and nature writing. A third year Creative Writing student at Falmouth University, she has been working with Guillemot Press and a team of students to help develop and launch these Three New Writers of Nature and Place.

Publisher's Diary - Small Publisher's Fair 2023

‘Bit bigger than Bodmin, isn’t it.’

‘And busier.’

‘I mean, changeover at the meat-packing factory gets pretty hectic, but…’

We haven’t done a book fair since before the pandemic and I’ve never driven in central London. We passed Buckingham Palace and then drove right through the West End on our way to Conway Hall

‘How far till we’re there?’

‘Two and a half miles.’

‘Amazing. We’ll be there in a minute.’

‘Erm…’

‘What?’

‘Satnav says forty.’

‘Forty what?’

‘Forty minutes.’

‘Forty minutes for two and a half miles? How?’

Day one set up

It’s a gamble travelling up from Cornwall for a book fair and there’s a little bit to balance. We had very little idea how well books might sell at the two-day Small Publishers’ Fair but to even have a chance of making the travel and the three nights away worthwhile we had to take more than both of us could carry on the bus or train. So I packed just about everything - ten large boxes crammed full of books, as well as a couple of bags - into our little hatchback. The car sank with the weight.

‘Have I packed too much?’ I said, thinking I ought to check the tyres.

‘Where do I sit?’ Sarah asked.

I remember our first book fair in Conway Hall. It was maybe 2017 and we only had three or four books to sell. We were perched on the end of Atlantic Press’s table. This year, we had a full table to ourselves, next to Fine Press and Hercules Editions on one side and the book artist Friederike von Hellermann on the other, and behind us, back-to-back, was Prototype. These were just about all the book stalls I saw over the weekend.

We took around 40 titles this time, which included almost all of our poetry books still in print as well as a handful of non-fiction titles. Our featured book for the fair was Maia Elsner’s Dante Elsner, the story of her grandfather and his art, and we also had an event with readings from debuting Guillemot poet Prerana Kumar, who performed work from Ixora, and from Astra Papachristodoulou, whose Selected Variations for Bees we were launching at the fair.

Petals signing Marsh-River-Raft-Feather

Better-seasoned fair-goers told me the first day would be quiet, but we ended up selling more books than I had anticipated for the whole weekend, which was good because I hadn’t been able to fit all of our titles on the table when setting up on the Friday morning. There were groups of design and illustration students taking photos of the covers and asking questions about the paper stocks, and by the end of the day I could tell the illustration students simply by the three titles they picked up - Constellations, Signals, Eight Songs.

And there were loads of Guillemot poets. We don’t get to London often and with a number of titles launching during the covid lockdown and fallout years this was the first time I’d met some of them in person - Karenjit Sandhu, Prerana Kumar and Derek Beaulieu, for instance. Others we had met before and it was wonderful to catch up with them here - Astra Papachristodoulou, Camilla Nelson, David Harsent, Nancy Campbell, Petals Kalulé, Amy McCauley, Susie Campbell, J.R. Carpenter, and no doubt more…

David Harsent signing Nine & Salt Moon

I was hoarse by the end of the first day and by today (Monday morning) my throat is still gravelly and my voice an octave deeper than usual from talking so much.

Lessons learned?

• People love shiny books. Our forthcoming Dorothy Lehane title, with its cover printed on the garishly bright Pastel Heart Attack from Gmund, was a special favourite.

• I’m not sure about London drivers. Maybe they’re fine once they get out of their cars, rickshaws and bicycles, but once they’re on the road…

• Tony Frazer of Shearsman is probably the best organised of us all. With his stackable boxes and folding hand truck he was in and out in seconds!

• Vegetables make beautiful papyrus. If you haven’t already, check out the work of Dizzy Pragnell - I could see her table from across the hall and wished I could spend a little more time with it.

• Derek Beaulieu’s name is not pronounced like the Hampshire village.

Astra Papachristodoulou & Prerana Kumar

The fair was a terrific success for us - yes, in terms of sales, but also in terms of the people we spoke with - publishers, artists, students, writers and book lovers. I think some of the best people I’ve met have been in this little world of writers and artists and makers and it was a thrill to see so many of them here and to have a little time to talk about what we all do. And it was a privilege to be able to speak about books and publishing with my lovely neighbours - Jess at Prototype, Tammy at Hercules, Ghazal at Pamenar - and to join in Friederike’s ongoing game of finding people who were wearing clothes or had tattoos that mirrored her books. (Check out Friederike’s Instagram - the butterfly one is especially good!) Space is tight behind those tables and we were all shuffling and bustling about, so it’s handy to have good folk all about you.

We’re back in Cornwall now and I’m writing this up at dawn. There’s a little mist in the woods down the valley, above the river, and roe deer in the field. Today, I’ve got to do a stock take. We’ve sold out of Camille Ralphs’ limited edition box set altogether and I’m going to have to reprint a couple of those shiny books - Richard Carter’s Signals and Camilla Nelson’s EPIC, for instance. Then we can get ready to release that shiny Pastel Heart Attack book by Dorothy Lehane next week…

A Translation of Jules Laforgue’s Essay ‘L’Impressionnisme’ (1883) by Tina Kover

Jules Laforgue (1860-87) is best known as one of the pioneers of free verse and for his influence on anglophone poets including T. S. Eliot. But this inventive French poet was also one of the earliest theorists of Impressionism. In 1881, he became the secretary of the distinguished art collector Charles Ephrussi and had the occasion to see brand new works by artists including Pissarro, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet, and Mary Cassatt. He began to publish art criticism in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and later as the reader to the German Empress Augusta he explored galleries in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Laforgue carried his interest in Impressionism into the shifting perspectives and careful irregularity of his own poetry, which the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans praised as ‘le véritable impressionnisme’ (‘true impressionism’). In 1883, he began writing his essay on Impressionism – an extract of which is translated by Tina Kover for All Keyboards are Legitimate: Versions of Jules Laforgue (Guillemot Press, 2023). The full essay is now available to read in Tina Kover’s translation below.

Impressionism

The physiological roots of Impressionism—the bias in favour of line-drawing. Recognising that, if the work of painting stems from the brain, from the soul, it does so solely by means of the eye, and that the eye is thus to painting as the ear is to music; then the Impressionist is a modernist painter who, gifted with extraordinary sensitivity of sight, disregarding the pictures amassed in museums through the centuries, leaving behind the approach he learned in school (line, perspective, colour) through living and seeing, honestly and simply, in the brightness of the open air—that is, outside the dim confines of his studio, whether it be in the city street, the countryside, or even some well-lit interior, has succeeded in restoring his own natural sight, and in seeing naturally, and painting simply, just as he sees. I will explain:

Aside from the two great illusions of art, the two criteria which aestheticians have long banged on about, Absolute Beauty and Absolute Human Taste, there are three crucial illusions by which technicians of painting have always lived: line, perspective, and studio lighting. It is to these three points, which have become second nature to every painter, that the three advances made by the Impressionist formula apply, namely: form, obtained not by line-drawing, but by vibration and colour-contrast alone; the replacement of theoretical perspective by a natural perception of colour vibration and contrast; and studio lighting—that is, the shift from working on a painting, whether it represents a city street, the countryside, or an artificially-lit drawing room, in the unchanging light of the painter's studio, and at all hours of the day or night—to working in the open air, painting in close proximity to the subject, however impractical this might be, and in the briefest possible time, given how quickly light conditions can change. Now let us examine these three points, these three dead-language procedures, turning them from a school-room exercise into an act originating on the playing-field of light and Life itself:

The bias in favour of line-drawing is an old and deep-rooted one, whose origin must be sought in the first human sensory experiences. The primitive eye, knowing only white light with its solid, impenetrable shadows, and thus unaided in its experience by the perception of nuanced shades, turned to tactile experiences. Thereafter, by continually making useful associations, and then by passing on to subsequent generations this improved understanding of the link between the abilities of the tactile organs and the visual ones, the sensing of form shifted from the fingers to the eye. The retention of form does not lie solely with the eye; the eye, in its ongoing refinement, developed the ability to see sharp lines for the ease of its own perception, and it is from this fact that the childish delusion that we can translate reality, in all its vibrancy and lack of flat planes, by line-drawing and linear perspective originated.

In essence, the eye can perceive only luminous vibrations, just as the acoustic nerve perceives only sonorous ones. It is for this reason that the eye, after having first adapted, refined, and systematized the tactile powers, has created, developed, and maintained itself in this state of delusion through centuries of line drawings; and so its evolution as an organ of luminous vibration has been severely delayed in comparison to that of the ear, for example, and its intelligence with regard to colour is still at a rudimentary level. Thus, while the ear in general, like an auditory prism, has no difficulty analysing harmonics, the eye sees nothing but light, and that synthetically and crudely, and has only a faint ability to break this light down into the spectacular sights provided by nature, despite its three fibrils, described by Young, which act like the facets of a prism. And so, a natural eye—or a refined eye, rather, because this organ must return to a primitive state, ridding itself of tactile illusions, in order to evolve artistically—disregards tactile illusions and their convenient, dead-language emphasis on line, acting only in a state of prismatic sensitivity. Eventually it becomes able to see reality in the living atmosphere of forms, broken down and refracted, reflected by beings and by objects, in infinite variations. This is the first hallmark of the Impressionist eye.

The Academic Eye and the Impressionist Eye—a polyphony of colour. In a landscape drenched with light, in which figures appear as if executed in coloured grisaille, and where the academic painter sees only an expanse of white light, the Impressionist sees this light as bathing the whole, not in a dead whiteness, but rather a thousand vibrant, clashing colours in rich, prismatic, fragmented shades. Where the Academic sees only the external outline of each object, the Impressionist sees the real living lines, without geometric form but composed of a thousand irregular brushstrokes, which, from a distance, create life. Where the Academic sees things positioned in their respective, regular patterns, like a skeleton reducible to a pure theoretical diagram, what the Impressionist sees is based on a thousand nuances of tone and effect, by shifts in appearance in keeping with the nature of things, which is not fixed, but ever-changing.

In short, the Impressionist eye is the most advanced in human evolution, one able to perceive, and to render in paint, the most complicated combinations of tint and hue known to man thus far.

The Impressionist sees and paints nature as it is; that is, solely in vibrations of colour. There is no line, no light, no relief or perspective or chiaroscuro; none of these childish classifications truly exist; everything comes down to vibrations of colour in the end, and can be captured on canvas through vibrations of colour alone.  

In the small and exclusive exhibition currently on display at Gurlitt’s gallery, this formula can be seen in the work of Monet and Pissarro in particular, where everything is conveyed by means of a thousand delicate brushstrokes, dancing in every direction like coloured straws—all of them competing to produce the overall impression. No longer an isolated melody, the whole is a symphony, alive and changing, like Wagner’s 'forest voices' battling to become the great voice of the forest, like the universal Unconscious, the law of the world, that single, great, melodic voice arising from the symphony created by the consciousnesses of peoples and individuals. This is the guiding principle of the plein-air Impressionist school. And the master’s eye will be the one able to perceive, and to render in paint, the shadings, the subtlest fragmentations, on a simple flat canvas. This principle has been applied—not merely routinely, but ingeniously—by some French poets and novelists as well.

The erroneous education of our eyes. As everyone knows, we do not see the colours of the palette in themselves, but rather according to the illusions imparted to us by the paintings of centuries past and, above all, by the light that defines our perception of the colours themselves. (Compare, in photometric terms, Turner's most dazzling sun with the feeblest candle-flame.) An innate, reflexive, harmonious agreement, if you will, arises between the visual impression caused by a landscape and the feelings aroused by the paints on a palette.  This is the proportional language of painting, which grows richer as a painter’s visual sensitivity improves. The same is true for scale and perspective. Dare I go further, and say that, in this sense, the painter's palette is to natural light, and to its plays of colour on reflecting and refracting realities, what perspective on a flat canvas is to the depth and the real planes of spatial reality? These two relationships are the tools of a painter’s trade.

The changeability of landscape, and of the painter's impressions. To you, the critics who codify what is beautiful and steer the progression of art, I present a painter who sets up his easel before a landscape that is rather uniformly lit—in the afternoon, for example. Let us imagine that, instead of painting this landscape over several sittings, he has the good sense to set down its colours in fifteen minutes—in other words, our painter is an Impressionist. He arrives on the scene with his own individual perceptive sensitivity, which, depending on how tired he is, or how much care he has taken of himself, will be either blinkered or alert—and this sensitivity is not that of a sole organ; rather, it consists of the three competing sensitivities of Young’s three fibrils. Depending on the state of fatigue or preparation the painter has just been through, his sensibility is at the same time either bedazzled or receptive; and it is not the sensibility of a single organ, but rather the three concurrent sensibilities of the Young's fibrils. Over the course of those fifteen minutes, the illumination of the landscape - the vivid sky, the earth, the greenery, everything that makes up the intangible network of its rich atmosphere, with the endlessly rippling life of its invisible reflecting or refracting corpuscles, will have existed in infinite variation—will have, in a word, lived.  

In the span of those fifteen minutes, the painter’s visual sensitivity will have changed, and changed again; its appreciation of the proportional constancy and the relativity of the landscape’s tones will have been disrupted. Imponderable mergings of hue, contradictory perceptions, minute distractions, subordinations, and dominations will have occurred, and with them variations in the reactive power of the three optic fibrils, among themselves and with regard to the outside world; infinite, and infinitesimal, conflicts.

Here is one example out of millions: I see a particular shade of violet. I look down at my palette in order to mix it there, and my eye is uncontrollably drawn to the whiteness of my own sleeve. Thus my eye has changed, and my violet suffers in consequence. And so on, and so on.

In sum, then, even if a painter spends a mere fifteen minutes before a landscape, his work can never truly reproduce the fugitive reality; rather, it can only record one person’s unique visual perception of a moment in time which will never occur again for that individual, in response to a certain landscape at a single, luminous instant, which, likewise, can never be duplicated.

There are roughly three states of mind, when one is viewing a landscape: the growing acuity of one’s optical sensitivity under the stimulus of this new sight; the peak of that acuity; and, finally, the gradual onset of nervous exhaustion.  To these we add the infinitely changeable atmosphere of the best gallery where this canvas will be exhibited, the rigorous daily mingling and clashing of the colour-tones contained within it. And finally, the unique individual perceptions of its viewers, each one possessing an infinite number of singular moments of feeling.

The object and the subject are thus always in permanent motion, intangible and fleeting. Flashes of identification between the subject and the object are reserved for the genius alone; seeking to codify these flashes is nothing but a schoolroom farce.

The double Illusion of ultimate beauty and the ultimate man—Innumerable human keyboards. Those who embrace the old aesthetic have tended to prattle on about one or the other of two illusions: ultimate Beauty, which is taken to be objective; and the ultimate man, considered subjective—in other words, Taste.

Nowadays we have a better sense of the Life within us and outside us.

Each man is, according to the moment in time he occupies, his hereditary and social circumstances, and his stage of personal evolution, a kind of keyboard, on which the external world plays in a certain way. My own keyboard is perpetually changing, and it is unlike anyone else’s. All keyboards are legitimate.

Likewise, the outside world is an ever-changing symphony (as in Feschner’s law, which states that the perception of difference is inversely proportional to the intensity of this difference). 

The visual arts spring from the eye, and the eye alone.

There are no two eyes in the world that are identical, either as organs or in their sensory powers.

All of our organs are in a state of vital competition: in a painter it is the eye that is dominant; in the musician the ear, in the metaphysician, a certain awareness, etc.

The eye most worthy of admiration is the one that is the most highly evolved, and consequently the most admirable painting will not be the one that embodies the academic fantasy of “Hellenic beauty”, “Venetian coloration”, “Cornelian thought”, etc., but rather the one that reveals proof of this evolved eye the refinement of its nuances, or the complexity of its lines.

The atmosphere most favourable to the freedom needed to evolve this way could be obtained by eliminating schools, juries, medals, and all such childish contrivances, the patronage of government, the parasitism of critics who lack taste, nihilist dilettantism, and the kind of anarchy open to any influence which reigns among French artists today: Laissez faire, laissez passer. The law follows its own developmental instinct, despite human interference, and the wind of the Psyche blows wherever it will.  

Definition of plein-air. Plein-air, the method used first and foremost by the landscape artists of the Barbizon school (its name taken from the village near the forest of Fontainebleau), does not mean exactly “open air”. The plein-air of Impressionist landscape painters applies to their work as a whole, and means the painting of people or objects in their customary environment: the open country, candlelit drawing-rooms or simple interior spaces, streets, gas-lit corridors, factories, markets, hospitals, etc.

An explanation of apparent Impressionist exaggerations. The ordinary eye of the public and the non-artistic critic, who have been conditioned to see reality in the stable harmonies depicted by so many mediocre painters, is powerless compared to the keen eye of the artist who, more sensitive to variations in light, will naturally record on his canvas those rare, unexpected, and unfamiliar nuances of illumination and shade that may cause the blind to accuse him of deliberate eccentricity. And, truly, we must make allowances for an eye naturally, even wilfully disdainful of the seeming hastiness of these impressionistic works painted in the first heady rush of sensory intoxication at the sight of a rare and unexpected reality; artistic tastes with regard to the world as it is are generally conventional ones, sensitive to new spice, and is not all this furore more artistic, more alive, and thus promising of more richness for the future, than the old, dreary, unchanging academic recipes?

An agenda for future painters. Some of the most vibrant, daring group of painters that has ever been seen, and the most sincere, living subjected to derision or indifference as they do, and in near-poverty as well, with only the voices of a small segment of the press raised in support of them, are now demanding that the State cease its interference in the art world, that the School of Rome (the Villa Medici) be sold, that the Institute be closed down, that medals and other awards be abolished; they are demanding that artists be allowed to exist in the state of anarchy that is life, each one left to make his own way, protected from and unhindered by academic teachings living off the past.  No more official definition of beauty; the public will learn on its own to see for itself, and will gravitate naturally toward those painters whose work interests them, modern, alive, and not the dead art of Greece or the Renaissance. No more official exhibitions and medals than there are for writers. Just as these writers labour in solitude and seek to place their work with publishing houses, so artists will work as they choose, and seek to place their paintings in the windows of art galleries; these will become their exhibitions.

The frame in relation to the painting. Exhibitions put on by independent artists have substituted an intelligent, refined, fashionable selection of frames for the perennial moulded gilt ones which have become such an integral part of academic cliché.  A sunlit green landscape, a blonde page in winter, a room glittering with twinkling candles and bright-hued garments—all require different styles of frame, which their painters alone can devise, just as a woman knows best which fabrics and powders suit her best, and which boudoir wall-hangings will set off her complexion, her expressions, her mannerisms to best advantage. I have seen smooth-surfaced frames in white and pale rose and green and jonquil-yellow; others are extravagantly multicoloured, combining any number of styles. An interior with dazzling lights and colourful clothes require different sorts of frames which the respective painters alone can provide, just as a woman knows best what material she should wear, what shade of powder is most suited to her complexion, and what colour of wallpaper she should choose for her boudoir. Some of the new frames are in solid colours: natural wood, white, pink, green, jonquil yellow; and others are lavish combinations of colours and styles. There has been some resistance to these frames in the official exhibitions, but in the end this backlash has produced nothing but gaudy bourgeois imitations.

Impressionism is translated by Tina Kover. Tina is the award-winning translator of over thirty books from French, including Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene, and Anne Berest’s The Postcard. She leads literary translation workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University. She is also the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features literary translators reading from their own work.

