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kpopfanfictrash · 6 years

Text

Stone Rain

Member: Jungkook (BTS)

Prompt: 13. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you didn’t have wings yesterday, correct?”

Rating: PG-13

WC: 1,268

Genre/AU: Gargoyle!AU (pls trust me LOL)

↳ part of my Halloween drabble game

All lands have stories.

All lands have legends, myths, tales passed down from one generation to the next. Stories tie a culture together, compiling the greatest lessons of a society to send on to the next. Occasionally the stories are based in fact; oftentimes, they are not but always, always the stories are told.

In your land, people tell stories of gargoyles.

Gargoyles aren’t what most people expect when they imagine the word. Gargoyles are the spirits of your town, they’re its protectors; they stand guard in the great stone bell tower at the outskirts of the Kingdom. From here, they watch over of your city’s inhabitants and from here, they offer their service. They exist forever asleep, always asunder, unless someone happens to wake them.

In your hand is a candle which flickers and burns, guttering low when you push open the door.

The entrance to the bell tower is a great, hulking beast, not a threshold to be trifled with. It only opens because of a favor you’re owed – the guard in question repaid you tonight by leaving the bell tower unlocked.

Glancing over your shoulder, you hesitate, then slip into darkness. With only the candle to light your way, you climb the stairs. The further to climb, the further the shadows dance away from your body. As soon as you pass, each stair you leave is cast swiftly in darkness – this only lends to your paranoia, encouraging the idea that you could be followed. Steeling both spine and mind, you force yourself to continue.

One thousand steps until you reach the top of the tower. One thousand steps for each minor god of your land and when reach stair nine hundred and ninety-eight, you pause.

The path behind you remains cloaked in shadow, but the wide expanse of the turret before you is not. Moonlight filters through columns holding up the roof and in between each squats a large, fearsome monster: the gargoyles.

Fighting a shiver, you climb the final two steps. It isn’t that you’re afraid of such creatures – no, this is a lie. To say you aren’t afraid isn’t quite the same thing as being so.

Still, you find yourself more afraid of what should happen if they awake. No one has succeeded in rousing a gargoyle for over two hundred years – indeed, some in your land propose their powers have disappeared. Or, perhaps the gargoyles never existed in the first place. Some amongst you insist they’re merely a legend, a metaphor for reaching inside oneself to find one’s own power.

Blowing out the candle, you place this soft on the floor and begin to walk the circumference.

Each gargoyle is out of stone, bent low to the ground with a harrowed expression. According to legend, the gargoyles are the spirits of the damned, trapped by their sins and forced to watch over the same town they betrayed. The gargoyles hold great power, but it is not theirs to command.

Rumor has it this power belongs to the citizen who wakes them.

Stopping before one of the many, you stare at his features. This one seems less horrible than the rest. His face is carved from stone; chiseled with a look of exquisite sadness and longing. His body is positioned to face the window, staring at the palace as you follow his gaze.

You find it ironic that this particular gargoyle knows the very source of your turmoil.

Without though, you reach out a hand. The gargoyle’s shoulder is smooth to your touch, where his tunic has slipped aside to reveal coiled muscle. His hands dig into the earth, as though he tried to anchor himself to the floor as he turned. His gaze is wide; stark as he stares out at the lights.

Again without thinking, your thumb grazes his chin.

Nothing happens.

Releasing a sigh, you settle yourself on the floor. The surface is cool, as is the night air which blows from the west. Leaning one shoulder to the gargoyle beside you, you stare at the city. Legends involving the gargoyles are many and varied, but few involve the procedure for waking them. All you’ve been able to gather is that the deed must happen at midnight, the waking individual must be alone and needs to plead their case, in a manner of speaking.

“I don’t know what to say,” you whisper, breaking the silence. Closing both eyes, a breeze stirs your hair; it carries with it the smell of granite after rain. “I’ve no other option but to come to you.”

You hear no response. You did not expect one.

“I am to be married,” you say, opening your eyes. “My father – the King – has many debts to a neighboring Kingdom. I’m to be married off to their Prince as payment, sold to the highest bidder. My husband-to-be is not a good man,” you murmur, faltering the words. “And I am afraid.’

