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 :)
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