Writing the Sleeping Place - Susie Campbell

i. Chalk ghosts

THE SLEEPING PLACE project began with my discovery that my family home – the house where I spent my childhood  - was not only built on chalk foundations but over the top of what had been a Saxon burial ground. Although initial excavations suggested the location of this cemetery was on the top of a chalk ridge just above my family house, subsequent discoveries found bones and grave sites extending down the hillside and beneath our garden. This haunting discovery was the starting point of THE SLEEPING PLACE. 

Chalk flint picked up from site of Saxon burial ground, 2023.

The great piles of chalk, excavated to make room for house foundations, and with which my parents later did battle to make their hillside rockery, were knobbly and socketed and vertebrae-like. My imagination was haunted by their memory. We played with these chalk flints as children, piling them up into unstable camp walls, hurling them as missiles, and cradling their cold protuberances like misshapen dolls. But did they include actual bones?

The chalk ridge, on which the Saxon burial ground was situated, forms part of a chalk spine which runs from Guildford towards Farnham and is known as The Hog’s Back. All along this ridge, there are heaps of chalk flints chucked in the corners of fields by exasperated farmers or used to line driveways of newly built houses. Who knows what else came up with the chalk, what skeletons? As I started to explore how I might stage some of this excavation in writing, these bumpy pieces of chalk kept intruding and reminding me of their materiality.

And there were other ghosts. Not only was I haunted by the thought of these unquiet foundations beneath my old home but also by those other skeletons, also white but far more dangerous: the racist myths of a white ‘Anglo’-Saxon past also buried here in the south-east of England. 

Sketch made in early stages of THE SLEEPING PLACE project.

 ii. ‘Three extra heads’: ethical considerations of working with human remains

Detail from archive photograph, Saxon burial site. (All such images used here are tinted blue and include a votive chalk piece, added to mark my recognition that these are human remains). 

 How much time has to pass before human remains become simply museum exhibits? Why should it make any difference whether it is hundred or a thousand years? Why do we regard the bodies buried beneath the marble tombstones of a Victorian cemetery as different from the bones dug up and exposed by archaeological excavations? This is one of the questions that emerged through THE SLEEPING PLACE's explorations, and it led to my use of some personal poetic rituals alongside other more procedural and linguistic approaches used in the composition of this piece. One immediate decision I made when confronting these questions was not to use the archival images of human remains without altering them in some way, as an acknowledgement of the ethical issues around my usage. I have ‘treated’ all these archival images as a gesture, tinting them blue in response to what I find to be their affect and obscuring them with the addition of a piece of chalk used as a votive object.  

Almost as I discovered the existence of a Saxon burial ground, England went into its second national COVID 'lockdown', and so I was not able to visit the local museum for many months. However, I was able to access online reports published by the Surrey Archaeological Society. I discovered the earliest part of the burial ground dates back to the sixth century, but the site was in use for burials for the next five centuries. Pagan burials mix with Christian graves, alongside burials of peoples from a variety of tribes. Many of the graves were 'shared', containing the remains of several different skeletons or parts mixed together, suggesting it may have been, for a time, an execution place or the site of a massacre. Alternatively, bones may have been ritually mixed together to make one ancestral body. 

My interest was captured by the complexity and multi-layered nature of this site and the way it so dramatically contradicts a nationalist myth of a ‘pure’ and indeed, ‘white’ Anglo-Saxon originary. I knew that I wanted to write about this but how? It was to be a formative conversation with artist-archaeologist Rose Ferraby and my engagement with online extracts from the archival archaeological site maps of the 1920s excavations that opened a way forward.

iii. Poetry as archaeology and the poetics of archaeology

Detail from site plan of Saxon burial ground made by AWG Lowther in the 1920s (this and all images in this essay reproduced courtesy of Surrey Archaeological Society)

Inspired by the multi-layered complexity of this Saxon burial site, I decided to engage specifically with its archaeology. The archaeological records of the 1920s excavations of this site are held in my local museum archive. The main site plan was made by archaeologist A W G Lowther. He led the dig in its final stage, but his plan incorporates the notes and plans made by an earlier team, using a numbering system based on the order in which burials were excavated. The site plan is crowded with layers of finds and multiple burials, a teeming mass of layered information which demonstrates the choices and decisions made by different archaeologists and the way the understanding of the site and its burials kept shifting and changing. Perhaps inadvertently, Lowther's map provides a diagrammatic representation of this site as a one in a state of flux and constant revision. 

One of the aims of my project was to deconstruct any essentialist notion of this burial ground as a ‘heritage site’ or as linked with a nationalist myth of a supposed ‘Anglo’-Saxon ‘Englishness’. The provisionality and revisions of this archaeological record struck me as a useful template for an alternative construction of this place as a dynamic series of changing networks and relationships. Conversations with artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby were formative in how I shaped the poetics for this project and led to the brilliant artwork Rose has produced (thanks to the support of Guillemot Press) as an intrinsic part of the project. Also formative was the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (Routledge, 2001). Pearson and Shanks' concept of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology suggests that the task for archaeologists is to forge assemblages which, if they are to be authentic and meaningful, must be volatile: ‘the emergence of new meanings depends on the perception of instability, of retaining energies of interruption and disruption’. This was the start of what became the poetry of THE SLEEPING PLACE. Archaeological excavations of this burial ground are staged as provisional assemblages of language and visual collage out of whose unstable layers, insistent patterning and 'misplaced' anachronisms the reader is invited to re-assemble the past.

 The processes of chance and choice, which play an important role in our constructions of history, were brought into my staging of these assemblages by my use of a specific textual constraint based on Lowther’s site plan. I describe this constraint in the Timeline at the end of THE SLEEPING PLACE:

Archaeological site plan made by AWG Lowther in the late 1920s.

March 2021: I decide to use Lowther's site plan not just as a template for my text, but also as its skeleton. The plan shows 223 burials and so I create 223 pieces of text out of an imagined engagement with the material circumstances of the site. Each piece of my text includes a deictic, those parts of speech which establish the spatial and temporal co-ordinates of a piece of writing, but at this stage in my composition they are detached from any presiding subject. They are simply loose fragments of text whose role in place-making or poem-making is not yet determined. Tokens of orientation, they wait for sentences in which to embed themselves as milestones and signposts. Or gravestones.

Late March 2021. I am inspired by the graphic quality of Lowther's plan to read it as though it were a page of text. I read it left to right and top to bottom, turning its burial numbers into a code or pattern by which to combine my text pieces into a whole. I arrange my text fragments into an order suggested by this code. As I do so, words attach to each number, randomly pooling around roots and squares. As the text comes into curious being, its deictics form new syntactic relationships, staging their temporal and spatial coordinates within the poem's newly formed sentences. These coordinates seem both random and plausible.’

 This approach to textual construction thus involved me in deconstructing certain aspects of conventional grammar, in particular, deixis. I was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s innovative approach to grammar and her experimentation with the hybrid grammar conventions available within the prose poetry form, which combines or layers the traditions of prose and poetry. By excavating and reconstructing some of these prose and poetic ‘grammars’, THE SLEEPING PLACE begins to play with a kind of linguistic archaeology.

 But my work on this project also raises bigger questions about the role of art and poetry in relation to archaeology and formulations of 'the past', and the importance of including a variety of different kinds of response - statistical, performative, scientific, affective, aesthetic etc - within the overall archaeological record. I hope that as part of the publication of THE SLEEPING PLACE there will be the opportunity for further conversation about archaeology, poetry, cultural enclosure and the work of decolonisation.

iv. Satirising ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’: Lewis Carroll, white rabbits and decolonisation

Visiting the 'Lewis Carroll' grave, white rabbits in the background.

 It might seem strange to make a connection between Victorian mathematician and nonsense writer Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and my project to engage with the decolonisation of a 'heritage site'. The drivers for my project to stage textually the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground were manifold, but one of them was the compulsion to interrogate the discovery that buried in the back garden of my family home in Surrey were, quite literally, the bones of a violent, nationalist myth of a 'white' and ‘Anglo’-Saxon past. 

The hillside on which my family home is situated is not only the site of a Saxon burial ground, it is also the location of a Victorian cemetery, a minor tourist site due to its fame as the site of Lewis Carroll's grave. This grave is the destination for many literary pilgrims and is always decorated with tokens and tributes, including a multiplying number of white rabbits.

Like many graves in this old churchyard, the Carroll grave is now tilted down the steep chalk hill. As the Saxon burial ground spread from the summit of the hill right down to (and possibly beneath) the nineteenth century cemetery, it seemed to my haunted imagination that Saxon skeletons and Victorian bones might be rolling together down the hill, white rabbits and all. 

Page pulled from my sketchbook.

Although Dodgson spent his working life in Oxford, he spent vacations in Guildford where he owned the house in which his sisters lived. He wrote Through the Looking Glass in Guildford, and in 1898, he died and was buried there. This played into my project in a number of ways: 'whiteness' is made visible and deconstructed variously in THE SLEEPING PLACE not least through the shrine of plastic white rabbits accumulating on the Carroll grave. Dodgson's phrase 'Anglo-Saxon attitudes' (Through the Looking Glass, 1872) is collaged into my own text. Dodgson was ambivalent about the British colonial expansion lauded by many of his contemporaries and indeed, there are some, not entirely implausible, readings of Alice in Wonderland as an anti-colonialist satire! He coined the phrase 'Anglo-Saxon attitudes' apparently to mock an early drawing style, but the satirical potential of the phrase has been spotted, taken up and exploited, including by novelist Angus Wilson and as the title of a recent conference examining English cultural self-images. But most important for my project is Dodgson's interest in language practices and systems, their role in meaning-making and thus in nonsense-making. I approached the writing of this project with a model of practice indebted partly to Gertrude Stein. Stein is of course a later and very different writer to Dodgson, and yet they share areas of linguistic interest. Stein's experimental writing was often read by her critics as the very 'nonsense' embraced by Dodgson. And that crooked headstone of Dodgson/Carroll's grave, baffling to a sense of the upright, tilts its uncomfortable shadow across the pages of my project. 

v. On doodles, art and the ineffable

THE SLEEPING PLACE by Susie Campbell/Rose Ferraby, Guillemot Press, 2023.

Because I had worked previously with Guillemot Press and artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby, I was able to draw on my knowledge of what they could bring to the realisation of this project if I were fortunate enough to be published by them again. And I built this into my vision of THE SLEEPING PLACE, dreaming of a book as multi-layered as the archaeological excavations it depicts. In the hope that Guillemot and Rose would come on board, I imagined a book whose design and visual artwork would work in an assemblage with the text itself. I am so excited that this imaginary book is now a real book to share with a wider audience. 

Detail from Rose Ferraby's artwork (inside THE SLEEPING PLACE).

Early in my discovery that an ancient Saxon burial ground had been excavated beneath the site of my family home, I had the first conversation in what would become a series of formative chats with Rose about art and archeology. We talked about the importance of broadening the archaeological record to include a range of responses to the material traces of the past. These responses might include visual art or a range of other art forms. Poetry of course is one of these forms. I am fascinated by the poetry of archaeology. There is much important work currently being done, including volumes of poetry (Vestiges and Peat) curated by poet archaeologist Melanie Giles with artwork by Rose. Other important books engaging with poetry, archaeology and the landscape are currently being published by Corbel Stone Press, Longbarrow Press and recently, Osmosis Press, as well as other books by Guillemot Press and many other presses producing important work in this field. Rose is of course renowned for her archaeological artwork, including her work on Seahenge for the recent British Museum Stonehenge exhibition. It was an enormous privilege to collaborate with her on this project. Her collage work for THE SLEEPING PLACE not only adds another rich layer to the book, image and text working together, but also creates new spaces for the reader's creative response to the landscape. And, as always, Rose's work brings an intelligent integrity, compassion and humanity to archaeological enquiry. 

I've written above about the influence of the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks on the development of my poetic for this book. I want to quote them again in this context. They advocate for a new way of making the archaeological record, including 'mutual experiments with modes of documentation which can integrate text and image'. They talk about the importance, when coming face to face with the mysteries of the past's material traces, of creating 'joint forms of presentation to address that which is, at root, ineffable' (Theatre/Archaeology, 2001, p 131). For me, addressing the ineffable is able to happen, if anywhere, across the spaces and relationships of THE SLEEPING PLACE's images, text and design. 

But, at a much earlier stage, it was doodling rather than art which helped me shape THE SLEEPING PLACE. Rather than textual, my first exploratory response to engaging with the archaeological archive was with sketches of lively skeletons dancing across geographical maps and site plans. As these cartoon skeletons increasingly started to resemble letters and words, so the ideas for how I might structure my textual response started to emerge.

And now these little skeleton doodles have a new role in this project, appearing on my handsigned extracts from the text which will accompany the first purchased copies of the book. As I inscribe each page of the published text with these loose-jointed doodles, they emphasise the open-ended nature of this book and the discovery of more and more skeletons just waiting to be made.

vi. A little piece of grave robbery

Chalk sketch of 'sleeping' skeleton 

Seven is a significant number for this book. It operates in a very different way to the numbered burials 1-223 which are used as a procedural 'hook' for my use of a textual constraint based on the archaeological site map. 7 is more mysterious. With its accompanying 1 2 3 4 5 & 6, 7 appears in various configurations throughout the book, straddling the gaps between the poem's sentences much as did my little skeleton doodles in an earlier draft. These more symbolic numbers arrived in the book as a result of a poetic ritual involving a minor grave robbery.

Although my primary approach to a linguistic staging of a Saxon burial ground involved using various textual constraints and grammars, I found that ethical and affective considerations to do with grief, death and the mysteries of mortality started to assert themselves.  I became increasingly struck by the coincidence that the hillside beneath which the Saxon burial ground was excavated was also the site of Lewis Carroll’s grave. I began to revisit what this might mean for my text. Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) was of course a mathematician and like Stein (who was herself a close friend of mathematician A.N. Whitehead) found correspondences between mathematics and language as a symbolic and relational system capable of generating meanings beyond the semantic (this is the basis for Carrollian nonsense). As I started to contemplate Dodgson’s interest in mathematics, I found some numerical symbolism and ritual entering the text. Although I am a little sceptical about ritual I am also drawn to its generative power, and so I followed where it led. 

And where it led was to an act of grave desecration. In the book, I describe this incident as follows:

7 pieces of chalk ritual.

‘May 2021. I perform a ritual at the burial site itself. I find a grave has been opened in the Victorian cemetery in order to repair its monument. The human remains have been temporarily moved but when I look into the grave opening, I see sockets of chalk and knuckles of chalk-flint. Carbon unites bone and chalk in the ground. I steal 7 pieces of chalk from the open grave and form them into the shape of a human body. This creature I lay out on the earth. It resembles a skeleton curled on its side or a foetus. My ritual is galvanised by my grave robbery. The 7 stones now enter my text, virtual subjects hosting my decentred grammar but creating a new question of how to combine the symbolic 7 with the pragmatic 223. The procedures I used to create my initial draft loosen and slide, and something more mysterious starts to animate the text.’ (THE SLEEPING PLACE, ‘Timeline’ notes).

Detail from Rose Ferraby’s collage artwork, back cover.

This more mysterious and affective approach started to dominate the closing stages of the text’s many drafting cycles. To an extent, this remains mysterious to me, but I believe it to be, in some ways, a return of the mortal griefs and terrors initially banished from the text by its procedural response to human burial. I was keen that my skeleton doodles would give way to numbers in the text, not only because of the more open-ended work done by the latter, but also to clarify the visual poetic of the book and to allow Rose Ferraby's rich, suggestive and profound collage to do its work across the fullest range of concerns (some of them barely surfaced) by the written text. 

vii. ‘a missing bead’: word-strings threaded through the text

Saxon glass bead (replica), Surrey burial ground, grave 223*

Archive photograph of some of the actual Saxon glass beads found during excavations.

During the 1920s excavations of Saxon burial site, a large number of glass beads were dug up alongside bones, pottery, pins and brooches. The strings themselves had rotted and so the beads had rolled apart. These beads were re-strung by museum staff in a creative approach to determining their original order. This resonated with my own project and so I adopted this as an additional textual strategy. 

This additional textual strategy drew on an interactive performance in which members of the audience were invited to participate in selecting coloured beads and deciding on their order. I used modern Murano glass beads for this performance but as far as possible, I duplicated the colours of the Saxon beads: red, blue, green, silver, black etc. I also made space for the broken and missing beads noted in the archaeological site report. Each bead was linked to a bank of text fragments and so each time the audience reselected a string of beads, this led to a new iteration of the text. 

Modern Murano glass beads used for bead-stringing performance.

Part of a Saxon glass bead string (replica)*

These word-strings are threaded through THE SLEEPING PLACE, forming a cohesive ribbon of repeated words, sounds and rhythm which link together the sections of text organised around burials. And these bead sections of the poem have a further, meta-textual function, figuring and drawing attention to the way words and phrases have been strung and restrung to make the body of the text. They foreground the way my compositional process has sometimes involved treating words as if they were beads– matching them by look and sound rather than semantics, much as the museum staff restrung the beads based on their colours and patterns.  The patterning and rhythms of the way the beads are strung suggests a way of reading the text that takes the emphasis away from the semantic meaning of individual sentences, and directs it towards the changing relationships between words and phrases. As each new archaeological find changed the meaning of previous 'finds' for Lowther's team, so each 'restringing' of words creates new possible meanings for the reader to construct.

This brings me back to my ethical dilemma around using human grave numbers as part of a procedure of random text generation, and the push-pull between using these material traces creatively to construct a past in the present, and an abiding sense of what is irretrievably lost: those missing beads. In THE SLEEPING PLACE itself, these tensions remain unresolved and play out across the text, resolving temporarily but then rolling apart, waiting to be restrung. 

THE SLEEPING PLACE is out now and available here.

This article first appeared as a series of blogposts on Susie Campbell’s website.

*all replica Saxon glass beads made by Tillerman Beads

Publisher's Diary - The Bookling

We’d like to introduce to you an underused form of publication: the bookling.

At Guillemot Press we’ve often been presented with manuscripts that are a bit cramped - 12 or 16 pages of poems squashed together - and we just want to give them a little room. We loosen the belt, maybe undo a button, let the poems breathe, and before we know it we’ve got a little book extending to 50 or 60 pages. It’s not really a collection, but it’s not a pamphlet anymore either.

I’m thinking of titles like Peter Larkin’s Sounds Between Trees and Selima Hill’s Dancing Lessons for the Very Shy. Similarly, we sometimes make a little hardcover, as we did for John F Deane’s Voix Celeste and Rosmarie Waldrop’s White is a Color. Both historic and contemporary definitions of the pamphlet tend to exclude these methods of presenting the text. For example, poetry prizes give hard definitions of what a pamphlet or collection can and can’t be. This is where the bookling comes in.

The bookling has been around since at least the 1700s but unlike its cousins the pamphlet and the book, the bookling has not spent much time in the limelight. The pamphlet was the single quire (which could be any length, as long as it was just folded) and the book was made from sewn and bound sections. The bookling, on the other hand, is defined only by diminutiveness. That could be diminutiveness of either extent or page size and it does not come with any expectations of format or finish. I can section sew it, case bind it, illustrate it - I can make a bookling as brilliant and beautiful as I like.

Booklings can be as wild and unruly as they like (and as the pamphlet was in its early life). They are short texts that have dressed to please themselves. There’s a good deal of fun to be had with the bookling, I feel.