The clock behind you strikes midnight.

In response, twelve bells around you chime in succession. Afterwards, the tower is silent once again. The quiet is oppressive; it weighs on your clothing.

“And so, you came here?’

The voice is unexpected, so close to your temple that you yelp in response. Jerking backwards, you stiffen when your side hits the wall. Hands shaking, you turn and wonder if you have gone mad.

Mere seconds ago the statue before you was frozen, but now there’s a man staring back at you.

He’s beautiful; this much is obvious now that his expression has softened. His tunic is pulled by the wind, as are the dark, wavy strands of his hair. The man stares when you see him; his lower lip is full, his cheeks high and his gaze questions you silently. Behind him are spread thick, feathered wings of onyx.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” you breathe, unable to look away. “But you didn’t have wings yesterday, did you?”

The corner of his mouth lifts. “It would have taken awhile to carve them, would it not have?”

“I suppose,” you exhale, still staring.

The gargoyle remains crouched, but you cannot determine if this is because he’s stuck, or doesn’t wish to intimidate you by standing.

He tilts his head to one side. “I am Jungkook,” he says, one hand splayed to the floor. “You don’t have to keep referring to me as ‘gargoyle’ in your thoughts.”

Sputtering somewhat, you push yourself upright. “Don’t enter my mind,” you demand, clutching tight at your dress – silly, really. As though this could guard you from harm. “Can I do that?” you ask, your curiosity overtaking caution. “Can I order you... not to use your powers?”

With a weary sort of sigh, Jungkook stands.

The action stretches powerful muscles, flexing and roiling beneath skin after so much disuse. It’s hard for you not to stare, since his clothing is fairly indecent, all things considered. There are rips though he’s been flogged. There are tears as though he’s been whipped and for the first time, you wonder what this man did to deserve such a punishment.

“You may order me to do so,” Jungkook says, gaze searching the town. His fingers curl over the ledge of the tower, turning white at the knuckle. “I will warn you, though. I don’t enjoy being told what to do.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” you say, drawing both knees into your chest.

In theory, you should stand – but each time that you try, your legs reject the idea.

Brow furrowed, Jungkook turns sideways. His dark gaze meets yours. “I know,” he says softly. “I heard your plea for help.”

Slowly, your eyes widen. “I didn’t mean to bind you to me... or order you about in any way,” you say, equally quiet.

Perhaps this doesn’t need to be said – according to legend, you’re his master now – but to you, it matters. You aren’t sure why.

The man’s lips twist, the gesture wry.

“I am already bound,” Jungkook says as he walks closer. Slowly, he crouches to search your gaze with his. “I’m bound as penance for my past crimes. You did me no further harm by asking me to come.”

Blinking, you find yourself stunned by his closeness. The smell of stone after rain is stronger with him being so near.

“Asked?” you manage to say. “I thought I summoned you.”

“In a way,” Jungkook allows. Wind stirs his hair, dancing across his features and turning them to shadow. “You called out for help,” he explains, still holding your gaze. “And I volunteered.”

#Halloween drabble game #bts fanfic #jungkook fanfic #jungkook #bts #jungkook writing #bts writing #jungkook drabble #bts drabble #jungkook au #bts au

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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(REVIEW) Not your minute turns from the blueprint: Body Work, by Tom Betteridge (SAD Press, 2018)

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Mon, 10 Dec 2018, 20:21 to maria.spamzine Hey Maria, Hope life’s good :) I’m just writing to see you if you’ve read Tom B’s new Body Work? There’s a paper I should be writing, but have been reading and rereading that pamphlet instead, or more like dipping in and out really, cause it's so beautifully layered and expanding that you can only take so much at a time. Don’t you think Tom’s poetry has this strange earworm quality to it? (I think he’d like the annelid comparison.) The way he choreographs words (I don’t want to use the word 'images’) makes its way into my brain and never wants to leave. He draws these, like, lateral paths of meaning so clearly that the weeds never grow back.Tom Raworth has this bit in 'Writers / Riders / Rioters' that goes:

the present is surrounded with the ringing of ings which words have moss on the northside

like, words naturally arrange themselves into a system of semantic habit, which is so stable and stale that makes them grow moss, but also so rich and vibrant when it's exploited productively. Obviously this is Raworth so it probably also means the opposite of this and so much more, but it kinda makes me want to say that the present (poem) makes the ringing of ings deviate so well that the moss can never grow again. I’d say that his poems behave like sophisticated lines in the sand, but they're more like brutal carvings on a rock. He had a couple poems in Blackbox Manifold ages ago (I think) and there was this one bit

