Tag: writing
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CO2 Cherries
I Rust thing against rot Thing against resting skin red Cheery parallel Lines the blinds of grey once gold Then wood between me and sand. II I spit into lines Those cherries sum the blossoms I would and they wood Now grow pink and red and brown Above, aground, and around. …
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Euclid’s First Definition
Cover image: Euclid, Stoicheia (Elements). Manuscript, Constantinople, September 888. MS. D’Orville 301, fols. 113v-114r © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (via Alain R. Truong)
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from ‘swims’
swims is a long poem documenting wild swims across the UK. swims starts and end in Devon, my home county, moving through Somerset, Surrey, the Lake District, London, Wales and Brighton. Each swim is conceived of as an environmental action, testing ways individuals might effect environmental change. swims is an overall sequence of twelve swims,…
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The Couple on the Corner
On the corner of St Michael’s Church, Bryngwyn, a couple are fixed together in mortar. They are lying horizontally, one on the east wall, one on the south. Their heads meet at the edge. At some point in the many buildings and re-buildings of this church they have come to be a quoin. Now, as…
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Dolly
Everyone on Prospect Walk knew Pat Steggles had a problem with drink; it wasn’t just me. For as long as I’d known her she’d always had a glass in her hand, and I often saw her carrying an empty Martini bottle down Wellington Lane to the off-license for a refill. Nobody could fail to notice…
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Plant Migrations
With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…
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Mildew
Never forgive, I said that morning just as I do every morning, by the window, waiting for dawn. Never forgive. Whom? Constanza? Which one of them? Never forgive her, the young Constanza, or myself, the old one? I did not know, all I knew was: I was never to forgive. ‘It hasn’t been that long,…
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Table of Contents (in the Form of a Sonnet) for an Imaginary Post-punk Poetry Chapbook
1. underground cellars, Experimental Trajectories. 2. La volonté de rupture ou la beauté radicale. 3. extensive rehearsals make (even) le moins que parfait perfect. 4. I Could Not Handwrite Any Longer. 5. the TYPEWRITER becomes an ACCORDION. 6. The Poet(ess) as a Cultural Machine. 7. Converting Ulysess into a quilt—A kind of Steve…
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Reliquiae
If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…
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The New Concrete
The history of concrete poetry charts a path from utopia to dystopia. You could say that there’s a secret history of the second half of the twentieth century embedded in this little movement, one that parallels larger changes across cultural output. By the late 1970s, when concrete poetry collapses into a smouldering heap, few could…
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The Undomesticated Chanterelle
The Cantharellus cibarius, most commonly known as chanterelle, is one of the most celebrated wild edible mushroom in the world. You would think by now that this prized fungus, which can be collected in the hundreds in certain wooded areas, would be commercially cultivated. But it is not. In fact, only twenty edible fungal species…