Luke Thompson, co-editor

Publisher's Diary

Uneasy Offcuts by Sarah Cave

‘What’s in the box?’

‘The new book, but they’ve trimmed too much off the bottom.’

‘Can I have them?’

We don’t like to waste things at Guillemot but we’re also not going to send a book out into the world until it’s right. Mistakes are inevitable in the printing process now and then and the composition of this round of books was a few centimetres off the desired trim, a failure which allowed me space for a little experimentation.

Nancy Campbell’s Uneasy Pieces is a shimmery-shiny silvery-blue production made up of gorgeous prose poems highlighting an intimate relationship between poetry and composition. The upcycled cover would be perfect for some creative play.

It took me a weekend to learn how to make paper from online tutorials. I’ve watched very simple DIY videos and long soft-filter documentaries about people who use traditional skills, exposing me to a rich world of beautiful handcraft tools and completely impractical (at home) methods of producing bespoke papers. I only needed two things to start: a mould and deckle.

We started the Guillemot Offcuts series in 2021 for two reasons. The first was to find a way of keeping limited-edition pamphlets accessible, but without compromising the original designs. In 2021, we released text only versions of Jen Hadfield’s Trembling, Singing, Suzannah V. Evans’s Marine Objects/ Some Language and my own like fragile clay. Each new print of the books would be different, composed of the offcuts from the manifold printing processes at our printers in Lostwithiel. For years we’d been integrating these offcuts into our own work. After we printed Kate Walters Iona Notebooks, we had a stack of Fedrigoni papers leftover, which I used to create my Wi/tch/ Sis/ter art book. The Offcuts Series felt like a revelation. Not only was it a tidy way of incorporating potential waste back into the design process, but it also felt immediate and closely lived.

There are plenty of opportunities, like this one, for us to continue incorporating Guillemot experiment into our own and there’s also something integral to Guillemot that insists on a playful interchange. In my own creative practice, I’ve experimented with different elements of traditional book production – paper marbling, letter pressing and book binding – with the aim of finding sustainable and contemplative methods of creating books. The coming together of different fibres in the paper making process is a nice metaphor for poetry and the synthesis of language.

It's a strange feeling destroying a book and I struggle with it fighting against the feeling of sanctity and library hush, as I gently pull the pages from their spine. It’s even stranger pulling Guillemot books apart when they’re made with such care and concern.

I slowly start to get a rhythm for it and end up with a bucket full of blue and white strips. I’m careful to separate any bits that still have glue attached from the binding process, which although is plant-based will interfere with pulping process. On the garden bench, indulging in fantasies of alchemy, I mix the pulp into the bucket of water, occasionally removing errant pieces of glue. The results are lovely enough to exhibit and to feel encouraged enough to continue experimenting with the process.

Cover Art: La Mystérique

by Chloe Bonfield 

In 2022 Chloe Bonfield created a cover for Jennifer Lee Tsai’s La Mystérique and we thought you might be interested to read how the image was made. Here, Chloe describes the process and the technology.

A little collaboration with Miro (please don’t sue me).

Whilst working on a research project, myself and a collaborator who lives in Germany have been using Miro boards. Our brains twist and turn and create circuitous flows that are now represented via our insane Miro board.

Miro is a sort of mind mapping tool in browser software that is used to visually explore ideas. I often use it when I teach online. It can be useful or the complete opposite. When the connections are too entangled it can become chaotic and readable only by the author. One thing that is consistent, however, is that it creates the most beautiful mystical diagrams. Maybe all bureaucratic tools do this.

We are cybernetic creatures, our brains and bodies are caught in and flow through machines. This is also beautiful. Jennifer’s poetry is a constellation of souls and places, and little pinpoints of research show themselves. Kristeva shows up in a little blaze then is gone. 

I used Miro to arrange screenshots of all of the poems from La Mystérique into a spiral around the title. I used circle diagrams to represent each of these and then finally connected them using the arrow tool. I drew by hand over the diagram to seal the mystical symbolic nature in. To alchemise it, now complete with little symbols for each text. So the mystical diagram is complete. It hangs in the air - like stars - but it is also tied to processes and human cybernetics that go beyond the books contents. 

At Guillemot Press we printed the cover art on Stardream Diamond and added sparkly Stardream Sapphire endpapers to echo the shimmery cover blues.

Sea Change: Phoebe Power and Katrina Porteous

In 2019, as part of the National Trust’s ‘People’s Landscape’ celebrations, New Writing North and Durham Book Festival invited writers to apply for a residency on Durham’s ‘radical coast’. This dramatic 11-mile coastal stretch from Seaham to Hartlepool, now designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including rare Magnesian Limestone grasslands, wildflower meadows and ancient wooded denes, was once the site of several of Durham’s last deep coal mines. Notorious for its ‘black beaches’ and perhaps the worst-polluted landscape in Europe, in the late 1990s it underwent an immense transformation, with the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of colliery spoil in a multi-agency clean-up, ‘Turning the Tide’. That transformation is still underway, particularly within the coastal communities, some of England’s most economically-deprived, the ‘Billy Elliot’ country of the 1984-5 miners’ strike and subsequent pit closures. The sequences that comprise Sea Change respond to the commission’s invitation ‘to look beyond’ that recent history, and imagine future prospects for the area.

In this conversation, the authors compare their approaches to the commission, and discuss their relationship to each other as writers, as the project developed. 

Katrina: Phoebe, our first meeting took place in Horden, in August 2019. You were beginning the second week of your residency. We spent the afternoon drinking tea at the Welfare Park, walking in the Dene, and gluing pieces of felt onto a miners’ picnic banner with the Creative Youth Opportunities group, to which you kindly invited me. To those children, miners were distant figures – hard-to-imagine grandas in their youth. I was interested to know how you would tackle this complicated project, not least because of the differences in our backgrounds and the more than 30 years’ age gap between us. I was about your age when the miners’ strike finished, while you were born some years after it. What made you apply for the commission?   

Phoebe: Before starting this project I didn’t know very much about the history of north-east mining, the strikes or even the geology of coal. At the beginning of my visit, a couple of ex-miners invited me on a walk with them along the coast and the technical terminology they used to describe the underground engineering of the mines was baffling. This, together with their very personal and embodied sense of the landscape then and now, taking in its depths as much as its surfaces, was quite difficult to relate to initially. In other contexts, such as participating in a beach clean to remove (mostly plastic) pollution, the relationships between people and the environment were more readily identifiable, happening right now rather than half-hidden in the past. For me, as a non-local, the process of excavation required an attitude of openness, listening and asking questions. Much of my finished piece is based on encounters and dialogue, and I think it was partly the potential for these conversations that corresponded with my creative interests and drew me to apply for the project. I’m very interested in how what people say, and how they say it, can reveal unexpected connections or resonate with broader issues. I had a hunch that the kinds of dialogue going on at this wonderfully complex, confused stretch of coast would have important links to issues of fossil fuel use, biodiversity loss and pollution – urgent topics that are nevertheless intimidating to try to address through poetry. The Durham Coast offers the messy truth of the mining legacy by presenting a landscape in process: baring the scars of our industrial dependence for all to see, it’s a very visible example of our struggling, partly-successful and uncertain attempt to move ourselves into a sustainable future. 

This is a cultural and social struggle as much as an ecological one, which was helpful to discuss with you, Katrina. You grew up nearby and were the writer-in-residence once before, twenty years ago during the millennium ‘Turning the Tide’ project. Your understanding of the communities here is much more long-standing than mine. I wonder if you could talk more about how you relate to the coast’s cultural identity and people. How did your previous experience of the coast, including the first residency, inform your approach towards our project? 

Katrina: My role for ‘Turning the Tide’ was on a different scale to our short residency. It lasted for two years, 1999-2000, and involved collecting stories and quotations from local residents, providing research for information panels, writing lines for Michael Johnson’s sculptures at Seaham, and creating poems for an exhibition and book. But that was not the beginning for me. My grandfather was a miner in East Durham and my mother’s family still lived there when I was a child. My memories are of a deeply conflicted landscape, still largely agricultural: the windswept beauty of the Magnesian Limestone grassland, ancient lanes deep in hawthorn, old farms and secret, garlic-smelling wooded denes, contrasted with towering pit-head gear, blue heaps and soot blackened red brick rows of impenetrable villages. The coast itself was a hellish no-man’s-land of black slurry dumped from endless overhead conveyors. The landscape seemed brutalised. The people I knew there were conflicted, too: proud to belong to a mining community, but determined that their sons should work elsewhere. 

 We used to visit my widowed Nan, and my mother’s sister, who married a miner and had a daughter a little older than I. We played on the black cinder path which ran between two villages, the miners’ pigeons wheeling overhead. I remember feeling very loved and safe there. What I didn’t know was that the Council had designated many of the villages ‘Category D’, which meant that they were actively encouraged to die as the coal ran out. The impact this had on people’s lives was tremendous. In my mother’s family that was especially true for the women. My mother and her sister had qualified for grammar school but, as girls, could not go. Nevertheless, my mother left the village, became a nurse in Durham, married a doctor. I grew up with many more advantages and became the first person in my mother’s family to go to university. I felt an unbridgeable gulf between my own experiences and a community that I viscerally loved, and that depended on an industry whose effects on people and landscapes I loathed. At the same time, there was for me a suffocating intimacy in the close-knit mining village. Here was another tangle of contradictions. We do not talk much about class these days, but it is deeply written in the DNA of this country. 

When it came to our residency, I wanted to explore what a new generation carries forward from such a strong cultural identity when the industry at its very heart is gone. Phoebe, you are of a post-coal generation yourself. You and I both see in the Durham landscape a microcosm for processes which might help heal aspects of the greater environmental crisis and open up what you call ‘an ecologically sustainable future’. I have long believed that human culture and society are an inseparable part of ecology, and I particularly agree with what you say about the miners’ ‘embodied’ sense of landscape. That is so true. I wonder, then, what you think a writer’s place is in relation to this ecological crisis, either at a local or a global level – our moral responsibility, if you like?

Phoebe: I found the Durham Coast a helpful subject to think through these issues because of its specificity: of place, of people, of history. Poetry, for me, creates meaning through attention to concrete detail. Rather than trying to predict the future or make generalisations about what is going on with our relationship to the environment, I want to identify the particular, without judgement, and present it for the reader to draw her own conclusions. My emphasis on heterogeneity – what you call ‘all the contradictions’ in your poem, ‘Wildlife’ – tries to present tiny, subjective and partial fragments of the picture in a way that is true, rather than resolved. One of the reasons for this approach is to make room for hopeful, genuine narratives of our capacity for wonder and co-living in our ecosphere, without losing sight of what has been exploited, and why. 

 Katrina, your sequence draws on the experiences of many young people, our ‘big sisters’, ‘granddaughters’, Brownies and bairns. Some might have ‘no word for bluebell or cowslip’, while their granda’s mining lexicon feels prehistoric to them, fast fading from use. On the one hand they represent a technological future, concerned with Insta, apps and emojis. Yet in your final poem, it is the cameras that help Holly to stay still, teaching her ‘how to look’ at the butterfly, and in different ways these children are as embedded in their landscape as their grandparents. I wonder if you could talk more about why it felt important ­to bring in young people’s voices, and how you view their relationship with previous generations? 

Katrina: Like you, I approach poetry from listening. Our commission asked us to ‘look beyond’ recent history, so I wanted to hear the views of children and younger people, to find out what matters to them in their place, and how they see their future. As well as the Youth Group we visited, making banners for a miners’ picnic where there were no miners, I spent a morning in a primary school in Horden, and an afternoon at an arts centre with Easington Brownies and Guides, who had been working with a photographer on a marvellous heritage project. My own background is in history, and I am aware of how deeply social and cultural identity were damaged in the coastal villages following the 1980s strike and subsequent pit closures. But for small children, as for nature itself, places are not about the past. They accept the world as they find it, the starting-point for their onward momentum. So there was a lovely freshness in the children’s point of view.

This is a perspective that was deeply important to Romantics like Wordsworth; but it is complicated. For all of us, as we grow up and become more aware of history, what we do with it matters. It is important to use the past constructively, neither to ignore it nor to wallow in nostalgia. What I loved about the banner-making project was that it allowed a group of children to connect with their cultural legacy and reinterpret it through their own creativity. Similarly, the heritage project allowed another group to understand their past through their own small discoveries in the physical landscape, using, as you say, cameras. By reinterpreting the past through such personal encounters, the children were carrying a common cultural identity forward. That can be a restorative process, and landscape, nature and place are completely central to that social and cultural healing.

So, yes, I agree with you that the children I met are as embedded in their landscape as their grandparents. But I would qualify that by suggesting that, as they grow into their teens and young adulthood, for most, that vital physical connection with nature diminishes. The teenagers I spoke to remained strongly part of their community, identifying as ‘belonging Horden’ or ‘belonging Easington’; but that community, or extended family, seemed less connected to its physical landscape. You quote one boy, with a slightly ironic sense of the commonplace: ‘Kids these days, they’re always on their phones.’ The miners’ outdoor pastimes, like allotment gardening, competitive leek-growing and pigeon-keeping, are not taken up by the young. The old ‘pitmatic’ dialect names for birds and plants are disappearing. As Robert Macfarlane noted when the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced words like ‘bluebell’ and ‘acorn’ with ‘broadband’ and ‘chatroom’, without the words, it is difficult to see the things.

It would be unwisely Romantic to suggest that the ‘tiny lights’ of rare glow worms in a wooded gill are ‘better’ for people than the brilliance of a smartphone screen, when that screen connects us all to a whole world of information. Of course we need both. I tried to use my writing to explore these knotty connections – between the personal and the common, between landscape, history, language, nature and technology – not to disentangle them, but simply to bring them to attention. I tend to do that through multiple time-frames or perspectives, and this is an approach that you and I share. I am interested in how differently our work takes shape from it, Phoebe. Your writing has an admirable lightness and freedom of approach. I like the way you include your self as a character. I love your impressionistic evocation of litter picking, using space on the page to suggest process, and how your prose-poetry spills over into verse in moments of intensity. Would you like to say more about how the form of ‘Once More the Sea’ suggested itself to you? 

Phoebe: I experimented with lyric poems before settling on the style you see here, based predominantly on prose. When starting a new project, I try not to get too bogged down in issues of genre. For me, the boundaries between verse and prose, or narrative and lyric, can be fluid. I see line-breaks, sentences, spacing, narrative, metaphor etc. all as possible tools in my writer’s briefcase, but rhythm is probably always the bedrock. I am influenced by mixed forms such as haibun, first developed in late 17th century Japan by Bashō. In haibun poetry, prose narrative flows into haiku verses, so a description of sequential events might gather focus at a moment of high lyric intensity. Rhythmically, I find this combination exciting: it resists the experience of a single poem as an isolated or self-contained entity. The passage of time is clearly an important aspect to this commission, both in relation to the way the coast has changed throughout history, and also in the way we experience it in space. In my case, for example, I travelled from one end to the other over a series of days – often on foot, since I don’t have a car. Each section of my sequence is a stop along the way.  I think the journal-like aspect to this was also a way of including myself as a ‘character’, as you say. Not being a local, I wanted to gently fix my own subjectivity in the scene, in order to emphasise that my observations are limited, partial, and peculiar to one visitor’s viewpoint at a particular time, rather than being in any way definitive. 

My personal perspective as a woman also informed my experience and interactions at the coast. It’s as safe as anywhere, but I was aware of travelling alone in a strange environment, occasionally getting lost in quiet back lanes, and avoiding the denes after dark, for instance. This caused me to reflect on whether women really feel free and able to explore the outdoors to the extent that men do, or within what parameters. What do you think the women who live in the area would make of this, Katrina? Are there differences between the ways in which men and women feel able to access the coast on their doorstep?  

Katrina: A generation ago, nobody in East Durham would have gone to the beach for pleasure. Today, in spite of its transformation, many people I met still considered it ‘Not a proper beach’. Of course, I’m not a ‘local’ either, and my experience during this residency was also limited. Although I walked the whole coast from Seaham to Crimdon, most of my interactions took place between Hawthorn Hive and Castle Eden Dene, and most of my conversations in the villages of Easington Colliery and Horden. I was interested to discover how differently the females and males I talked to seemed to perceive the beach. That was true of all ages. In spite of the glorious views and abundant evidence of wildlife returning, many girls and women still spoke of the beach as ‘dirty’. Access can be difficult and although, as you say, it is as safe as anywhere, some reported feeling unsafe or uneasy. I agree that these attitudes affect female access to nature and the outdoors. That is true everywhere, not just on the Durham coast. Among older girls and women, I found there was often at best an indifference to the beach. As Mark observes in your piece: ‘some mums...don’t actually like nature themselves, they find it boring.’ At the same time, in direct contrast, I saw many female and male runners and dog walkers on the coast path; and I was really moved by the number of small shrines along the cliff top. For both men and women, there is a powerful sense that the coast – especially looking down at it from on high – connects us to a deep spirituality. You touch on this in your conversation with Bob and Michael.

So the unresolved contradictions in people’s responses to the landscape seem to remain. They exist within and between younger and older people, female and male. These binaries are real, in the sense that the people I talked to would consider them so. Perhaps partly as a legacy of a male-dominated heavy industry, there is still a strong distinction between male and female society in East Durham. I wonder if you could say something finally about your own reflections on this in the course of the project, Phoebe?  Your piece takes its title from a line of Lord Byron’s, and one section recalls how he ‘bullied’ his wife, Seaham lass Annabella Milbanke. Do you see this as a metaphor for how extractive industries have treated the land, and perhaps also people?

Phoebe: Streets in Seaham are named after Byron; he is claimed as a source of cultural capital for the local tourist industry. And yet there is an irony to this, since in reality he only spent a few months here in 1815, expressing dislike for ‘this dreary coast’ in his letters, in a marriage which seems to have been doomed from the start. Looking further into the details, I was appalled by the way in which he abused Annabella and other women – emotionally and physically – before his wife instigated a formal separation within the year, and Byron left for Europe. It therefore felt important to complicate the image of Byron as the area’s poster-boy. I’m interested in your reading of his misogyny as connecting in some way to industrialisation. Certainly, shortly after Byron’s role in its history, Seaham Hall came to represent a new form of profit and power, when the Londonderrys bought the property from the Milbankes in the 1820s and opened the first collieries there. 

Like you say, the experience of the coast is still very much a gendered one for those who live there today. Yet, in contemporary conservation activities, such as cleaning up coastal litter, all kinds of power structures perhaps feel less acute, as people unite – albeit briefly – in a common purpose and the inter-human conflicts can seem less relevant – just us and the beach. I see this – the opening-out from the human scale of things – in your work, too, as in ‘Painted Ladies’, where both mam and daughter are identified with, and somehow released with, the butterflies. The ends of your poems often gesture outwards to the wider ecological picture in this way, as the coal begins again underground, the sea continues its ineluctable erosion and the world re-makes itself again and again. That’s what, in the end, makes the Durham Coast such a hopeful and even humbling environment, and will stay with me as its guiding image – the constant sense of the tide returning to erase and renew human activity. 

Sea Change is out now and available here. All artwork featured in this interview is by Rose Ferraby and was created especially for Sea Change.

Neutral Milky Halo: Karen Sandhu interviews Maria Sledmere

In December 2020 we released Maria Sledmere’s new sequence Neutral Milky Halo. In this interview poet and Guillemot friend Karen Sandhu talks to Maria about her work, lockdown, the anthropocene and lots more. The images are by artist and illustrator CF Sherratt, who also designed the cover of Neutral Milky Halo.