‘nerve truffled plume lead pickled breast’

I think about all the time (especially when I cook). It’s so smooth. Why can I not stop thinking about it. It’s cause it’s so shameless, it wants it all - the feather-light and the corpse-heavy, never perturbed, so lucid. It plays at tasting good, but it tastes of an unrealistically blank texture. A-ha! Anyway the new pamphlet is gr8, if you haven’t read it yet look at the first poem pls - ‘OCCAM OCEAN’ (sounds like an anagram or palindrome)

It all dwells in systematic abstraction but flies so close to materiality, like a mosquito buzzing around the ear ('Not your minute turns from the blueprint'). I love that ‘plate’ in the first phrase, too: it behaves like an adjective but feels nothing like it. I can't help but think it's the subject of the sentence in a parallel universe that's created by scrambling syntax. It makes me think this is the way language should always work, and that we're the fkn idiots living in the parallel universe in which syntax is scrambled in ordered to be as boring as possible. Idk - it's late and I need to go back to writing boring essay syntax 'bound to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Lemme know ur thoughts you smart queen D xxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> Wed, 12 Dec 2018, 17:30 to denise.spamzine

Dearest Denise,

Life is good thanks. I'm sitting in the attic of the law building and I can hear the construction work going on and every time I leave I look out at the skyline and slivers of infrastructural alteration. I was walking along the road earlier because the pavement was closed off for construction and cba crossing and the high-vis guy was like, 'you'll not see Christmas walking on the road like that', but I guess I misheard him saying something else because I was really engrossed in this old Slowdive album, so I just smiled sweetly. Anyway, that got me thinking back to the question of erasure, which I think is pretty vital to Body Work.Have been carrying this pamphlet in my bag for so long that the cover has started to peel and revealing speckles of white underneath, like the text itself is ready to reveal itself, and yes I was thinking Barthes and strip-tease and paratextual enticement.

So I had to google the word annelid and now can't get the phrase 'segmented worm' out of my ear/head/throat (gross!). I was thinking about what sort of stains are on the cover of this book, you know, with Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir's gouache/pencil work. A stain is one thing stuck to another. Gouache is a funny kinda substance that is half watery gauze, half binding, thick, gummy akin to acrylic. Wet, it will easily smudge. My thumb keeps bleeding where the skin thins, hardens, peels and sloughs off. Tom's poems are kinda mucilaginous in parts (v. insecty, molluscky, sap emission; but also they have a crispness and precision, like cuts of leaf). Things that smudge or fall in flakes. Bodies are maybe whatever we leave behind. I didn't want to mention Hookworms the band because of the singer's sexual abuse scandal BUT it seems significant that a group named after an earworm/type of parasitic larvae would have a song called 'Negative Space'. Like what we eat into in the process of making, existing, remixing. Is language a rash, the result of these parasitic inf(l)ections?

I've been to a couple of reading groups on microbiomes lately, and we were thinking through this idea of how acknowledging your bodily composition in terms of myriad genes and organisms challenges conventional, bounded notions of 'self'. What kinds of affects does this produce? There's a weirdness to that, in Mark Fisher's sense of the weird as 'that which does not belong', that which 'brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even as its negation)'. Fisher suggests that the form most conducive to rendering the weird might be montage. So I was thinking about how montage involves splicings, gaps, juxtapositions, cuts and suddenness. I mean you open the very first poem of Body Work, 'Occam Ocean', and see that its prose-poetic paragraph compacting is split in the middle by the juncture of line break and indent. And ofc the title recalling Occam's razor, the philosophic principle by which in the case of two explanations for an occurrence, it's best to go with the one that requires least speculation. Razor things down and erase speculation? What are we left with, more of the Rreal? Lately I've been hankering for cleaner prose, crisp lines, simpler solutions. The Anthropocene is all of a goddamn tangle. Do I want to follow the myriad threads or just cut cut cut -- who gets to do that?

Did you ever cut a worm in two as a kid?

Okay so I love how 'Occam Ocean' might promise, title-wise, this clean prosaic expanse (like the oxymoron of expanding ocean and occam's, which requires surely a condensing), but what we get is clustering, motion, shiver, containment. The sensual trash magickk of P. Manson! The little syncope of this thing or that, the 'maple neck', vibrating canes, 'chambered breath bowed into the driest soundboard'. These aren't like 'Latour litanies' because they are not like concrete OOO segments of things; idk, they are more about processes and mutable assemblages, emphasis on action and change, sometimes transmission, things inside things. Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis. How things interact, communicate up close; all of a mutable, prose-poetic swallow. It's actually an incredible intimate pamphlet, don't you think? I feel inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing. I feel a vague ecological sorrow, which gnaws at introspective tendency. The clue to that, you might see, is the cutaway phrase, 'emo Chord' in 'String Growth'.

'Collapse all tears allowing echo retreat'; these lyric lines of 'Glissando' expression, smoothing and shimmering over cuts and junctures: a slide between notes. I used to play trombone and I wish I cld articulate linguistically what kinds of lip vibration occur when you attempt a glissando and feel it slide down your arm muscle but then also through your chest as you try to sustain a sound. It's maybe the way you glide through a scattered poem, with your eye, which is different ofc to the spikier way you'd have to read it aloud, stuck on the vowels. Stuttering. I would love to hear Nat Raha perform these poems, because she does such wonderful things with punctuation and bodily performance, a kind of grammar of breath and cough and click. Reading over the more field erasure poems like 'O--NE' and 'String Growth', it's easy to say something like ~vibrant materialism~ here, but as usual I reach for Steven Connor on noise. Return to the ear, which is 'vulnerable' and 'resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception'. I love what Connor says about Levinas' perspective on 'the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that "there is"' being 'an experience of noise'. <3 Acknowledging that breath in the void, that is not nothing but a sparkling something, entails a sense of noise. I am here in the attic of the law building, listening to construction, the type of my fingers on the keys. Someone is murmuring of their distress. What is the difference between living and existing, and being and nothing?

Karen Barad:

'Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultrasensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of...?'

When she asks, 'What is the measure of nothingness?' I think surely it is a bodily measure, as everything is: 'bound', as Tom puts it, 'to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Of course 'what follows' recalls Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', where he's just out the shower and watching his cat watching his phallus, etc. What kinds of dislocation occur. But I mean in all that grandeur of encounter, there's still anthropocentricism. Tom gives you this cinematic CUT, like the instructive 'keen SNAP' that occurs in 'Occam Ocean' to dramatise 'Still, pondsnails whir and blindly source [...] a working leaf shutter'. Soever the language enacts the slurs of the snails up close. We look for the answer to the question of ellipsis, the more to follow [what follows]: inevitable, a question. Sometimes Tom is writing about silence ('then silence confronts an earful underhand') but the music of his language does all the noise, so we just can't have nothingness: there is always a vibrational residue that speaks of something in miniature, atomic, happening.

Ofc with the ear again I am thinking of the ear at the start of Lynch's Blue Velvet and how it's covered in rasping wee insects whose hum is a sort of white noise of trauma that runs through Lumberton's suburban idyllicism.

And so what happens next is I flip open to the following page of Body Work and there is 'String Growth', one of Tom's sprawling erasure poems, which for more than a split-second resembles hundreds of crawling, shimmering ants. I actually think my earliest childhood memory is of looking down at my bare feet on the patio of our old house in Hertfordshire and seeing red ants run over my toes. Then looking up to a greying, English sky. Constantly struck by the cinematic image of that, its splicing out of time: the vividness of insects on human flesh, then milky smog of skyward nothingness. 'String Growth', the accompanying notes to Body Work tell me, is an erasure poem of the Chordoma Foundation's 'Understanding Chordoma' information page.