Karen Sandhu: neutral milky halo is a truly remarkable collection as it encapsulates the time we are currently living through. The poems are urgent and of the now, and nowhere is this more felt than in the line: ‘Pollen clots/in a chest that has suffered more than its/casual share of infections’.  These words resonate with us all as the Coronavirus pandemic causes far too many bodies to suffer. And in poems such as Sundae and Soft, Waterproof Formula, you make reference to ‘lockdown’ as well as signalling hope in ‘now that the virus is gone’. Furthermore, references to ‘pollen’ along with ‘smoky roses’ and ‘nuclear daisies’ continually foreground that which has not been forgotten – nature and ecology. Delayed by the pandemic, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be taking place this November in Glasgow, and questions concerning the climate emergency seem to be more pressing than ever before. The pandemic appears to have brought with it an urgent need to act now for the sake of both healthy bodies and a healthy planet. In ‘Through a Dark Glassery’ you cry out ‘my health, my health, my health’, and in ‘Arcadia Glazer’ you are ‘a cop botanist’ filled ‘with chlorophyll’. I’d like to begin by asking, where did your idea for this collection first take root? And in light of 2020, how has the meaning and effect of these poems changed for you?

Maria Sledmere: Thanks Karen, wow, it’s so strange to be talking about this book at the beginning of another national lockdown, thinking back to the first lockdown in which it was conceived. In February 2020, I was asked by The Curatorial Fellowship to come do a workshop and talk as part of their With the North Sea programme at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen. My presentation focused on telling the embodied stories of energy: with a petrocultural lens, we looked at the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Roseanne Watt and others, including Amy De’Ath’s excellent poetic critique of Edward Burtynsky and Lana Del Rey’s video for ‘The Greatest’. On the long train home, I started writing some notes towards what became ‘flotsam’, the pamphlet’s closing poem. I was working through this ambient experience of loss which I’d been carrying around for months already, following various personal and political upheavals, mornings spent on freezing university picket lines, and then suddenly come March plunged even deeper as Covid took hold across the world. There was barely any time to breathe between winter depression and this crisis, and so I found myself (like many others) noticing spring in this incredible childlike way, the birdsong and new buds and evening sunlight felt there like never before. This was at a time where if you sat down for even a minute the police might move you on, and in Britain we were allotted just one trip outside a day for exercise or essential purposes. So there was spring and blooming but also all this stasis and terrible waiting. It’s strange to feel nostalgia for that part of lockdown where there were no cars, even as the memory is laced with the weight of all this grief and the horror of watching the necropolitics of the Tory government’s Covid response play out around us.

At the same time as writing my presentation on petrocultures and the North Sea, I’d started a collaborative project that was intended to run adjacent to COP26 in Glasgow. With A+E Collective, solarpunk theorist Rhys Williams, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe, I was thinking towards some kind of interactive art project centred on themes of ‘low carbon pleasure’. I think this theme went in many wild directions as the pandemic developed: on the one hand we might be consuming less because the shops are closed, we are taking less flights; but equally many of us depend entirely on energy-guzzling laptops made of rare earth minerals in order to work, consume news, play, socialise and generally function. Recently I’ve been thinking in line with Mark Fisher’s notion of postcapitalist desire or Kate Soper’s alternative hedonism. Basically with poetry I’m interested in how we find new ways of bearing ourselves and others, desiring beyond what capitalism offers; going to the extremes of certain emotions and showing them up as transmissive affects (a phrase I borrow from Teresa Brennan) in the context of ecology, technology and the ambient infrastructures of our daily lives as felt in language.  

There was a lot of talk about how everyone was dreaming more in lockdown. I’ve always been intensely interested in dreams: not just as ways of working through trauma or providing escapes, although these are important, but also in relation to utopian thinking. A lot of mental health advice around Covid, what my mum (who qualified as a counsellor last year) always tells me, is to take it day by day. The narratives of crisis which form our ‘here and now’, as understood from digesting the news and the relentless storm of reaction online, can be genuinely unbearable, but the more we digest them, the more they totalise. I was looking for ways of talking about the pandemic without talking about the pandemic, which is to say, becoming invested in imaginaries of elsewhere that were not necessarily futural but at least prompted by a kind of survivalist desire for nourishment, solidarity, joy — I’m obsessed with this phrase Jackie Wang used recently, ‘outlaw jouissance’.  There’s this great bit in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) where he writes, ‘[t]o critique an overarching “here and now” is not to turn one’s face away from the everyday. Roland Barthes wrote that the mark of the utopian is the quotidian’. Taking it ‘day by day’ can’t just be complacency, ‘just getting by’; it might also allow for genuine refusals of the neoliberal time pressures and structures of living that we experience as capitalist realism. The psychic and social violence of being expected to work ‘as usual’ from home has been felt for almost a year now: I think these poems are probably attempts to feel into the negative capability of living in excess of where we are in this moment, finding escapes but also not necessarily being in full control of their veering. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year it’s to grow out of that impulse towards the messed-up ‘comforts’ of apocalyptic thinking (although it’s there in the poems, it’s still part of our cultural imaginary and lingering, generational sense of feeling strung out by capitalism and climate crisis) and towards manifesting architectures of thought that allow us to stay with and write from the trouble, as Donna Haraway puts it.

KS: This is fascinating – as well as alluding to the pandemic and climate crisis, I’m really struck by the idea of your poems as ‘imaginaries of elsewhere’; they provide a departure, or rather, an escape from this age of chaos. The poems hint at these big global catastrophes but also offer incredible moments of solace through your evocation of shared moments and experiences. For me personally, neutral milky halo brings me back to my surroundings, and reads as a eulogy to the climate and environment of the Anthropocene. This is particularly striking in the imagery ‘sickling April’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘coffee/fills our faultlines’ and statements such as ‘there will be no nature’. In response to the climate crisis, how much of your poetic practice is about activism and how much of it is about reflection?

MS: Good question – maybe it’s worth starting with the title. The title, neutral milky halo, I’d had by early March: it’s a kind of gimmicky reference (as Jo Walton puts it, gimmick can be praxis) to the band Neutral Milk Hotel, known for their psych-influenced, deliberately ‘low-quality’ recordings…I’m interested in what lo-fi poetry, bedroom poetry, looks like when you name it as such. Sometimes I like to think, perversely, of all lyric poetry as bedroom poetry – which is not to forgo its relationship to the public or commons. In lockdown, there was something weirdly radical about lying down a lot, dancing furiously in your bedroom or trying to sleep more – buying back pockets of time from labour, cultivating forms of withdrawal or refusal. Stuff I would’ve liked to do and often tried to do more in my office or the library, or even in stolen moments at the restaurant where I used to work. There’s a great episode of the Serpentine podcast from 2018 where they talk about the transformation of home into a blurred environment of leisure, labour and intimate relation – obviously that’s come to a head with the pandemic and stay at home orders. The imagery you identify is maybe at the extreme end of the book: those moments where language picks up a sort of malaise in the air, struggling to clear or work through it. Reflection is an interesting word when it comes to lyric…always makes me think of Wordsworth’s idea of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Maybe there’s an argument (I guess this is what Timothy Morton identifies as dark ecology) to say there is no tranquillity from which to reflect on experience now, just as there are no ‘neutral’ conversations about the weather anymore – most small talk of the weather is overshadowed by the spectre of global heating. But obviously a lot of us have been doing a lot of ‘reflection’ over the past year, from our bedrooms – not in comfort so much as an accelerated and painful sense of stasis. We are all in some hullabaloo of the general tornado; while our exposure to the storm is unequally distributed. I was given this great advice back in early March: I was thinking about heartbreak and depression, the kind of crying you do that feels ceaseless because it comes again and you don’t feel better; I was told eventually the feeling would be a kind of clearance, a total sense of the neutral. It’s not to say you can then approach the crises around you with objectivity or some kind of god-trick of affectless focus, casting your troubles aside forever; it’s just to say, poetic practice might be part of that circling around the possibility of having these neutral moments where you are not devastated and paralysed but can temporarily think and be open to more-than. I liked the idea that this was milky thinking: viscous, nourishing but by no means absolutely untainted. You could have it bottled in a poem or the poem could spill the milk everywhere. When I think of milk I always think of that Julia Kristeva reference to the skin you sometimes find on milk, which she writes of in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). The ghost membranes found in daily life, reminding us we are porous, related and psychically wounded beings. And the milk (white) is always having a dialogue with oil (black) in the book…I wanted to feel into the problematic way we frame oil and extractivism. I consider the dairy industry to also be extractive (especially on a mass and genetic industrial scale – Ariana Reines’ The Cow (2006) is great on this), so the symbolic resonance of these images is all kind of mixed-up and mutually contaminating – as everything is in the anthropocene.

As for the activism, I want to shift gears from ‘can poetry change the world’ to what it means to think you have something to say, or thinking how the poem speaks you and the poem’s sociality. There’s this discussion between Stephen Collis and Sean Bonney in Toward.Some.Air (2015) where they talk about ‘a commoning of words and voices’ in poetry as forging ‘a kind of subjectivity in history’. It’s important to see climate crisis and the anthropocene as deeply historical. I tend to de-capitalise the anthropocene to take it down a peg: I’m not interested in it so much as this ‘new’ epochal force with the phallically identifiable ‘Golden Spike’ of origin, so much using it as a discursive heuristic for identifying the gendered, classed and racialised agrilogistics of capitalism in different contexts. It demands a very messy, retroactive and glitchy sense of time, always shaped and filtered by the technological archives and sensoria of our available knowledge and media. I’m thinking with people like Kathryn Yusoff, Joanna Zylinska, Anna Tsing and Claire Colebrook here.

I keep going back to this quote from Fred Moten’s poem, ‘it’s not that I want to say’:

It’s not that I want to say that poetry is disconnected from having
something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I

caught it I wouldn’t want it and you wouldn’t want it either. Maybe poetry

is what happens on the bus between wanting and having.

Poetry then is something more like a transport of thought, feeling and relation than it is about the arrival. If activism is all about making demands, I think poetry can participate in that, but perhaps in a more vibrational way, feeling into khora-spaces of desire and thought that might incubate the bigger ideas and actions. The word ‘eulogy’ is a speech of praise, right, and I suppose it’s a strange thing to make tributes to something which you are fundamentally enmeshed in, but feel is dying around you at different rates and scales. I like work that really looks into how climate crisis is also a bodily upheaval: from Adam Dickinson’s notion of metabolic poetics to Joyelle McSweeney’s necropastoral, to Rachael Allen’s feminist meat poems to Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings (2018) and the amazing multimedia work of Sophia Al-Maria. Maybe there’s something like a feeling through what happens when everyday life becomes elegia, can we bear that? One of my favourite ‘extinction’ poems is Juliana Spahr’s ‘Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache’: she does this really expansive and strange thing with the ‘we’ pronoun; she writes in cuckoo fashion with the song of the more-than-human; makes a litany of lost species and ultimately performs this complex and kind of fraught ascent to lyric as a mode of ecological engagement. I’m still trying to find a balance between being on-the-nose and direct (which sometimes you need to do!) and also implicitly drawing in specifics and examples. It’s probably quite a risky and grandiose gesture to end your book with ‘the only decorated islands / in the United States of America’, but I also wanted to see what happens when you just dump the reader in these weird, dressed-up oil islands and then sort of exit the poem, the book ­– for me there was a strange kind of panning out involved there, from the otherwise more intimate lyric meditations of the poem to this strange, ‘unnatural’ landscape.  

KS: Yes, at the end of your book I really did experience this physical load when you mention the USA. I found it so provocative as it instantly cast my attention to all the goings on in America recently and in this last year especially. I love how you describe yourself ‘exiting’ the poem as you hand over to the reader who continues to unwrap the semantics and connotations on the page. This has got me thinking about your approach to writing and your points of focus across projects. Looking back over your impressive publications, it is evident that an exploration of ecopoetics sits at the heart of your practice. What is the relationship between neutral milky halo and your two previous works: the weird folds in collaboration with Rhian Williams and infra·structure in collaboration with Katy Lewis Hood? How has your work evolved from one publication to the next? 

MS: I’m currently in my final year of a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow: it’s a practice-based PhD which looks at a mode of ‘hypercritique’ for engaging with the anthropocene (as both a critical term and felt experience) and its mediations in contemporary lyric and ecopoetics. The prefix ‘hyper’ bears the sense of ‘over, beyond, over much, above measure’ (OED). So hypercritique is a thinking which inhabits the dream-time of the extra-sensible and overspills its human limit, trying to enter into and inhabit the embodied sensoria of our anthropocenic experience. After Sara Ahmed, I see critique not in a negative sense, but as a work of generosity and attentiveness, a restructuring or bringing into the fold. It’s highly citational and dense in certain ways – that’s just how my messy, agitated Gemini brain works – but also tries to be fluid and open. Every poetry project and collaboration I’ve worked on since 2018 in some sense comes out of the research and thinking I’m doing for my PhD, these little rhizomatic offshoots of thought that emerge as poems.

the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene is an anthology of contemporary UK poets that Rhian Williams and I edited for Dostoyevsky Wannabe. It’s a gathering together of friends, comrades and other writers we admire whose work touches on anthropocenic experience as felt within the realm of the everyday. We finalised the proofs and introduction (plus a lovely foreword from Timothy Morton) just as Covid was really kicking off. As we wrote to and from the poems included, Rhian and I realised just how much the collection resonated with where we were now: in lockdown – or ‘The Great Pause’ – experiencing a pandemic that was caused essentially by capitalism’s incubating of coronaviruses through deforestation, biodiversity loss and other manifestations of ecocide. While many peoples and places on Earth have been feeling the anthropocene up close and personal for decades or more (in the form of wildfires, floods, droughts and storms), for others this was our first direct confrontation at the level of daily life. Being forced to stay inside completely recalibrated many people’s relationship to the everyday, to the sense of indoors/outdoors, to the environment and our sense of time/space altogether. I think neutral milky halo speaks a bit to this in both a playful and confrontational way (as does Chlorophyllia, my 2020 pamphlet with OrangeApple Press, perhaps more in the post-internet side of things), and the weird folds was an editorial project where Rhian and I developed a sense of how contemporary poetry ‘thinks’ climate crisis. We suspected that something was happening that wasn’t nature poetry or ecopoetry in its traditional conception, that the aesthetic and ethical trends were shifting, even while they were often shifting within reworkings of traditional poetic forms. We wanted the book to expand people’s access to the more diverse and ‘experimental’, small press, lesser-published side of anthropocene poetics in the UK context, and also have it available as an educational tool.

infra·structure is a collaboration that came out of Katy Lewis Hood and I’s epic, ongoing email exchange following our time together at the ASLE, A Place on the Edge? conference in Orkney back in 2018. We were circling a world-leading wave power station, taking diligent notes in ecocriticism panels and thinking a lot about petrocultures, infrastructures, energy imaginaries and their effect on our daily lives. Some of these threads — such as solarity, lyric architecture and metabolic poetics — I’ve picked up and developed in more recent work like neutral milky halo. I even revisited the concept of ‘Darkland’ (a poem from infra·structure) in another poem called ‘Darklands’ which is included in a collection I finished working on a couple of months ago. A kind of world I keep going back to. Katy’s work often looks at oceanic imaginaries and the blue humanities, and we were really drawn to this photo one of us took of a huge wind turbine in Evie, with the sky-blue sky behind it, so I suppose it’s a kind of airy, blue work (we’re both air signs). I am a bit obsessed with colour and definitely classify the mutation and development of my projects by the colours they attract or present by. It’s one of the reasons I so adore C.F. Sherratt’s artwork for neutral milky halo – those pastel gradients are just perfect for the weird, acid spring feeling of the book. Collaboration is generally a big part of my practice and infra·structure was really fun because we basically ‘translated’ each other’s poems by different kinds of secret puzzle logic: so for each poem in the pamphlet there’s an alternative version or shadow poem. It was definitely a way of thinking about various kinds of scaffolding and how form holds or slips from meaning. Some of the poems in neutral milky halo also came out of collaborations: ‘Airstrip’ and ‘Nice ‘n’ Eurydice’ are ekphrastic responses to Kirsty Dunlop’s dreams (we kept a collaborative dream journal for a summer) and ‘Soft, waterproof formula’ responds to a visual work by the brilliant artist/sculptor Jack O’Flynn, who I was corresponding with last spring and summer.

KS: In neutral milky halo, I’m repeatedly excited by your experimentation with form. I’m drawn to the architecture of narrative as seen in Lycanthropy is back by a certain fashion, and the architecture of the poetic line as seen in the overall form of Graphite. The former poem has a prose style which reminds me of Angela Carter’s short stories with its fable-like style, poetic repetitions and imaginative coupling of words. How do you as a poet think through form? And how is your work shaped by mythology, folklore and the fairy tale tradition?

MS: I got to interview Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) for GoldFlakePaint back in 2019 and I love how she navigates the interrelation of the personal and political, intimate and mythic through music. The quote from ‘flotsam’ you identified earlier, ‘a lot of coffee / fills our faultlines’, is kind of a riff on one of my favourite songs, ‘Something to Believe’, which I would sing along to constantly back when her album Titanic Rising (2019) came out. I think in the interview I described her as something like Karen Carpenter for the anthropocene…She has this perfect, devastating way of framing heartbreak within the general heartbreak of the extinction narrative; it’s about bearing witness but also inhabiting the story which is often otherwise projected elsewhere or presented as total, foreclosed annihilation – often through the wide-angle screens of apocalypse cinema. The Titanic movie referenced in Mering’s album title is this epic, meta-mythology for our times, except as she puts it ‘instead of the ship sinking, our civilisation is sinking’. As an academic I’m always trying to critique universalism and putting things in contexts and specifics, but I think there’s something beautiful about pop music and certain poetry where you can frame things in a way that makes space for others to come into the work, to tell their own story through the questions and imagery it raises. These are the myths that end up shaping how journalists and politicians as much as novelists, poets and pop musicians present the stories of climate disaster. It’s important to find critical and creative ways of reframing them or transposing them from different perspectives. Maybe it’s something about how the reactionary hall of mirrors that is social media in the wake of a big event leaves us with the sense of ‘drowning’ in a viral excess of information, and writing with mythology in mind is a way of putting shape, critique and historical dialogue to all that affective residue and (often anti)intellectual debris.

I was raised in quite a working-class, agricultural area where you couldn’t even study history at high school, let alone classics, so my understanding of folklore, myth and historical narrative is very much a piecemeal assemblage from random bits of popular culture, literature and haphazard study. Sometimes I worry that I can only engage with classical myths and so on in a crude or shortcut way, but I hope poetry allows for that. ‘Sluttish Aphrodite’ is a deep cut Tom McCarthy reference (see his Satin Island, a very petrocultures novel). As an undergrad I read Carter’s The Bloody Chamber a lot, and I guess I came to writing in general through fiction – I wrote a lot of flash fiction in my early twenties and at some point must’ve realised a lot of these pieces were actually poems. ‘Lycanthropy…’ is much more in line with the kind of stuff I wrote when I was younger; I once wrote this novel that followed a pair of twins whose mother had gone missing, but she kept appearing in the form of a white hart in the woods they often got lost in. I’ve always been interested in transformations between the human and animal, but also in identifying animal characteristics in people close to you. I’ve noticed some of my friends have highly feline qualities, which is something I adore in them. Often it’s a way of expressing something beyond language, or the yearning to become more than you are, feeling already less than you are? Growing up on the west coast of Scotland, I’ve always been obsessed with mermaids and selkies, this oft-more-than-metaphoric longing to return to the sea (see also the Weyes Blood video for ‘Seven Words’)…When writers reinvent or sort of write new animal mythologies, that’s exciting to me, and the way ‘fable’ works as a way of telling which feels lost to history and subject to the lossy compressions of passing time. Anne Boyer’s ‘When the Lambs Rise Up against the Bird of Prey’ is so great. How fable can also scale up from metaphor or allegory to actual social relation. Also ideas of augury, astrology and mysticism, they seem more pertinent than conveying morals: this is hardly a hot take at this point, but I see the recent popularity of astrology among millennials as a kind of narrative architecture which sometimes has affordances for thinking of futurity, relation and wellbeing in modes beyond capitalist realism. It allows us to talk more playfully, with both irony and sincerity, about a future which otherwise seems cancelled.