Erasure can expose sequences of nightmare at work in the lexis and syntax of the text on which it parasitically feeds. I am scared to go on the Chordoma Foundation's website, for fear that just reading or saying the word 'tumour' will activate some kind of malignant growth in my body. And so something of the word chord as a sonorous relation between materials (bodily, textual; textural, cellular). Chordomas are tumours often located in the spine and so I find myself looking for the undulating shape of a spine in the scatter-text of Tom's poem. My eyes cascade down textual spines. Why is it sometimes I otherwise latch upon a 'keystone' word which then extends with adjacent resonance? Musical abnormalities accumulate. Thought swells.

And yea I wonder how this fits into what you say about the poems being 'so smooth'. Like Lynch's waxen silicone ear. Because even though fragmentation makes me think of bits and jaggedness etc, there's this sheen of aestheticism to Tom's work that makes me think of gloopiness, fullness, thereness but also the glaze of potential nothingness. Like in Barad's sense, or miniaturised ecological window shopping - a la Morton's Romantic consumerism? Or do we get into the things themselves? What are your thoughts on the question of recalcitrance? Maybe cos he named a previous pamphlet Pedicure I've just got varnish on my mind. Things an insect might stick to, and be amberized in. Mm.

'[...] Phosphorus crystals may be white, red, burgundyor alight as urine passes'

I keep a stone of citrine under my pillow sometimes. It is supposed to alleviate nightmares and 'manifest abundance'. It is the colour of a rich, dehydrated piss and sometimes when I come back to bed after peeing in the night I think it's some kind of organ lain on my bedsheets, hopped out of my body, and I have to stop my heart and breathe. Is that syncope?

On the <topic of piss>, isn't there a sort of caustic quality, even to the smoothness? Like it is working at making a brittleness of its sheen? And that is what poetry is, cracking the veneer of language or something? Punctuational insects dwelling in splits and fissures? It is nice and cool in Tom's poetry, a place for thinning the self and dwelling. Even though the lexis is so rich and dense, it still seems slender somehow; there's a suppleness. Tease threads of your silk(worm).

Was thinking about what Lisa Robertson says about 'commodiousness' in poetry and what kinds of space there are for the reader here, because I don't think there is much space at all, in the conventional humanly readerly sense. Maybe what I mean by (straw man: Romantic) lyric, which requires something of declarative expansiveness? The density and clutter of specialist language in Body Work makes me feel like a worm, trying to hook my way lusciously into a line: 'espalier's / strains unfinished by the scarp trellis' ('Body Work'), 'rooted to a middle-ground / no more than motion defibrillates'. And I become a parasite on the body of the text, which is a parasite on the body, which is made up of millions of (para)sites. Para ofc meaning side by side, which made me think of Haraway's sympoeisis (making-with) but also, admittedly, Limmy's madeup psychic show, Paraside (lalalol what you were saying about the scrambling parallel universe maybe, is that a lalaLacian Real which necessitates ululation, stammering? Complex remixing musicality of language throughout Body Work as summoning?). Going back to my incidental Slowdive reference earlier, maybe there's a shoegaze thing here, like setting up these 'noise-worlds' which shimmer indiscriminately behind/inside/through the semiotic oscillations of lyric? Is shoegaze a form of sonic gouache? Well it is certainly an ontic form of seduction, where I can't pick out the instruments of expression but I look for them hungrily in the haze. And the idea that transmission between worlds (the living/dead, human/nonhuman) might require a strain of humour (like haha but also meant in the sense of bodily humours?). For instance, shoegaze is decidedly not a humorous genre, but it sort of works on bodily humours, sometimes giving me the bends, or the blurry spaced-out feeling of having one's pleasure receptor's caressed by sound. Was wondering how YOU experienced the space and physicality of the poems -- was there anything u found FUNNY or sufficiently sultry as to produce a long and gorgeous sigh?

Mm and aren't there these tasty, cute moments of wow like 'tropic glut' ('O--NE') and 'prism arousal' ('Body Work') and 'clamour to emboss' ('Sapling').

Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of trees in Body Work, at the very least between 'Sapling' and 'Copsing', but also resonance in 'Awning', 'Annual' (which mentions 'yield', 'Thicket', 'sky-light muddle' etc) and 'Georgel' (georgics, idk?). Something about sprawl and thread: like the action of branches as arboreal mirror for threads of viruses, threads of code?

Side note: Can a person in a crowd of people experience canopy-shyness? Emily Berry has this lovely poem about crying and canopies and language.

Ways to dwell in inertia, violence, suspense ('Poem for July') as a 'clearing' within the pamphlet? Body Work as a title seems to combine two distinct fields: car repair and alternative medicine (hence mention of plants, cancers and crystals). The question of holistic approach, therapeutics, restoration. The sheen of metal, the sheen of health. O wise one of la letteratura del contemporaneo, pray tell your thoughts on possible Ballardian comparisons? Like obv v. different but I was struck by something to do with the cut-up structures of The Atrocity Exhibition and the way erasure works in Tom's work (probably in a more precise, attentive way, like the specialist's collage of tiny skins and digits, as opposed to grander themes of mediation that explode all over Ballard's work? -- generalising for the sake of interest obv).

Longing for a 'carvery [of] / uncommoning / rave'. Some kind of party you'd give up your skin for (is skin mere synecdoche of identity here?). Maybe the rave is what you were saying about scrambling.

Anyway, I hope your essay is going well. I must go read Hillis Miller's thoughts on Ariadne's thread, maybe make a tea. I've been getting these headaches lately, dawn to dusk & beyond, like the kind you get after being swimming (chlorine headache) or after crying (hormone headache). Pressurisation. I wonder if I have a parasite in my brain? So tonite I will probs lie awake, sleepless, listening for tinnitus :(

With warmth, Maria xxxxxxx

p.s.

Of course, by the time I get to the end of rereading I realise that it's only white marks being revealed underneath because literal holes have appeared in the Body Work cover, like some kind of fungus has been eating away at the book, performing another erasure.

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Fri, 1 Feb, 12:15 to maria.spamzine Dear Maria, Once again my legendary inability to reply to personal emails within a reasonable 1-month window manifests itself. Invoke my Scorpio moon (?) etc. I love it when people are like 'RIGHT - enough Facebook for me, email me if you want to talk etc', because that sounds like a nightmare to me. Long live IM! Long live the short form! (quite rich coming from someone whose job at the moment, I guess, is to churn out a dissertation?)

But then you know what I was thinking - someone like Clark Coolidge, for example, can get away with long form, intense long form. Not only get away, but own that long form. That long form I'm into. Clark Coolidge drown me in words and I'm fine with it, because he never dilutes, there's never any stagnation, you know what I mean, he just goes and goes and goes and you're like !!? YES!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS!? He just never runs out of steam. And I'm thinking of Coolidge because you mentioned crystals as agents in Tom B. (cf. The Crystal Text, how would the crystal speak etc), and of course because both Tom B. and Clark C. are just doing mad things with language, bold things and exciting things... They are like scientists you're friends with but who (maybe) don't like to talk about their work, then one day they decide to let into their basement lab where they've been secretly working on the most complex, organic, project for years, and they're like, don't freak out, here it is:

(Sorry for terrible quality [#postinternet] First is Tom B., second is Clark C.) Body Work looks quite controlled in form, visually speaking, with its vaguely justified lines, BIG symmetrical margins.. even the scattered pages look orderly! Like the bit of 'STRING WORTH' you sent. Which going back to your erasure thing, it makes me feel like Tom B. is giving us an OXO cube of his writing, all concentrated and delicious. But then my response is - show us more!!! Which rarely happens because I am scared of long form. And email. And dissertations. I also LOVE what you said about how Body Work combines car repair and alternative medicine!! That is absolutely spot on. Like the material, pragmatic tinkering motions of his writing, the referral to structures and the intention of like, see how far we can bend them and push them, but then it is never as dry as that! Very sweet motor oil. It's very kind poetry... generous! (A word that my friend Phoebe used to describe a certain type of poetry at a party last week and I thought, very interesting). Linguistically generous because it offers so many networks of reading, but then also.. approachable? As approachable as experimental poetry of this kind can be. I'm sure like, DANIEL would not think this is approachable lol (#COYBIG #romance). Which, fair enough. But if you're a nerd for this kind of poetry, then yeah. Like this bit from 'ANNUAL'??