It’s great you use the word ‘architecture’ because in my PhD I spend a lot of time thinking about lyric architectures! Lisa Robertson is a great person to read on this, but also Madeline Gins, Deleuze and Guattari, Robert Smithson, Fred Moten. For me, it’s about ways of bearing the weight of living, planning for different modes of living and thought, imbuing the poem with glimmers of utopia, holding texture, colour, shade and light, making space, being hospitable, thinking about openness and closure, entrance and exit, rhythm and dailiness, weathering. It’s also about Web 2.0 and the post-internet: how can poetry engage with the existential state of online immersion, the sense that it’s impossible to go back to a world in which we did not have the on-the-fly architectures of social media, google and Cloud archivisation structuring our reality? Like many others, I’m trying to feel through how ancient and modern poetic forms chime with and get reconfigured through the modalities of swipe, scroll, exteriorised memory, tabular thinking, drag and click. For instance, I love the fractal affordances of the sestina. All of this architecture chat is of course deeply about the social, and the spaces we think, eat, share, work, sleep and dream together. Ian Heames’ anonymous sonnets, Verity Spott’s coronelles, the niner as popularised by Peter Manson/Mendoza/Nat Raha et al, Sean Bonney’s letters, Alli Warren’s flirtations with the pastoral, Nisha Ramayya’s sequences of ritual, devotion and tantric poetics, Bernadette Mayer’s epic journaling and Bhanu Kapil’s ‘literature not made from literature’ are some of the most exciting contemporary forms to me. 

KS: This is such an inspiring list of poets and theorists with lots of works to delve into and consider further. Your collection also makes reference to the wonderful work of Clarice Lispector and Adrienne Rich. When did you first encounter these writers, and what is it about their work that has influenced your own?

MS: I guess I must’ve read Adrienne Rich at some point during the obligatory Plath phase of my life, but I really came to her work in 2018 when someone close to me gave me The Will to Change: Poems 1980-1970. Adrienne Rich taught me to write about water, about the stars, about loss and change, falling and mourning. I think about this line from ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ a lot: ‘To do something very common, in my own way’. To me it’s like the Frightened Rabbit lyric everyone recalled after Scott Hutchison’s death, ‘And while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth’. Rich also does interesting things with form and sequence: you can learn a lot about stamina from the longer works. Kirsty [Dunlop] and I were having a very weepy limbo between Christmas and New Year in 2019 and found ourselves browsing the shelves of Waterstones, where I picked up Rich’s Later Poems. I’d read ‘Diving into the Wreck’ before, but somehow something clicked this time, with the imagery from that Lana Del Rey video I’d mentioned, my very watery star chart churning, watery feelings, thinking about hydrology and wave power, vortexes, currents and oceanic consciousness after everyone from Alexis Pauline Gumbs to Freud and Jackie Wang. So much at the start of 2020 already felt a wreck, we were going into this new decade…I had the need for something with a feel of epic, and looking for the ladder that Rich says is ‘always there’. There’s a great ladder scene in the film Rois et Reine (2004) where the character’s in his psychoanalyst’s office and quoting a Yeats poem about a ladder, seeing a ladder in your dreams or lying down where the ladders start…I did a lot of drawing last year and sometimes there were ladders to mountains, clouds, tunnel entrances, chessboards.

On the topic of ladders, let’s climb over to Clarice Lispector, who I mostly discovered through her short fiction and then through my love of Hélène Cixous, who also writes about ladders. When I can’t write, I read her book, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1990), this incredible exploration on writing process through the ‘School of the Dead’, ‘School of Dreams’ and ‘School of Roots’. Cixous writes so richly about writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Kafka, Lispector…She was a huge influence in the first year of my PhD and continues to be. I am generally drawn to writers who would be in this school of dreams. I think my whole attempt to theorise anthropocene poetics and hypercritique is really about which writers would show up to the school of dreams: what do they teach us, what friendship, hospitality and solidarity are they able to show, what would we eat together, what things surround us? My friend and fellow editor at SPAM Press, Max Parnell, gifted me Água Viva by Lispector for my birthday in 2019 and I’ve reread it at all these extreme and insomniac times in my life since. I dip into it and experience flooding, immense amounts of light, treasure; a phenomenology of what it means to see or have vision, to sense, to write as one paints. Her writing is a kind of ‘chamber writing’, and again I like how this chimes with ideas of lyric architecture, especially on the musical or ambient side. I consider Lispector to have been always already a writer of the anthropocene: on the side of dreams while also attuned to fate, peril, struggle, the animal, the atmosphere, the lack of time. 

KS: Yes, I love that you mention Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1990) as your go-to when it comes to thinking about the process of writing. I’m interested in your practice as poet. When working on this particular book, did you follow any daily routines or rituals?

MS: I did a lot of writing in bed, writing on the floor, writing through terrible fits of hayfever, writing through tears, writing with chilblained fingers while walking, writing to people in emails, writing in water-crumpled notebooks and google docs, writing in Zoom workshops, abolition seminars, poetry readings or training sessions. I usually do a lot of writing in my office at the uni (alas, sorely missed) or on trains, and in lieu of these spaces this year I did most of my writing at home. I was trying to find ways of rewilding my consciousness within the same-old space of my flat. This included listening to endless soundcloud mixes, nature sound field recordings, nostalgic ambience. Sometimes I’d watch youtube videos of places or things I missed. Not really rituals as such, although I tend to like writing when just a little bit sleep deprived, and on an empty stomach. It’s my equivalent of grapefruit juice or something. I tend to keep obsessive diaries and journals of dreams and everyday occurrences, and even though my daily life was pretty dull in lockdown, that gave all the more time to the more baroque and flighty meditations. Free-writing is just something I’ve done for about ten years now and I need it to keep up the muscle memory to write, but also those materials and tendencies within them often end up in poems. I want to find a way of maybe publishing some of these messy prose materials some day; for now, posting on my ancient blog is a monthly ritual that keeps me attuned to ‘writing’ as a kind of ongoing project of living. 

KS: I couldn’t agree with you more about creating a soundscape for our domestic spaces during lockdown. There is something so magical about bringing the outdoors in, especially when our time outside is limited. I will definitely try out the nature sound field recordings! And lastly, what advice would you give to other poets working on their first collection?

MS: I guess my biggest advice is to find some sort of poetry community: whether that’s a reading group, a workshop or just a couple of friends you feel comfortable sharing work with. That doesn’t have to happen through an institution! I’ve never really got on 100% with a regular feedback style workshop (generally I prefer workshops where we write together but don’t necessarily share the work straightaway), but always appreciate the mutual exchange of sharing honest and productive critique with friends over email. I kind of don’t think I could write without these points of contact, and in a way there’s never been an extended time in the last couple years where I’ve not been working on some kind of poetry collaboration with someone or something! A reading group is also great for forming a sense of critique and understanding of ‘poetics’ in the context of other people’s work. I don’t always have a title in mind when I write towards a pamphlet but I think it does help to have a concept or an aesthetic buzzword or framework in mind – for me this is sometimes as simple as a colour palette! I guess I lean towards considering neutral milky halo as more of a pamphlet than a collection, mostly because it comprises poems written in quite a tight timeframe (more or less within the same three months), but I’m happy for it to be read either way. The poet Sophie Collins recently gave me great advice about assembling a collection: try to be brave and weave in older poems among the new, as this gives the book a lot more depth and often makes you confront the new poems differently, with the new relations made possible by their inclusion. As an editor, my advice is probably to bear in mind your book might be published B5 or A5, in which case, think carefully about how line lengths are going to work, taking bleed margins into account! But in general, I feel like trust yourself, have a few trusted readers (they don’t have to be poets), have a sense of what the book’s influences are and how you would position your work in the world (which helps with cover letters!). And think carefully about what publishers you approach, listen out for reading periods, read what they’ve already put out in the world. You could also be daring and take something out, add something new at the very last minute!  

KS: Thank you so much Maria! Thank you for this generous discussion about your work and the work of so many others. Your words and ideas have been truly inspiring, and thank you for gifting the world such a rich, magnetic and thought-provoking book. Looking forward to the next one already!

MS: Thank YOU for the generous questions, and your time! Stay well :)

Salt Moon: Philip Lancaster interviews David Harsent

Following the November release of Salt Moon Guillemot friend, poet and composer Philip Lancaster catches up with the poet David Harsent to discuss this new collaboration with his son Simon.

Philip Lancaster: In your new book from Guillemot Press, Salt Moon, your poetry appears alongside photographs by your son, Simon Harsent.  The photographs are as engrossing as the poetry, capturing something akin to the atmosphere of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings; their textures and their light.  So often your poetry uses human stories as a starting point, be they real, imagined, historical or mythological, and it seems unusual to find something visual perhaps providing the impetus for a book.  How much of a role did they play in the birth of Salt Moon?

David Harsent: Some while ago I published a collection called Marriage, poems that traded off the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his mistress, model and, eventually, wife, Marthe de Meligny. There was, of course, a narrative to the relationship but, for the most part, the poems were prompted by Bonnard’s paintings. I developed a theory that I called ‘the mysteries of domesticity’ that has to do with subterranean equivalents of the quotidian: a deeper narrative that registers along the nerve-endings, that works off image and texture and music. So, for example, in the ‘normal’ way of things dinner is simply dinner; in another version of that, a different understanding, all food is a sacrament.

The difference between my responses first to Bonnard’s work, then to Simon’s, is that the photographs in Salt Moon offered nothing to narrative. Simon and I have worked together before. I wrote poems for three photographs he took: of the icefield, the ocean and the rainforest; three poster-poems. This was a commission from World Wildlife Australia. Later, I wrote a poem to accompany a photograph (one of an astonishing sequence called Into the Abyss) of a woman who has just crashed through the surface of a body of water and is holding beautiful, angular, poses while the seethe of bubbles from her sudden plunge flow past her towards the surface. The image was part of a group exhibition and was later taken for a promotion by Sydney Opera House who asked for a poem to accompany it. 

There was no immediate response of that sort to the Salt Moon images. Simon showed them to me some years ago. They haunted me, I was moved and fascinated by them, but I felt no impulse to write about them. It simply never occurred to me. Then, much later, and I don’t know why, it did. As soon as the impulse was there, I had the bare bones of a narrative built round images provoked by the sea, the sea at night, moonlight striking the sea.

PL: Your theory of the ‘mysteries of domesticity’ is perhaps something that poetry, at some level, does naturally.  It is the art that is almost uniquely suited to exploring those deeper levels and nerve-endings. 

Naturally, Salt Moon is full of reflections; words and ideas that reverberate throughout the book.   Those who follow your work will undoubtedly see on the surface some echoes of previous publications: the near-elemental salt that gave its title to one of your most recent collections, and, in the first poem of Salt Moon, a mention of ‘a bird’s idea of flight’.  However, Salt Moon is so very different to these.  Indeed, Salt and Salt Moon seem formally to be polar opposites: the engrossing small windows onto lives and ideas in Salt, and the intense and expansive focus on the sea, the sea by night, and that moonlight striking, across 13 sections of four 3-line stanzas, with very short reflective interludes. 

Was there some liberty in being able to build and develop an idea so intensely, and was it important to give something so expansive the formal backbone it has? (while never feeling formal); and are the echoes of previous works intended, or are they ‘just’ further layers in the growth of ideas and fascinations that develop and evolve across a lifetime? 

DH: There are constants in my work, yes. They return unbidden and I don’t resist them. They define me and so define my work. That emphasis is revelation – to me, that is, but also, perhaps, to the reader. A lifetime’s work is not disparity but focus. Painters and musicians come back, again and again, to images, subjects, motifs. Picasso once said that, were all the steps he had taken in life represented as dots and the dots joined, it would give the shape of the Minotaur and, indeed, he finds the Minotaur again and again, or it finds him. (In my case, it would be the hare.) Maybe it’s easier – more immediate, less apparently measured or mannered – to revisit image in paint or music, but to me those intermittent re-discoveries are naturally occurring events. Harrison Birtwistle was once asked what he felt he had brought to modern music. He said, ‘Well, I tried to do something with pulse.’ It sounds almost dismissive but, in truth, describes an undertaking that informs every compositional encounter. I suppose my version of that would be, ‘Well, I tried to do something with the lyric.’

The compositional shifts in Simon’s photographs – the way light is gathered or spread by a dark sea, the shapes that are made by the sea’s movement, the way photography both traps and releases that movement, the images that are thrown, how the eye is held by the held moment of light-and-dark, of light-on-dark, the apprehension of movement before and movement to come – all this gave rise to the rhythm of repetition in the poems. The musical effects of ostinato and appoggiatura occurred to me – those hints that are glances back to future moments, each a new moment held in a moment revived.

Like the hare, moon and sea are everywhere in my work. But then moon and sea are crucial in the collective human imagination and human imagining: part of the life of the mind, part of an inner life. It’s a surprise, perhaps, that Simon’s salt moon photographs took a while to provoke me. The narrative grew slowly, as if the moon might take years to draw one movement of the tide. Where the particulars of the narrative came from – how they developed – is nothing more nor less than the commonplace compositional delirium in which images arrive and integrate.

PL: I don’t think it is at all mannered, that revisiting.  Time brings continued thought, and new perspectives and contexts; and just because a book or poem or a piece of music has been ‘put to bed’ doesn’t stop the growth of ideas, nor the use of previously explored ideas to lend weight to, or place, new thoughts. 

Being myself a musician, your talk of music – mention of ostinati and appoggiaturas, the use of the rhythm of repetition akin to musical motifs, as well as mention of Harrison Birtwistle – fascinates me.  Music plays an important part in your poetry, in frequent snatches of song, thought, felt or sung by your protagonists, the bringing in of its language, or in the verbal music of your poetry.  This latter seems especially ripe in Salt Moon, with a beautiful use of sound; in the subtle shifts and transformations of the words when spoken aloud. 

You are not a musician, but you work very closely with musicians: a regular collaborator with Harrison Birtwistle, writing several operas together, as well as other works including the song cycle Songs from the Same Earth (poems published in Fire Songs); and you have also produced libretti for other composers, such as Sally Beamish and Huw Watkins. 

How much has working with composers influenced the music in your work, or has music always been an important part of you and your poetry’s being?

DH: I didn’t mean revisiting in the hope of gaining new perspectives; I was thinking, rather, of emphasis, of sending the reader back to an image or a thought: you might say repeating, or referencing, a particular colour in the poem’s palette.

Music is a big part of my life, yes, but music itself doesn’t have any compositional effect on my work. I was once asked what I look for in a poem (stupid question). My response was to say that if I couldn’t hear the music it probably wasn’t a poem, a reply that was met with puzzlement and hostility. Music in poetry has to do with word-choice and rhythm; rhythm has to do with the way you manage prosody: that is, how you configure the beats and the line-breaks and the pauses. Basic stuff, really, but too few people seem to know it, or want to know it. Strict metrical patters are always there, somewhere, at the back of things: an echo.

I often use what seems to me to be a loose metrical structure that works for narrative shapes and / or the burden of the piece (or you could say its temperature, its degrees of light and dark) and then come to realise that I have found a patterning that relies, in some way, on formal metre. (I guess my use of the word burden there is something of a giveaway.) To go back, for a moment, as a parallel, to the join-the-dots minotaur and the join-the-dots hare, Tam Lin and the Demon Lover and The Twa Corbies and Little Musgrave are so often playing in my head. Like my relentless tinnitus, I don’t hear them unless I’m thinking about them, but I’m never less than glad to be reminded. (The music of tinnitus is sometimes fanfare, sometimes as if in the string section a fluctuating note were being held to infinity, sometimes the uninterpretable voices of angels.)

PL: In my work as a composer, I am always wary of respecting a poet’s words.  The act of setting a poem to music is tantamount to grievous bodily harm, imposing music on a work that was seen by its maker to be complete in itself, with its own hard-won verbal music. 

When writing for musical setting, when it is poetic exploration rather than merely dialogue, do you make concession to the music? and how do you feel upon hearing your words set to music? 

DH: I know what you mean by GBH, but I simply don’t see it that way. I trust the composers I’ve worked with (especially Harry, though him, perhaps, because we’ve worked together on so many projects and the evidence is definitely in) to use my words in a way that works best for their purpose: that is to say, for the purpose of the collaborative piece. There’s no question of making concessions to the music, because I don’t know what the music will be and it’s not my job to think about what the music will do. Or do to my work.

Harry was once asked why he had worked with me so often. He said, ‘David gives me what I want.’ He wasn’t talking about words that can be easily bent to music’s purpose, he meant that we think alike, that our sensibilities – when we’re collaborating – seem to match. I don’t expect my rhythms or line breaks or syllabic structure to be in any way reflected in the way his settings work. I know there are librettists who complain of their lines being bullied, of structures being taken up and re-made. My view is that the libretto, before it’s set, is waiting on the music. Once set, it’s transformed – part of the piece – opera, oratorio, song cycle – which is a different thing and to be differently judged.

The libretto can be had separately – as a pamphlet or pages in the programme; there, it is (let’s say) a verse drama. When incorporated, its sculptural definitions change and modify; are changed and modified. It applies in all cases, not least when poems are set. Of course, it’s possible to take against this piece or that because the music itself might be thought indifferent. Britten’s setting of the Lyke Wake Dirge [in the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings] (for example) is banal.  

The collaborative process isn’t (perhaps I ought to say ‘shouldn’t be’) a matter of appropriation, but of creative compatibility. When writing for the opera stage, Harry and I talk at length about the structure of the piece, but never make any reference to words and music as separate events. We have ideas about the dramatic patterns, about characters, about motive, about certain turning points in the action; in short, about how the piece will develop as operatic drama.

I was talking, once, with Don Paterson – and Don’s a musician, of course, as well as a poet – on the subject of poems being set. He said, ‘How could someone set this poem – I’ve already set it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you have. But it won’t be that person’s intention simply to re-set it; they’ll want to make use of it.’  

To consider this in the light of Salt Moon: I can’t imagine Simon complaining that my poems don’t reflect his intentions when he took those photographs, or match what he felt. My point is that the best collaborations are developmental. (Reading back, I notice light and reflect making themselves felt. There might be something in that.)

PL: You have mentioned already the compositional shifts in Simon’s photographs; ‘the way photography both traps and releases’ the sea’s movement, and the rhythm of repetition that they brought.  Salt Moon presents 28 photographs alongside, and framing, your poems.  Thinking about that transformation: are the poems particular to their photographs, arising from long contemplation of both the individual images (seeing such as the hagstone) and an ordering of those photographs into a narrative sequence?  What was your process in this, and how did the images prompt and build that narrative? 