*Cries!!! This is like you said, healing!! I feel looked after! 'Stomach prefers sound to day-to-day camphor'!!! Honestly what is this! So touching, so simple!

(Btw, I started experimenting with aromatherapy in my tiny room lol, do you know how to stop the water from boiling in the oil burner??)

Thanks for sending such interesting ideas over, I have to shoot to a seminar ! PPS: I saw Steven Connor in the English library yesterday (Oliver pointed at him silently like !!!!!!!!!!) so I kind of followed him to see what his approach to book browsing is.. very natural-looking and orderly? Surprised. Love the guy. *bubble sounds*

Lots of love Maria ‘let’s see where the spirits take us’ ur the best

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> 6 Feb 2019, 23:19 to denise.spamzine Dear Denise,

Makes so much sense to map your message sensibilities onto your taste in poetry! I am so torn between the percolated richness of the email, its classic deferral (omg hun I owe you a million emails!) through a sort of quantum dimension of procrastination, and in opposition the sugar rush nowness of IM. I am such a frantic typist that often I send the wrong messages or cross my wires or just gush too much, so email is probably a safe option for me. There is all too much blue in my Messenger windows...Temptation of x's and endless emojis. But such a beauty to IM and texts out of context, like I wonder how many people read your probs too late 4 a snog now :'((( as micro-fictions, versus poems. I have a whole folder of screenshots on my computer from things that happened on Facebook that I have no memory of. Something about the Romantic fragment, accumulating ruin.

(btw) I feel like these extracts also shed light upon Body Work somehow. Biodegradables versus hard minerals and synthetic matter. Inner/outer. Flush. Tbh I think the middle one was from you?

Yes the dissertation, the dissertation as labour; it's like you have to find your scaffold first. Sometimes I feel like the scaffold in that wonderful Sophie Collins poem, 'Healers', and I write and don't notice myself and suddenly I'm so there, but the scaffold is secretly taking her bolt pins out the more I write around her. You can only be so respectful to your scaffold when she's so in the way. Gemini problems?Duality; structure/content. What is it Tom McCarthy says: 'structure is content, geometry is everything'. I want to be a wee fractal in a sequence of massive refraction. Is that how it works? Back to scaffolds, maybe we need to find the kindest mode of dismantling, and that's when you work into a form or something. And then also the more organic structures! So for CC it's the whole crystal thing, and working out of crystal logic. And then you just go and go and it's wonderful, much extravagant fractality, almost like poetry as virus, replicate replicate, grow, change. Mm, it's so good. My friend Kirsty did this mad poem about a tree, I couldn't tell if it was a story or poem, it was just branching out in a way that seemed hungry, necessary, spreading its roots. She said she wrote it in a rush! As if trees could rush! I like to think she inhabited a concentrated moment of becoming-tree, like she was a myriad in the roots or leaves. I don't think it could have happened without the tree, you know? But also the tree was almost entirely absent, it was like a ghost of form. Maybe I forgot how it goes. The lines looked like branches or something. Can you have long-form concrete? Concrete I guess by necessity is long-form. It takes a lot of energy to make. People are building houses out of mycelium instead, which is rad. Talking of roots and that, I just wrote 26k words on ecopoetics & t h r e a d s over the past fortnight and it was kind of that process, like letting a sort of tapestry take hold and I was maybe just one more thread, I was hardly doing the weaving, everything was moving around me and I wanted to wriggle into more and more gaps. Becoming-thread, perhaps. The next step is to slack and cut, which is exciting. Where to even start?

Your description of the complex, organic project is so gorgeous. Poems slow-cooked in a lab with tender organic care. My two scientist PhD pals are always gramming these beautiful pictures of crystals they're growing or mad wave patterns on screens. And we go for lunch and I'm like what you doing this afternoon and they're like, Oh just shooting photons. And is that much different from spending your afternoon writing poems? (Yes, they'd groan). I'm just chasing bits of light. Reading Tom B's work it's this whole precision thing, the actual inhabitation of process as such, so you see the energy buzz between things. I don't mean to say simply this is atomic poetry or poetry as tool analysis. It's more a betweening.

Isn't it super difficult to write non-anthropocentrically and really inhabit micro-relationality and also sound interesting and sexy in the way Claire Colebrook (she has that great essay in Tom Cohen's Telemorphosis) describes as 'sexual indifference', i.e. that threat to heteronormative reproduction that 'has always been warded off precisely because it opens the human organism to mutation, production, lines of descent and annihilation beyond that of its own intentionality'? Well anyway Body Work really works this way for me, it's like a poetics of sexual indifference that is nevertheless charged with desire you can't really predict, it's something in the frisson between objects and lines and coils of form. I think of crystal charge, iPhone battery (mine's always dying, Gemini trait 100%), engines. Neat miniaturisations of entropy, surge, spike and flux. When the 'I' comes in I'm like hey, what flow are you? It's actually so satisfying to quote these poems as fragments btw, they can do so much on their own as much as in poems and pamphlets, I wonder if that goes back to the accessibility thing. Like the absolute charm of a line as auto-affection:

This bit is from 'Temper' and I go back to my point about the flush/fluster! Globe of air/your *bubble sounds*. Isn't everything held so neatly, and yet it never feels neat, it just feels sharp and sparking, this 'technical glossy finish' like a really nice car, the body paint of a poem, its prosody so tightly held it feels more surface, a selection of hues and textures. And the erotics of the text or at the very least its pleasure is the shift between bodies, synecdoche, yes you could say bodies without organs but things in themselves are also important. Maybe another poet who does this is Sylvia Legris, she writes these apparently impersonal poems filled to the seams with specialist lexis (you have to have like twelve tabs open per poem to get it), but there's an affirmative humour and energy that feels v much a personal sensibility, a deliberated skewing of world that splices the poet's agency among items, artefacts, language. I mean how nice are these poemsshe published in Granta. I feel like I want cutlery to read them with, if that makes sense. Maybe a scalpel, for the succulence. The appearance of an ear again!

And then the beautiful metallurgy of this line from Tom, like somebody pierced my ears with perfect silver and it let all the demons out:

I am worried about what a certain seizure would look like. When we talk about vitality is it a willing naivety towards matter qua matter, as if we could just step out of correlationism? Such thoughts for 11pm of a Wednesday night. I can't help but think of the body image that Elizabeth Grosz describes in Volatile Bodies, kind of riffing off Paul Schilder: 'What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels'. And yeah, cool, what about the nonhuman body also? Has anyone done a really good psychoanalysis of the object. Parsed its psychic striations (traumatic or pleasurable residues of every microbial, huh?). In fact, what about the psychodynamic model of actual icebergs? Time we started literalising the matter of metaphors, absenting 'real cultural / medium' and filling with meltwater, fire and flow. Maybe it comes down to a bead of ink, the 'intimate concentrate' which is Lucozade, hangover piss, sick pH levels. So yeah, Body Work for me is this totally seductiveintersubjective space which actually works out pretty visceral states, sometimes disembodying me into a more fractal, mineral or bacterial being. I could start talking Kathryn Yusoff and geomorphism too, but maybe enough strata for one email? Plus I'm mixing my metaphors, I'm sure, mostly because I'm still morphing, dissolving inside those lines. I think I ate too many OXO cubes.

As for your oil burner boiling, sounds like you have an overactive candle? Maybe try a cooler tealight, nestle it to the back a little to redirect the strength of the flame? I like rosemary oil for remembrance, cranberry for comfort, ginger for energy. That line about resin is so nice. I was in Crianlarich at the weekend and my friend Patrick found this massive log and he carried it for so long that you could smell the resin on his skin, it was amazing. I keep thinking about the word 'pitch' and lush tree-ness, and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and poetry you can chew like new molasses, prior to melt. Is that how it works?

Somebody is smashing glass into a bin in my garden and probably I should just close the pamphlet...

...but it's like a delicious pdf that gives infinities...

Yours in multiples & cherryish flusters,

Maria xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox

#review #tom betteridge #body work #Sad Press #reviews

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