DH: The short answer is, that didn’t happen. No single photo gave rise to (for example) the cliff-top house, the bird, or the Black Madonna. The poems – a narrative sequence – came about as a response to the photographs as a whole: to their mood, you might say, or to the mood they provoked in me which, as I’ve said, developed slowly. (No pun intended, but I’ll allow it, as with burden and light and reflect. Puns of that sort are little electric connections across the synaptic terminals.)  

Simon has the most extraordinary eye. His vision is compelling and his reaction to image and object intense. All art (that of significance) is obsessional and vision is everything. I referred to the sequence he called Into the Abyss – a kind of underwater ballet, pas seul; but to make mention of just a fraction of his output: there’s GBH, a series of portraits of one-time football hooligans, then portraits of Mafiosi taken during Simon’s years in New York, then a series called The Beautiful Game: shots of football stadia, an example of startling compositional innovation that tells a story of class-divisions, but also indicates the fierce loyalties in football; another series was shot (at not inconsiderable personal risk) in a favela in the Philippines. And there’s Melt – Portrait of an Iceberg, a truly major undertaking that involved Simon tracking icebergs from the moment they calved from the icefield and recording their sculptural transformation as they travelled and melted in open water. It’s an extraordinary set of images. Quite why it was Salt Moon, as opposed to any of these, that moved me to write is a mystery: the kind of mystery on which poetry depends.

Simon and I are both enormously grateful to Guillemot Press for taking on Salt Moon and making it such a beautiful book.

PL: And I am grateful to you for taking the time to talk about your work.  Thank you, David – and thanks to both you and Simon for what is in every way a truly beautiful book. 

Salt Moon by David and Simon Harsent is available to buy here.

Sonata by Philip Lancaster will be published in 2021.

Many of the photographs and photographic series by Simon Harsent mentioned by David can be seen here.

Salt Moon is published by Guillemot Press.  The other works by David Harsent mentioned here are published by Faber & Faber.

October Events - Guillemot Press at Chener Books

We’re so excited to announce these three FREE online events being hosted by Chener Books. Events are running throughout October and will feature Jen Hadfield, J.R. Carpenter, Jazmine Linklater, Isabel Galleymore, Lou Sarabadzic, Suzannah V Evans, David Harsent and Petero Kalule. It’s quite a lineup. To register all you need to do is send an email to chenerbookshop@gmail.com

Harriet Tarlo & Emma Mason on Peter Larkin's 'Seven Leaf Sermons'

Peter Larkin’s Seven Leaf Sermons, with artwork by Rupert Loydell, was released August 2020. Here, Harriet Tarlo and Emma Mason reflect on the sequence.

Harriet Tarlo

“Trees won’t be miracle-filled, but can be leaf-willed”: so begins Peter Larkin’s Seven Leaf Sermons, proceeding as is common in his work through a series of statements and questions which prod the reader into alive and active questioning about the lives of trees. In the small act of hyphenating two words, ‘leaf’ and ‘willed’ Larkin asks what we might believe about the possible (‘can be’ not are) mind, spirit, will, of trees or their associations, parts and wholes - leaves, roots, forests, rain, light and dark. Always, the relational, also, often with dry wit, a casting of allusions between the wider more-than-human world and our own preoccupations, perceptions and moralities. The philosophical element reminds me of Thomas A Clark. The hyphenation and moments of tenderness, ‘starry pause-alongs of time’ evokes Barry MacSweeney - perhaps surprising to associate Larkin with such a passionate poet. But it is important to note that Peter Larkin is not just a dry monastic figure, clever with forms, sentences and ideas, as I think he is sometimes seen. He is a poet alive to the beauty of sonic patterns and pairings (‘trust insurrectional’; ‘green machine’), knowing well that such lines reach in their awkward, jagged beauty beyond the mere think-able into the world of feeling, spirit and co-existence that he explores in these ‘sermons’. This seems to be particularly true here, where he is working within restraints, a ten-word line established by Rupert Loydell. The two-stanza ten and five line element of the form he chooses to start and end in, but to break with in the body of the book, embodying  perhaps the possibility of greater densities of proliferating leaf patterns. This book, its monochrome tempered with Loydell’s folial colours, shapes and abstractions, would be a great introduction to Larkin if you don’t know him, and a lovely addition to your collection if you do.

Emma Mason

In his book, Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture, David Lee notes that the ‘green tinge’ with which the Earth seemingly glows when viewed from outerspace is due to a ‘layer of leaves’ that covers the surface: 39 billion tons of leaves every year (‘about the same as our extraction of petroleum’, Lee writes*). Lee shares with Einstein the belief that immersion in the details of the universe offer a ‘cosmic religious feeling’, one affirmed by the experience of the leafy fabric that paves the way for all life. Yet his study also expresses anxiety about our ability, will, and capacity to reverse the climate change that threatens our connection to the natural world because of the disconnect between human and other-than-human. Few writers conceptualise this relationship as carefully and complexly as Peter Larkin. His spell-binding Seven Leaf Sermons is an example of Larkin’s mesmerizing imagining of our reconciliation with earth’s diversity. Reading it reshapes both our perception and reception of the complex cellular organization of leaves, their branching venations and autotrophic magic. The poems offer language through which to witness how leaves move within their communities (‘a leaf hovers only beside neighbouring / leaves’), relate to the weather (‘The sound of rain is its light rattle, rinse sonics / of dust down each veining canal’), and speak to each other (‘Sprout branches mouthing oak, pre-human to the last speech’).

But these poems, almost extended sonnets, are also sermons. Leaf being and form—a ‘throng’, a ‘palmate’, a ‘sea of givings’—is revealed as a spur for meditative and collective thought. Leaves become are a gathering for the divine, holding out their infinite fabric to humans unable to see what paradise can: ‘Leaves endlessly unachieved profferable, so paradisal what gleans into them’ (‘Leaf Sermon 4’). By the sixth sermon, Larkin stresses the ‘pre-human’ and ‘primitive’ aspect of the leaf as a way to ‘inhabit’ its ‘prayer-scrawl’ and ‘Liturgical fan’, phrases that intimate a gentle, ‘low energy’ leaf motion at once ‘weak’ and vital. For Larkin’s line ‘Lobes cue / poor light, “abide weak absorption” goes for path-lengthening direct’ draws us into the detail of leaf life, the way in which its rounded petal margins experience light as dappled and scattered because of the air spaces between its cells. This in turn elongates or lengthens the surface across which they absorb light waves and so produce pigments: they are ‘green machines’ that help us to understand light, colour, oxygen, temperature, and the things of which our world is made, atoms, protons, neutrons, isotopes. Such nuance Larkin draws directly from Lee’s study, and echoes of Nature’s Fabric resound through these poems as invitations to empirical analyses that are in turn illuminated by Larkin’s tangled variations. As he writes in ‘Leaf Sermon 7’, in charting the being of the leaf, we find our way ‘towards an alphabet of shelter’ in the haecceity or thisness of these photosynthesising engines and their modelling of connection as an ‘overspill’ that ‘inseparably joins’ each leaf ‘with every future germination’. Like the cup that overflows in Psalm 23, Larkin’s leaf is always enough, elaborately if impenetrably content in the green pastures it creates.

*David Lee, Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), see especially chapters 3 (‘Green Machinery’), 4 (‘Nature’s Fabric’), and 11 (‘Colour’).

Emma Mason is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and co-editor of the New Directions in Religion and Literature series. Emma’s books include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018) and forthcoming Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work, co-written with Mark Knight.

Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic at Sheffield Hallam whose books include Gathering Ground (Shearsman, 2019) and Field (Shearsman, 2016). Harriet was also the editor of the influential anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant (Shearsman, 2011).

Seven Leaf Sermons is available HERE for £5.

'Inhabiting a Space of Love': Cat Chong & Jen Hadfield

Cat Chong
‘Poetry permits a speaking from the margins’ has seemed a commonly accepted assertion in my life over the last few years. Typically, this referred to the margins of race, gender, class, and sexuality practicing interventions into language which enacted a speaking back, a speaking out of places of erasure. I recently read that ‘disability is the last margin to be addressed’ (Scior and Werner, 2016) and while I know this idea isn’t new I realise that while I was studying I never encountered a contemporary poetics that engaged with neurodiversity or disability.

As I was trying to counter this lack of representation within academia and poetry, I started attending events in London which spoke to my subjectivity as a poet and as a disabled individual. These were often organised and run by people like me, and I attended because I felt compelled to validate the belief that I am not alone. I wanted to be with others like me and to commune together about embodied difference in a way that didn’t feel like I had to confess anything. When I did eventually find these places, they felt like home. I felt like I belonged there. Even without a diagnosis I was able to engage with my identity as a disabled poet in a way which felt sincere. I was simply being, and that was alright.

Creating space for women interested in and sensitive to neurodiversity is the aim of The Poetic Spectrum workshop hosted by Jen Hadfield, an award winning poet who herself is neurodiverse. The workshop recognises women without a diagnosis, who identify Autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) traits in their personality, acknowledging how ASD presents differently in women than in men (and welcomes any woman who would describe herself as neurodiverse in any other way). I wanted to ask her what it’s like occupying multiple marginalities as a poet, to navigate neurodiversity and gender in a way that feels generative, to discuss some of the ways in which neurodiversity and disability overlap and intersect in poetry. I was curious about what it was like to organise safe, communal spaces and how this affected her experience of poetics and the role of the poet.

Jen Hadfield
So I notice, first of all, that you choose to describe yourself as ‘disabled’ and that you mention ‘neurodivergent poets’ – these two things aren’t necessarily connected of course.

Cat
But there are areas of commonality. As someone with a chronic illness, my disability is invisible. There’s an assumption that because I look healthy then I am healthy. This assumption is made by friends, family, and even doctors. It’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get a diagnosis. As a result, at times I spend a great deal of time compensating for being ill.

In a seminar with Broc Rossell, he said that ‘poetry is a sensitivity to language’, and I think the same can be said of neurodiversity and disability: neurodiversity and disability can create a sensitivity to language – connecting communication, poetics, and atypical phenomenologies. To me, explaining symptoms to doctors, lecturers, and those around me involves selecting the right words in the right order, and is to be taken seriously. Having spent years without a diagnosis, narrating my own experience without a medical way to signal what it is that makes my body different, is difficult. For me, it’s hard to tell the truth when it doesn’t have a name for anyone to recognise. It took a long time for me to identify myself as disabled. The word was covered in projections of shame, most of which came from my family and those around me.

Jen
This has been quite hard for me to navigate personally and professionally (I feel quite vulnerable explaining why I describe myself as neurodiverse) so I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately unpicking why I feel like that. My way of talking about it now is this: I definitely recognise an interesting array of neurodiverse traits within myself that are often associated with Aspergers. I don’t have a diagnosis, but almost certainly should do, for reasons I won’t go into too deeply here, mostly because to do so gets too personal. I think the reason I don’t is that women present very differently and the clinical approach hasn’t quite caught up yet – something that’s been discussed a lot on Radio 4 in the last couple years. Some of these traits are difficult/uncomfortable to live with and have given me some grief over the years, although I’m relatively comfortable with them now. Others feel like genuine boons. Women work harder than men, we think, to mask such traits as don’t conform to social and cultural mores, and sometimes you don’t know you’re doing it. Have been doing it all your life. That’s hard work, and sometimes it goes wrong, and I think there is a kind of violence you can do to yourself by denying your own needs in this way. On the other hand, sometimes it means that you’re treating other people with a lot more conscious care and responsibility. Either we learn intellectually (if we choose to) how to empathise and ask questions and express our own feelings and thoughts (I shouldn’t say we, here, there’s too much variation to do that) where others do so innately, or we do it just as innately, but later … or others learn how to do it as much as we do, but earlier in life – I don’t know. Anyway, I think our feeling for folk – for example – and our care of others is no less authentic and valuable for developing in this way.

At any rate. I think that the way I want to tell my own story, and the way that feels true to me, is that rather than me being a neurodiverse person as opposed to a neurotypical person, is that maybe everyone by definition of being a person is neurodiverse in some way or another. How does that sit with you as an idea? What it gives me is dignity, of course; and it refuses the collection of paradigms that say ‘these people are more normal than these people over here’. What the massive underdiagnosis of Aspie women for example has signalled to me is that there is such a huge hidden population of people that would probably call themselves neurodiverse if they didn’t feel that was a stigmatising thing, as to probably represent a really significant chunk of the population. But then there are all these other manifestations of diversity too, so why do we insist on calling ANYONE normal? Everyone’s got something going on, right?

Cat
We all do have something going on now, with lockdowns imposed in a majority of countries, the covid-19 crisis has highlighted our reliance on community, connection, and our ability to change the way we conceive of work, especially work from home. It’s been incredible to see the speed at which the world has become more accessible now that working from home has become an everyday reality for many people. Online poetry readings have proliferated massively and the term ‘Zoom’ has just about entered the common lexicon. It does have its benefits: if a discussion feels too loud I can simply turn the volume down; only one person talks at a time; I can do poetry readings in a shirt and the comfiest trousers that no one will see; and I get to do everything from the safe space of my bedroom with the ‘End Call’ button always in front of me.

When I was doing my BA, I was told that to be involved in poetry in London meant that I had to ‘be in the room in order to be counted’. At first this frightened me because of the huge amount of energy I knew it would take me to simply be in a crowded place with so many people, but after a while I slowly started to get used to it. By the end of my MA I could attend poetry events without getting too overwhelmed. This took some practice, though it always meant spending the next day in bed utterly exhausted. So much of poetry before the lockdown felt as though it was predicated on the spaces in which it communally took place, according to who was in the room, who was there, who was able to be counted. This has changed since the lockdown and I retain the small hope that this broadening of accessibility won’t evaporate when the lockdowns lift.

Jen
So, I am very sensitive to sounds, sometimes, especially when I’m tired. Busy places tire me out and make me a bit panicky after a while, and I find it hard to think straight in those places. NOT UNUSUAL TRAITS I don’t think, even for people who wouldn’t call themselves Aspies. I find it quite hard to talk sometimes (proper tongue-tiedness) but for others it’s very easy and I can be very articulate on subjects I like talking about, if I’m relaxed with the folk I’m with. That’s about the sum of it for me, except to say that that sensitivity to sounds, smells and colours and textures can be a really delicious thing under the right conditions.

Hm, where am I going with this? Oh, the workshops. So, I wanted, yes, to create an atmosphere of inclusion and as much calm as possible. One workshop was at Glasgow Women’s Library, and they invested a lot of time in getting this right with me. We had a nice spacious quiet private room and I made sure that people knew if they wanted to pop out or leave at any moment that was absolutely fine. I took care to talk only about my own experience and that of my sister where she had ok’d that, and to not presume to know anyone else’s experience. I would say that everyone in the group willingly shared traits that they themselves defined as neurodiverse, not that they had to do that. I wanted the group to be open to women who were curious about neurodiversity as well as those who would describe themselves as neurodiverse. We all gave each other time to talk as much as we needed, and we didn’t make anyone speak before they were ready. And the focus of the writing exercises, as I remember, was on language – was on writing as we speak, as closely as possible – so celebrating the diversity of our voices, and harnessing writing’s power to get across what we most need to articulate, even when that’s difficult. It was a wonderful experience for me because I felt like everyone felt comfortable with who they were in that room and enjoyed each other. And that we valued each other’s strengths and superpowers. Glasgow’s Women’s Library also said, not only were we oversubscribed, but that normally with free weekend workshops they normally see a no-show rate of about a third. We had MORE people than were booked. They were really surprised, and I think that too points at the fact that there are a lot of people out there who have needed a different format/focus in writing workshops.

The other sessions were mostly a talk/reading kind of format, but I shared a few neurodiverse traits of my own and just asked folk to consider whether they recognised any of those traits in themselves, whether they called themselves neurodiverse or not. I was quite shocked by the number of people who came up afterwards and said they felt I was speaking very directly not only to their own experience but that of many of the people they knew. Of course, an arty crowd is sort of self-selected, often, and we’d maybe expect to see a lot of quite sensitive people there … but still, I was surprised, and it felt very positive. I did feel very nervous before some of these events. I took in feedback forms and the responses were various but mostly very warm and positive and appreciative; there were maybe just a few stupid comments like ‘lovely feminine reading’ !!!!! but everything about neurodiversity was very encouraging and actually gave me a lot more confidence to talk about this stuff. I will say that after a reading in St Andrews this week where I was quite nervous, I felt very keenly the need to develop a way of talking about this stuff that can be both professional and personal. When it feels too personal, it feels like I’m baring my soul in an unhelpfully confessional way and making myself vulnerable. When I get the balance right, I feel fine about myself and positive about my subject. I think that variability is coming from decades (or more) of stigma and misunderstanding about Aspie traits and neurodiversity though and I’m quite committed to challenging that. I feel like it SHOULD FEEL SAFE.

Cat
I’m curious what it means to speak out of difficulty. I want to think about this in relation to the poem ‘The Asterism’ in Byssus (2014) which is preceded by a quotation from Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

a mystery, and a waste of pain

The first line of the poem is addressed as if to an 'Inexplicable pain – / ... a thing like Sirius / or Aldebaran –'. I wonder how you navigate difficulty within the fragile structures that constitute the written and spoken word? Between ‘effortful’ and ‘proper tongue-tiedness’ and ‘sudden flu-encies' to say ‘what we most need to articulate, even when that’s difficult’?

Jen
I think I just try to be honest about them. After my reading at StAnza, a friend said she wondered how people could take on board what I was saying about struggling to speak when I was talking about it so fluently in poetry! The point is that writing a poem very practically helps you rehearse what you need to say. And say it as powerfully as possible. To score in breath when you know you will need breath. To take out clusters of sounds that are hard to say. And to self-hypnotise into a calm state where speaking is more possible. Also, I think if you can hypnotise yourself with a poem’s rhythm, you probably also hypnotise a willing audience! Then they too have the opportunity to process stuff … Perhaps …

Cat
I really appreciate this strategy for reading. I've only started to read my work publicly in the last year and I still find the prospect of pronouncing my work, out loud, quite daunting. The process of putting my body to and into a text was something I wasn’t sure I felt confident doing.

According to the National Autistic Society, ‘various studies, together with anecdotal evidence, suggest that the ratio of autistic males to females ranges from 2:1 to 16:1’. The most-up-to-date estimate is 3:1 which was found in a study by Professor Francesca Happé, the director of the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. Within the same study Happé and others believed the ratio could be potentially as low as 2:1 – ‘as diagnostic processes become better tailored to identifying autism in girls and women’ (Delvin, 2018).

To situate diagnosis within the realm of poetics – framing the process of diagnosis as a medical form of labelling and meaning making – spoke to the poem Love's Dog in your debut collection Nigh-No-Place (2008). The poem begins with a lucid declaration about the conflicting responses to this legibility within diagnostic identification. The poem begins with:

What I love about love is its diagnosis
What I hate about love is its prognosis

I've been thinking about this a lot; the love of a name while hating the predicted future projected by that name. Like loving a signifier and hating the signified, the poem seemed to suggest what they love about love is the sound, the word, the image of the diagnosis, whilst hating the rigid and concrete boundaries created by a prognosis’ parameters.

I think there’s a loving and hating involved in being ‘hidden’, in being invisible. I feel this a lot in relation to my own undiagnosed chronic illness but I’d never thought about it in relation to love before reading Love's Dog. I’d never thought about the invisibility inherent within an invisible disability in relation to love as an emotion, as sensation, as act, and affect. I realised that within the rigorous medicalisation of my body – in my attempts to understand what was happening to me, – that I’d internalised the loveless lexicon of medical science. I’d never thought about my body and disability as inhabiting a space of love. In reading your work, I spent a great deal of time considering the limitations of vocabularies and language itself in relation to experience. So far, I’ve found two ways to approach diagnosis as a naming; either diagnosis reduces an experience to the word or there is a failure to name.

In The Argonauts (2015) Maggie Nelson seems to describe the former when she quotes her partner Harry as saying: ‘Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.’

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain described the alternative, the inability to get a diagnosis viscerally as, “you are wordless expanse of affect and sensation without a name”. In my work, I've often tried to disrupt the sentence and the medical language of sickness to create a kind of rupture between the signifier and the signified in relation to chronic illness, to try and make space for my own identity as disabled without invoking the stigmas of shame and pity that are typically attached to disability. The influence of stigma seems to cause the same kind of alienation when recognising neurodiverse traits.

Jen
There is such a huge hidden population of people that would probably call themselves neurodiverse if they didn’t feel that was a stigmatising thing, as to probably represent a really significant chunk of the population

Cat
I think both neurodiversity and disability find an alliance through poetics, in the poem’s ability to intervene into the language of diagnosis, prognosis, and scientific discourse; it can be a space for staying with the possibility of failure in naming, in lacking a diagnosis, in struggling to speak out of difficulty.

Jen
I think the apparent contradiction here maybe isn’t too much of a contradiction. Language/names are power right? And our way of owning our experience. I met a bunch of art students a couple years ago a lot of whom expressed being intimidated by the need to describe their own creative vision in WORDS in their critical essays/programme notes/biographies/theses … because they articulated themselves most comfortably in other media, but also because critical language felt like it excluded them (it can exclude writers too I think!) To learn to write critical language is empowering; however I really think it’s the critical language and the power associated with it (you pass or fail depending on whether you can learn to ‘speak’ this foreign language!) that is the problem. Making any kind of language like that your own; transforming it creatively; replacing it with a personal chosen language … is a positive, empowering act. I still hope we can culturally evolve to hear each other describe our own experience in different ways though, rather than relying on language we’ve ‘had done to us’… and maybe that is quite relevant for disability and diversity too. It’s just another cultural norm –– with its own cultural history –– the authority such language suggests it has is really quite subjective. Similarly –– where does my sensitivity to sound and movement make me atypical? Only in the context of post-industrial cities for example? That book “Quiet” is quite good for challenging the assumptions that ‘extrovert’ is ‘normal’ and from there on in I think you can play at dismantling all of those structures about what ‘normal’ is.

Cat
I read the poem ‘In Memoriam’ as a response to this difficulty in voicing our own subjective embodiment, starting with the quotation by Iain Crichton Smith which prefaces the poem:

No metaphors swarm

Around that fact, around that strangest thing,
that being that was and now no longer is.

To me, the quote is reframed within a context of an absent language never having been there to begin with, rather than a loss of Gaelic as a language specific to the geographic region. The poem seems to advocate for animal tongues, for sound, and sensation as an alternative place out of which communication can arise.

I

For it is not like a sea of nested gas
that you float upon
in your pedalo.

This unspeakable is not like
anything

a poem or riddle collies no particle
of it for us to fank
in mouths and minds.

II

Loving language is wide
and shallow: sooks, polches
and wistens it.

Already I can only noun
about its shores
and surfaces

nym the brinks of this squilly thing

where congregates stuff
that can be likened:

III

First we’ll need
to agree:

are we taking up the first language
or must we coin
a new one?

I found a similar sentiment in your essay ‘A Higher Language: What Iain Crichton Smith Couldn’t Say’ (2011) which meditates on ‘what language is, and what we lose when a language is lost’. How do you manage to negotiate the inadequacy of language and the loss of it within your process? Whether there can be an answer to 'are we taking up the first language / or must we coin / a new one' in order to find voice?

Jen
I suppose – I hope this doesn’t sound callous – that finding a language is always a positive gesture towards any difficulty, for me; whether or not the language can adequately convey the experience doesn’t trouble me too too much – if it can wake us up to experiencing something universal or familiar or personal and specific in a way that CHANGES SOMETHING for the writer/reader I think we’re on the right track. And when it’s working, I feel that as a palpable relief and release from stigma/difficulty. It increases my sense of self-worth too. But yes, I think it is always worth ‘coining a new one’. I also think it’s worth trying to be very straight forward and simple and clear sometimes too. Maybe the act of making something beautiful (in image/in recognition/in surprise/in music) in response to something difficult is like a demand on the reader to say, not only do I claim this experience as my own, but look, it’s WORTH something. We are definitely alive. We have a life. And we will celebrate it.  To write about something also allows us and our readers to turn it around in their hands and look at it from different angles. It makes frightening, immense, overwhelming experience something we have a chance of tackling at our own scale. We can say it, read it, close the book, open it when we’re ready.

Cat Chong is a poet, transcultural twister child, and a proud queer crip. They're a graduate of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway and current PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where their research focuses on the intersections between gender and medicine to investigate contemporary female experiences of healthcare. Their interests include ecology, feminism, gender, health, contemporary poetics, medical humanities, and disability studies.

Jen Hadfield is a writer and visual artist based in Shetland. Jen has published three collections, Almanacs (Bloodaxe), Nigh No-Place (Bloodaxe) and Byssus (Picador), which have won prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her fourth collection The Stone Age is due out with Picador in early 2021 and she is currently writing a book of essays about Shetland. Jen has a new 3-pamphlet sequence of writing and painting out soon on Guillemot Press and available for pre-order here.

The making of Tenter, by Susie Campbell and Rose Ferraby

Tenter is our latest poetry publication, written by Susie Campbell and illustrated by Rose Ferraby. And it’s beautiful!

When we first began talking to Susie about the book she expressed the feeling that her poems in one sense were not finished – they required something visual, something of texture, something physical. ‘The visual aspect is very important to me,’ she said. ‘The backdrop of the tapestry, its darns, tears, stains and repairs are the template for this sequence. The poems attempt to find a form in which some of these material aspects of the tapestry are realised.’

This was when we thought of Rose.

Rose Ferraby is an artist and archaeologist from Yorkshire. We have worked with Rose on a number of projects, including on Melanie Challenger’s The Tender Map, for which she won the Michael Marks Award for Illustration. Rose is a thoughtful and generous artist, and she is one of our favourite illustrators to work with.

The feature below has been written by Susie and Rose, with images from Rose’s development of the artwork. They talk about war and memory, monoprinting and illustration, and on one another.

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Susie

The writing of Tenter came out of what I perceive to be a crisis in the way that this country makes sense of its conflicts and wars. Whilst the wars of the twentieth century continue to attract parades, poppies and civic war memorials, this does not seem to help us to grapple with the complex international realities we face, nor with the refugee crisis on our doorstep.

My sense of a crisis in our response to war was heightened by spending a year as poet-in-residence for the Oxford Brookes/University of Oxford's 2017-18 Mellon-Sawyer Lecture Series on Post-War Commemoration. This residency enabled me to listen to the experiences of veterans, politicians, historians, artists and survivors of genocide. What emerged was a plurality of voice around any experience of war and conflict. All too often, most of these voices are marginalised or ignored in favour of one privileged narrative. We construct simplified histories by suppressing certain experiences and voices, leaving us unable to make any ethical connection between our national acts of remembrance and our current involvement in international wars.

Tenter was written as an attempt to unpick this kind of reductive thinking about conflict and in particular to problematise any notion of memory or language as a translucent and universal conveyor of experience. This meant I needed to find a form that would allow me to include multiple voices, and to engage more interrogatively with both past and present conflicts. Tenter is threaded together by interweaving not just a number of voices but sometimes a chorus of many voices, with the absences, unknowns and re-makings of history finding ways to appear physically on the page.

Before I started writing, I felt I needed to make a physical visit to a site of a battle. The only battlefield close enough for me to reach at the time was the ancient site of the Battle of Hastings. I kept a diary of my visits, recording the slippery, muddy experience of wandering around a small field on the side of a wooded hill. Many things came up for me during those walks: the resemblance between the south of England and parts of northern France, the turning point in the development of English language and culture represented by the outcome of 1066, and, unexpectedly, an upsurge of personal grief as I remembered bringing my mother on a visit to the site a couple of years before she died.  This field, this centuries-old battle site, became the ground on which I could explore many of the more abstract ideas in my head.

And, of course, this led me to the great embroidery known as the Bayeux Tapestry. As I researched the making of the Tapestry, the common root of the word for textile and text (textere) began to suggest how I might pull some of these complex ideas into the fabric of the poems themselves.

The Tapestry was made in the workshops of female embroiderers, probably in Kent or the South of England. Whilst the job of these workers was restricted to embroidering a given narrative onto the main body of the Tapestry, they had more liberty to improvise in the margins at top and bottom of the fabric. These margins are filled with lively, sometimes shocking, depictions of creatures, scenes and tableaux providing, in places, a subversive commentary on the main action. This was the starting point of ‘Et Aelfgyva’, one of the main pieces in Tenter. The materiality of the Tapestry, its threads, its dyes, its repairs, patches and stains, became important, linking motifs for the whole sequence.

I knew right from the outset that Guillemot would be the perfect publisher for Tenter because of their commitment to making beautiful books in which the poetry and the design work together, creating a richer set of meanings than either on their own. This is exactly what I was looking for. Tenter is named after the 'tenter' frame on which a piece of cloth is stretched for working (using tenter-hooks). The title emphasises the importance of the visual and the tactile, and so I knew I wanted a publisher who was equally committed to realising the material qualities of poetry. Now that I am holding the book in my hand, I realise just how much the vision and the creative input of Guillemot as a publisher have brought to the finished project.

When I first saw the illustrations made by Rose, it was as though we had collaborated on this project right from the beginning. The tactility of her work, and the sense of fabric, materials and 'making' in her illustrations speak back to the poems in a way that opens up new possibilities and meanings. I particularly love the way she finds abstract patterns in the Tapestry - its eyelets, chain mail, patches and stains - and recreates them to amplify a sense of fraying, patching and re-purposing.

Almost simultaneously, Rose and I reached out to each other to put into words the dialogue that had already started between our work, and so I will turn to her to explain how she came to this project.

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Rose:

I remember first coming to Susie’s poems for Tenter. I read them late at night before going to bed. Hovering on the surface of them, they were like gatherings of thread cascading away. I went to sleep and my first thought on waking the next morning was of their tantalising depth. I was caught. Over the next few months I spent a lot of time with them, reading between other bits of work or over a cup of tea. Each time, a new element or aspect of the poems began to grow. They reminded me of my archaeological work; slowly digging and getting to know the landscape in new ways, from the feel of the sediment to the narratives it holds.

To read Tenter was to see the construction of a tapestry, the threads weaving together to form a narrative image. Like the great Bayeux Tapestry, these were poems of war, of memory and remembrance. They were poems of loss and losing, but also discovery and growth: rotting and renewal at once.

What I love about illustrating this poetry is that the poems themselves are already so visual. So as an artist trying to create images which enhance and respect the poems – give them space and provide a rhythm for the book – it is really interesting to live with the poems for a while, and see what atmosphere or feeling begins to grow. Very often I get an idea quite early about the particular look the book might take in terms of space, light, speed, colour, mood. Or a particular technique may jump out as being suitable. With Tenter, I felt early on that a print process like collagraph or monoprinting could offer interesting responses to the textures of the poems.

I used monoprinting to experiment with all kinds of materials and ways of printing to explore ideas of textiles but also the rooty depths of landscape. It was a lovely opportunity to gather bits and bobs, from scraps of fabric in charity shops (in themselves a stratigraphic collection of bodies and memories), the stringy bags of tangerines and forgotten strands of lace curtain: everything took on new possibilities as I imagined my way into the poems once more.

The wonderful thing with monoprinting is the versatility that can be achieved with a roller. Sometimes a form is traced into the ink as the roller passes over, and transferred to paper. Or a negative space is formed as it’s rolled over. Or an old tracing combines with the next to create a ghosting in the ink. What’s more, if you excavate into these and look really closely, tiny details can create vast worlds in the imagination.

Particular lines of poem, or the textural quality of images or shapes, led little exploratory experimentations. Words accumulated and found visual form in the ink: ‘tight weave’; ‘a passage through time moth-holed and embroidered by desire’; ‘freckles’ and ‘particles’; a ‘red tongue outlined in gold’.

I made just over one hundred different prints. Like the poems, I looked through them again and again, letting them sit or drift off in the growing imagined form of the book. Some sung out as instant companions to a particular poem, whilst others stirred and roved. I love the stage of combining text and image. New surprises emerge, and – hopefully – both begin to spark in new and lovely ways. A sense of the book breathing begins to form, a rhythm of noise and silence, trickles and rapids. Gradually the moving of images become small tweaks, until, finally, it seems to sit, just right.

One of the reason I love working with Guillemot so much, is the trust that is put in us illustrators; the real joy in experimentation and growth. The books grow from real, rooted collaboration, tended and nurtured by the Guillemot team. Susie didn’t get to see any previews of the illustrations, and only when they were all produced did she get the chance to see and comment upon them. This reflects a great deal of trust on her part – that the illustrations would complement her hard won words. I am always so nervous at this stage – nervous that I’ve understood the feel and subject of the poems, got to their hidden depths and roving meaning. Poems are personal, and to be let into them, to form part of what they are through the images that talk back and forth with them, feels personal too. A strong connection is formed with the poet, even at a distance. It was therefore a huge relief when Susie responded with such warmth and enthusiasm; like meeting an old friend – someone with whom you’ve shared an experience. The finished book is rooted in people and memory, both in the subject and its creation. Certainly now, more than ever, history and humility should be at the forefront of our minds.

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Susie:

Looking at Rose's illustrations, and reading her account of her process, it occurs to me that another way of approaching her illustrations is as a kind of reading, a physical, imaginative reading of Tenter that reaches into some of the spaces in the work and fills them with new possibilities and additional meanings.

To read Rose's words that 'to read the poems was to see the construction of a tapestry, the threads weaving together to form a narrative image' is such an affirming response to what I was trying to do in Tenter.  She goes on to say 'they were poems of loss and losing, but also discovery and growth: rotting and renewal at once', teasing out meanings for me that I was barely conscious of when writing the poems. The idea that they are poems of rot and renewal shines a light for me on the way that one poem is succeeded or reframed by another as though an earlier plant has flowered, decayed but seeded the next.

Rose's idea of 'rotting and renewal' also reframes some of what I have thought of as repair. There are places in Tenter where I have patched new voices into old, or where I have pulled much older voices of ballad and traditional song through into stories of later wars. I was emboldened to do this by the repairs, darns and re-stitching that hold together the Bayeux Tapestry. Louise Bourgeois, who worked in her parents' tapestry restoration workshop, was a great believer in the kinship between this kind of repair work and emotional repair. Rose's comment on rot and restoration reminds me that it is the rotting of old fabric, and the decay of memory, that makes room for renewal and for new and imaginative recreations.

Rose's reflections on the process of monoprinting and the way that 'an old tracing combines with the next to create a ghosting in the ink' suggest something of the palimpsest effect I hoped to achieve in some of these poems. Rose's insight here allows me to see my use of linguistic collage and layering of voices as a way of making my peace with the use of the lyric in Tenter. The poem 'Hush' is perhaps the most personal of the poems in Tenter as it struggles to make sense of the place of personal loss within public mourning. It is driven by a lyric impulse but layers up some voices and erases others to create what Rose describes as a 'ghosting in the ink'.

But, perhaps most important of all for me, Rose's illustrations hint at the connection of stitched or fraying fabric with the vulnerability of skin and the human body which brings a deep humanity to the page, and reminds me that compassion, as well as history and humility, should be at the forefront of our minds right now.  

Holding this book in my hands, with its thick, tactile paper and print, its ochre colour hinting at old fabric, parchment, camouflage gear and even the Wipers Times, I am proud to say that it is not just my book, but it is a book made through the collaboration of Guillemot, Rose and myself: it is our book. I hope our readers enjoy it.

To order a copy of Tenter please visit here.

Chloe Bonfield on Illustrating Marine Objects / Some Language

In April 2020 we published Suzannah V Evans’s debut double pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language, which was illustrated and designed by Chloe Bonfield. We had been looking for the right project to approach Chloe with for some time and Suzannah’s text seemed (and proved) perfect. In this feature, Chloe gives us an insight into her creative practice and process, reflecting on language, emblemata and the relationship between text and image in her work.

On being presented with Suzannah V. Evans’s Marine Objects and Some Language, I immediately engaged with them as a pair, and simultaneously as distinct objects in and of themselves. I was drawn to the colours, to terracotta, and to a feeling that the two pieces were lightly holding each other — light pages with stiff tension.

The first reading evoked impressions from my own lived experiences. Before moving back to the city I had been working in care in Falmouth and somehow saw elements of this in Some Language. In a similar way to how I now feel the distance between here (London) and there (by the coast) I noted the distance between the voice of someone living in a place and experiencing tourists in Some Language. The feeling of watching someone experiencing something that you know so well. It seems to be more about a communication gap of some type, and for me this gap or hole links to desire. In Marine Objects I had the vague notion of ekphrasis but made a decision not to research this further so I could carry out my work.

I wanted to approach illustrating the pamphlets using a method that I have recently come to through a mix of research and making, at the centre of which is the Emblemata of Alciato. The Emblemata as a form began in the 1500's and ended somewhere around the Victorian era. John Manning writes about it in his book The Emblem, saying that ‘[t]hey represent not so much a palimpsest, but the growth rings of a poet’s mind...’

I am particularity interested in how the image and text forms of the Emblem, whilst made with some form of artistry, are systematic in their method of production, and how this links to the creation of identity, language and culture. New images are informed by words, and those images live on to describe and transform the identity of an individual or a concept or even a society. Emblems are ‘veiled utterances’ where meaning is generated by dislocation. ‘The familiar, everyday or commonplace’, Manning says, ‘is changed by virtue of being placed in another context: it has become the bearer of unexpected meaning, a metonym for a previously hidden reality’.

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‘Maturandum’, (By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Archives & Special Collections.)

With this in mind I started to make the images for Suzannah's poems. From studying the way the wood block illustrations of the Emblemata were made, I made an inventory of the poems of Marine Objects, selecting words carefully and intuitively. It was a case of looking for those words that highlighted the objectivity of the poems, despite those objects gaining subjectivity within the poem’s structure. The way Suzannah uses language – deftly, with wit and unbelievable creative intelligence — created such an exciting space to work within. After taking inventory of these words I then used my own reference library of books. I like to think about these books from the viewpoint of taxonomy and classification — from Foucault's ideas in The Order of Things, or from Borges' essay 'The Analytical Language of John Wilkins', where the writer points to a list of arbitrary classifications that are shown to be absurd.

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Engaging more particularly with the content of Suzannah's writing made me reach to the discourse of Through Vegetal Being, in which Luce Irigaray converses with Michael Marder through philosophical letter writing. Irigaray talks about naming things, about the meaning of this versus the physical embodied reality of experiencing the elements. She writes that ‘[m]ost of the time, we have lost the perception of the difference between meeting living beings and meeting things, be they material or spiritual, that we made’. When we talk about the Sun, do we see its face? This calls to mind the two lines from Suzannah's 'Starfish Balancing at Your Throat':

A horn, a shell, a terracotta, a yes, a lip, a burnished,
a thinking, a drowning, a crying, a barnacle, a wave, a heap.

Irigaray later writes how ‘[w]e ought to almost gesture in an inverse way, that is, momentarily consider ourselves objectively in order to decide how to pursue our journey’.

I used reference books to collage, chop and paste, drawing elements for each of the words I had in my inventory. When the wood block carver made their work for the poems of the Emblemata, they would work in a somewhat similar way. Some of them being illiterate, only an impression of the text might be passed on, resulting in a myriad of composites that built image cultures for hundreds of years.

Once I had covered the words in the inventory I used a light box to bring these composite parts together. This is where a balance of intuition and contemplation entered in earnest.

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The Emblemata were travellers. The same images were reused, and the same emblems worked their way through volumes and centuries. Whilst thinking of the classification and deconstruction of categories combined with a desire to push the emblematic process further I began to rework illustrations in grid format, the grids either hand drawn or derived from an arbitrary source like a stationary shop. I feel the nature of Some Language lends itself to a fractal and mobile version of words,  and suited itself to this method. Working through the illustrations made for Marine Objects, I re-drew them through grids of graph paper, making turns of ninety and 180 degrees of the drawings, imagining them as travellers to be paired seemingly randomly with Some Language.

I still at this point had not paired the poems with the illustrations. I find a thrill in doing this, in leaving it until I need to make the final layout. At this point in the process I am also thinking about paper, layout and space, as well as a container. That is, how the books will hold or frame the text and image conceptually.

Whilst these thoughts were building, I worked up the pencil drawings digitally. I have several reasons for doing this. Firstly, I have an interest in the digitisation of images and how they can connect with identity, both cultural and personal, and with linguistics. Once digitised how the images translate on the screen, especially when there is also a print version, is fascinating. I work as a print maker, and I use this method to ready my images for print. But further to this there is the physical action of using a tablet to trace over the lines drawn in pencil. Those broader sweeping lines were erased and duplicated, becoming obliterated by one strange thin line made by my hand, attempting to outline the idea that has been made, which in itself is a kind of ekphrasis. The lines become wiggly, odd, distorted further yet still familiar. The colours are simple, easy to replicate in print in concise ways. Then the grids disappear from the images I have drawn, taking away the frame that shows how they are made and what they mean.

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Returning to the container of the pamphlets, which ran alongside this process, the thought of the books holding one another persisted. I started to see the pages interlocking in some way. Working with papers from stationary shops, echoing the grids and graph paper process, I found a pair of exercise books that became a blueprint for the pamphlets’ physical structure. They were both gridded and had singer sewn spines. The covers were stiff and the inner paper stock very thin and delicate. I tried to comb these two together putting their pages one within the other and found they held each other in a tension a bit like a Chinese finger trap. If you pull too hard they won’t let go, but by carefully leafing through the two books they become separated again.

As a layout started to form it felt like this could go a little further, and that the layout needed some space within it. Something to suggest the two were reaching out to one another. Here the idea of fold out pages emerged. The singer sewn spines and stiffer covers would hold them flat, and the end papers would echo the lips, shells and crustaceans, as well as mustard trousers.

Once production had begun I felt ready to look further into the ekphrastic nature of Marine Objects. Reading now inside the back of the book Suzannah writes:

'Marine Objects is based on Eilieen Agar's sculpture ‘Marine Object ‘(1939). In A Look at My Life (London 1988) Agar describes collage as ' a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence'. Words I borrow for the opening of 'Balanced and Barnacled'.

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In her introduction to poems in The Modernist Suzannah says that some of the poems of Marine Objects / Some Language were written in response to an exhibition in Cambridge inspired by the writing of Virgina Woolf. I saw a similar show at Tate St Ives. It added a weight to the iterative feel of these poems, their relationships with existing art works and literature, and the potential to continue the iteration through publication.

Discovering the links between Suzannah’s influences and the emblematic process that I followed  was very exciting. It echoed just the kind of poetic contemplation offered by those emblems and by the text and image relationship. I am glad to have followed this playful and systematic form of collage to illustrate these books. I particularly enjoyed the revelation of Agar’s sculptural work that began Marine Objects, which brought me closer to the idea that the bond between the text and image can have a material, or at least, ‘object’ quality. The transition of this into cerebral thought in Some language completed the conversation.

Chloe Bonfield is an illustrator, writer and researcher working in London and the South West. You can visit her website here. And you can buy the double-pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language here.

References:

• Borges, Jorge Luis. The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. 1952.

• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, An Archeology of Human Sciences. 1966.

• Irigaray, Luce. Through Vegetal Being, Two Philosophical Perspectives. 2016.

• Manning, John. The Emblem. 2002.

• The Modernist Review : https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/some-ekphrastic-poems-on-eileen-agars-marine-object%EF%BB%BF/

Callie Gardner Interviews Francesca Lisette

CG: I’d like to start by talking about sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics, your recent collection from Boiler House Press. This is a significant collection of work because of the variety of approaches it takes in as well as the ways it folds together questions about art, nature, and spirituality with those of gender, sexuality, and desire. Even to reduce or split the book into these six ‘themes’ seems reductive, because they flow together and because there is a very real metaphysical component behind your understanding of them. How did sub rosa come about, and what do you see as its project?

FL: Thank you for this question!

sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics has always had this full title, from its very inception. It is written on the title page of the journal it was birthed in, where -many of the poems in the first sequence originated. In March 2011 I was living back with my parents & signing on, having graduated with a Master’s from Sussex, & dwelling in the bleak wasteland of life after graduation in credit-crunched coalition Britain. The protests of the student movement against tuition fees had filled me & an entire generation with a deadly combination of solidarity, fury and awe. I was also in love with a poet and performance artist, and spent most of my dole money on going to see him on the other side of London. It was in this state of tenderness & rage that I found Ariana Reines’ book The Cow for sale in the secret downstairs poetry section of England’s Lane books (which shut down a year later). I chose this book over travel fares for the next week or so, seduced by its weird direct lyric magic unlike anything else I’d encountered. I entered reluctantly at first, but then fell fully in love with it. I now wanted to challenge myself to write a book: a cohesive whole which would fall together. I was determined that the book must have a tripartite structure, & I think that both that idea & the title sprang fully formed from the extraordinary painting on the cover of the journal in which it began: 

Our Lady of the Barren Tree, Petrus Christus, c.1450

The concentric eggs of being represented through: tree/ elder/ language matrix; mother (principle of gender and conception); child/ symbol/ idea – fed directly into the writing of Becoming. At some point I thought I’d write in detail about the depictions of women in religious paintings in the National Gallery, about how we couldn’t have anything other than a sexist culture while this remained the venerated canon which daily processions of schoolchildren toured around. Eventually this morphed into its current incarnation as a sequence on motherhood, pain & gender, which itself was more directly inspired by the tense-bending, evanescent tongue I found in Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva.

The third part of sub rosa was always intended to be a dance/performance piece. Yet it took a very different form from what I originally imagined. I thought very carefully about the progress of the sequences: from highly individualised initiation through sorrow, culminating in ‘Deceit & Habitat’, where the apex of miserable consumerist/ sexual substitution is reached; to an engagement with inheritance and identification (or the lack of it) in Becoming, and then, to a movement out into community. A gradual process of erosion and de-individuation. Originally I had envisioned this final part as a collective dance piece, but it became a personal ritual of transfiguration, a way to mark how my understandings and the project had changed, and to let old forms slip away. Which was always the intention of sub rosa: to find my personal writing voice, my own real concerns.

CG: It's been six years between your last full-length collection Teens and sub rosa. Although there are commonalities in the style, the extraordinary facility with language, and the sense of the possible, sub rosa seems a more sober working with a stronger sense of internal consistency – this is not a criticism of Teens but there seems to be a difference in the poets that informs the two books, although crucially both texts address sensuality and the body (reading ‘Three Strikes’ against ‘The Moon’s Move’, for instance). How do you see the relationship between these books, and how did you move from one to the other?

FL: Yes! There is a distinct difference between these two books. When the publishers of Teens approached me, they were keen to bring together everything I had done. At this point I was already writing sub rosa, and I didn’t want to mix the two projects. I was very clear that everything I was writing that was part of this project was of a distinctly different style.

As I’ve hinted already, I felt that Teens encapsulated a very specific part of my life as a poet. It isn’t an accident that sub rosa begins with a poem written to a poet on the other side of the world with whom I had shared some of that specific, secret life, the intense enthusiastic kinship which germinated the communal poetics and orientation in the world for that small & still close generation. I am more or less entreating him to answer for the world of philosophical, imaginative grandeur we had left behind, which hangs over the frightening banality of life outside it, like a vaporous gateway it seemed impossible to re-enter.

More than a difference in poetic influence, I was gobbling up every form of avant-garde poetry I could get my hands on when I was writing Teens, and it all fused together to create its anti-stylistic, trying-on-everything-for-a-second-but-still-specific style. sub rosa is different because I started to know what I really valued in writing, and I came to learn that I value process and concept more than style alone.

Much of my process with sub rosa was about learning to trust the work. Quite often with certain poems in Teens I lacked the confidence to bring the poems to a point of personal satisfaction. With sub rosa, I only kept something in if I was 100% certain of its veracity, its accomplishment: at times that meant trusting the work’s capacity to speak beyond my understanding, for we shared the same horizons if not the same acuity of vision. (Poetry knows more than its makers do; perhaps there’s little joy in writing it without that precondition.) What could sound like control in this context is really surrender: if a poem couldn’t be brought to fruition I assumed that it didn’t want to be born for eyes other than mine, & let it go.

CG: In many of the poems of sub rosa, it seems that you give that trust to the poem as a way to reflect on ideas for which the language of direct statement is not always sufficient, and one of those is gender. ‘Becoming’ and ‘Transubstantiation’ are the ones I find most affecting in this way, and they feature the interrogation of the category of ‘woman’ in particular – ‘not the true feminine, but the suppression of self that I experience’. How do your poems think about gender, and are there other poets who come into that process for you?

FL: I have, quite literally, contemplated this question for weeks. So thank you for such a bold and complicated question! I guess I should first obviously state that my poetry is inseparable from my thinking process as a feminist and non-binary person. Nonetheless, my poetry was initially nurtured in an environment which was predominantly heterosexual and overwhelmingly white and cis male. I am thrilled to see the way UK poetry has shifted over the last decade, towards a more diverse range of voices and traditions – it is a genuine source of joy and relief. This includes your work with Zarf, Gloria Dawson, Dom Hale, Nisha Ramayya, Caspar Heinemann, Azad Sharma & Kashif Sharma-Patel of The 87 Press, Pratyusha, Momtaza Mehri, and so many more. It creates space for so much and so many, and I’m really heartened by it.

In certain poems from Teens and the first and second sections of sub rosa, there are clear critiques of misogyny, marriage, the disposability of women as love objects and screens for projection of unhealed patriarchal wounds. ‘Casebook’, from Teens, represents the subject speaking back, and this was the first time I felt I’d broken through as a poet to what I really wanted to say. I looked at many photographs of the Surrealist women and made collages and drawings alongside the poetry to better understand the fragmentation and depersonalization experienced by many of the long-suffering Surrealist women artists and muses, such as Unica Zurn, Lee Miller and Leonora Carrington. Throughout ‘Becoming’ I examined archetypes of femininity as the idea of ‘non-binary’ began to properly take hold in the broader conversation about gender, and ‘Transubstantiation’ attempts to capture my new understanding of my own genderfluidity. Then the third section aims to liberate the self from the prison of false projections, dissolving and reconstructing them via the compositional stuff of life itself.

My newer work seems more ethereal and strange and genderless than it has ever been before. Much of this writing seems to emanate from a chorus of voices, moving between individual bodily experiences and group mind.

Women writers and artists have always been my first love, and primary inspiration. Important poets to me on the subject of gender include: Mina Loy, John Wieners, the always-extraordinary Marianne Morris, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Emji Spero, Caspar Heinemann, j/j hastain, Nat Raha, Samantha Walton, CA Conrad, TC Tolbert, Ariana of course, John Wilkinson, Bhanu Kapil, Celia Dropkin, Marosa di Giorgio, Amy Berkowitz, Sara Larsen, ANNE BOYER… oh I could go on and on…

CG: Your poem ‘A Dream of the Cyborg as a Metaphor for the Historical Body Called Language’ appeared in the ‘Trans/queer’ issue of Cordite. This bodily/dream poem echoes the treatment of these concerns in  sub rosa. How did that poem come about, and what role does the ‘dream’ play in your poetics?

FL: ‘A Dream of the Cyborg…’ was written when I was in daily rehearsals for Alexandra Pirici’s performance piece, AGGREGATE. The piece features approximately 90 performers, all of whom are enacting a repertoire of gestures echoing images and sounds from art history, the animal kingdom and popular music. We were rehearsing and performing every day for two or three weeks. This poem sprang fully-formed out of the physical experience of inhabiting these cultural spectres, holographic cyborgian echoes from a future we can only guess at. Partway through the run I shaved my head for the first time & felt like a gender-ambiguous alien cat witch.

I have written from & through the dream state. I wrote some poems which are actually just straight transcriptions of extremely odd dreams I had. I keep a dream diary and also have precognitive dreams which frequently prove alarmingly correct. This leads me to understand dreams as a way for our intuition to speak when we are not listening, both to warn and enchant us. I also often write from a (conscious) altered state, which I reach through meditation, trance, movement, communion.

I’d say that poetry itself is a kind of dream state: a harmonic pattern encoding mystery which makes no logical ‘sense’ but feels utterly real, true, important. In that sense I would say that ‘the dream’ – of a different life, a world liberated from the kyriarchy in which the earth, the sacred and the interconnectedness of all beings are foundational ideas – is central to my poetics. For me poetry is a way to enter that world, whilst inhabiting this one, and in that regard it truly is a practice, which tests language’s powers of mediation, code-switching and capacity to hold contrary densities.

On a related body/ dream note, I am particularly interested in how movement has the capacity to affect what and how we write. Three minutes of dancing or breathing can completely change how you feel, get you into your body, and open up areas of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible. It is really about having more presence & breaking the cognitive grip over your linguistic faculty. Much of the work in sub rosa – ‘Becoming’ and all of ‘Ecstasy (Dispersal)’ – are written directly from this state of sustained physical engagement.

In an ableist, capitalist world, in which some bodies suffer more than others and emotional trauma is passed down as illness through generation after generation, the body remains a battleground. When the world that is summoned in poetry (& the arts more widely) is brought into our physical experience: is that magic? I believe that for everyone, and especially for those of us in various positions of oppression, these moments of presence or transmission which art facilitates give us the opportunity to change our lives and shape our resistance more effectively. That is why for me, everything I do is both a practice in its own right, and part of a larger system aimed at healing and empowerment.

CG: In a climate where many poets are attached to academic institutions in various capacities, you’re walking a rather different path. What advantages and challenges do you think this presents for a writer? Do you see universities’ involvement in literary cultures as benign, pernicious, or just something you’re not interested in?

FL: I would love to pursue a terminal degree. Due to various circumstances, it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s still my intention to do further study. My non-institutional existence is not as deliberate as it may seem!

There’s a great deal to say on this topic, so I will restrict myself to two points. Firstly, my decade outside of academia has been instrumental in helping me to understand myself primarily as an artist rather than as an intellectual or critic. I often feel that experimental poetry has more in common with the visual arts and music, rather than fiction, and it might well benefit from being taught alongside those instead. I see poetry as occupying a separate genre from mainstream fiction, since they involve vastly different cognitive processes for reader & writer – whereas the ‘novels’ of Kathy Acker, Ann Quin and Beckett have so much to offer contemporary poets and artists.

Secondly, I understand that given this often-restrictive labelling of poetry as ‘imaginative literature’ rather than as sonic, physical, or visual experience, it may struggle to survive outside of academia as the considerably less popular cousin of narrative storytelling. What I’ve witnessed first-hand as a performer and writer, however, strongly challenges that conception. People are fascinated by the strange magic of poetry whenever they encounter it, and are far more open to experimental work than mainstream culture would have us believe. Small press & experimental arts have always thrived in non-institutional settings and DIY scenes.

I also believe that working in academia, being prompted to engage with literary texts in depth and open the invitations of that work to others can really fuel one’s writing. From a funding perspective, I wish there was more financial support for experimental and interdisciplinary poets who aren’t attached to academic institutions, simply because it is very difficult to make work outside of them.

I guess that universities’ involvement in experimental poetry both fosters its continuation, and unnecessarily inhibits its development and ability to reach across social divides. But really the problem is structural, and thus political: rather than blaming universities, we should ask what the hell has happened to public support for boundary-pushing arts and culture, and why it has disappeared. (Those who wonder what I’m talking about should investigate Derek Jarman and Charles Atlas’ work with Channel 4 in the ‘80s, for starters.)

CG: As well as being a poet, you also work as an astrologer. How does your poetic practice tie into your work with Glitter Oracle? Does the process of doing those readings involve any of the same skills and energies as writing poetry, and/or performing?

FL: Definitely, yes! The process of reading a birth chart or a spread of cards is very similar to writing an essay on a work of literature or art you adore – that is, you are showing understanding through extensive engagement and debate. Intuition and counselling skills also play a major part, but essentially with astrology you are decoding a snapshot of a moment in time. (Maybe this also helps to understand why tea-leaves and even entrails have been traditionally consulted as divinatory portals: future & past meet in the unconscious traces of the present). Most fascinating is watching people slowly realise that planets and transits aren’t external energies, and therefore are not something to be feared.

Something I value in both poetry and divination is precision. Both offer uniquely specific vocabularies for conscious experience. As we know, poems are spells which can enable their writers and readers to redistribute and reclaim power in both subtle and profound ways. Mythology, mysticism & astrological terminology permeate my writing from the beginning, because I discovered astrology and tarot at about the same time I started writing the work that would be published in Teens. I’ve been working with crystals and spells and the natural world since early adolescence. I think people often assume I’ve gotten into esoterica in recent years, but the atmosphere’s just been more conducive to coming out of the spiritual closet.

Lastly I would say that poetry, astrology and tarot are all both creative and receptive arts. Many artists have had the experience of ‘channelling’ a piece of work, which arrives more or less fully-formed, although for most this is the exception rather than the rule. I think poets are spirit-workers, whether they are conscious of it or not. We work to attain finely-tuned linguistic antennae, combining the transmissions received with personal intellect, patterning and musicality in order to express something beyond regular comprehension. In that regard, it’s always a collaboration: we do the work and then trust it to transcend us. Art must find its audience, just as intuitive readings work best as conversations. Personally I love making writing and art without knowing where it’s going, art which teaches me how to let go and dance with the uncertainty and opportunity it offers, which is basically a metonym for living with awe.

FRANCESCA LISETTE is the author of Teens (Mountain, 2012) & sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics (Boiler House, 2018). Recent work can be found in Chicago Review, MOTE and the anthology SPELLS: 21st Century Occult Poetry. They are teaching a class on astrology, embodiment and writing for creative practitioners – learn more & sign up here.

.CALLIE GARDNER is a poet and editor from Glasgow. Their book naturally it is not. was published last year by The 87 Press and they edit Zarf poetry magazine and its associated pamphlet press Zarf Editions, which has most recently published work by Pratyusha and Alison Rumfitt.