For a while I thought this book might not happen. The initial manuscript was mostly ready around by 2014 and it took me a good 5 years and several rejections to place it. I was over the moon when Aaron Kent, editor and publisher at Broken Sleep Books, said yes. He had been doing some fantastic things to the UK poetry landscape, opening up channels for often occluded and invisible voices and perspectives that often don’t break through the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry publishing, and had a strong line in nature poetry that I was glad to be a part of. There’s also a connection to Rupert Loydell of Stride Magazine, who has been a long time friend and supporter.
A couple of months before publication, Aaron was hospitalised for brain bleed. Thankfully, he’s mostly recovered, though he had to skip attending (and reading at) the launch event in December 2020 – just after BSB won Michael Marks Publisher of the Year 2020. Much love to him and his family for making it through. That they’ve done so while also expanding and diversifying their output to include fiction and non-fiction is amazing.
As to the book, it’s a serial project. There’s probably twice as much again of offcuts and semi-coherent drafts. There’s a subseries called fragments from an imaginary landscape, some of which were published (a tiny pamphlet from Rupert Loydell’s smallminded books and a short series in Dandelion). To put it plainly, it’s one long thing exploring my relationship with nature, my fear of the changing climate and the damage and extinction it is causing.
I used the poetry to enact a process of self-decomposition and recomposition. Recognising the artifice of language, its mimetic qualities alongside the thinglyness of words as ink on a page, I played with section breaks, arriving at Composing, Decomposing, Recycling, Upcycling. There’s a kind of mood pattern following those chunks, leading to some optimism.
The poetry enabled me to ride through the narratives around climate disaster, recognising all narrative is designed to arrange elements into meaning – in this case, scientific data into a warning. However, I’d allowed this narrative, to paraphrase Keats, to unweave the rainbow in front of my eyes, taking away my ability to see beauty in the world.
Negotiating futility and despair, I tried to write my way through to a place where I could recognise the possibility for ethical choice and action. I’ve come to believe despair is produced by the power mechanisms driving the Capitalocene and climate exploitation and destruction.
Launching the book under lockdown wasn’t much fun. It’s hard to get a sense of reader responses without the visual cues you get at readings and poetry book reviews often take a couple of years to come out. I’ve had one lovely review from Stella Backhouse at Here Comes Everyone, who really got the challenge I was negotiating: how to change our thinking and relationship with nature to avoid hard-categories and boundary-formation.
At the same time, I really adored how online readings opened up access to events I (and many other writers without the means or mobility to scoot about the country on a regular basis) would otherwise never have known about or been able to watch – readings from across the UK and overseas as well (when I was willing to endure the timezone differences). So in some sense I may well have reached readers who wouldn’t otherwise have known about or attended events I’ve done. Yet that bank of switched off cameras and the hard-to-process-when-you’re-trying-to-perform chat box haven’t done a great job of connecting people actively. (I’m just as guilty – I’m often eating my dinner during readings and don’t like to switch the camera on, but then, what dignity am I worried about protecting, exactly?)
The project continues, trying to catch snapshots of my interactions with the natural world, recognising the reconstructive nature of mimetic writing and the politics of structure, trying to reconcile myself to the world. The moods rise and fall, cycle and recycle, but as a fundament, I continue to start from the world as a thing outside of self, in itself.
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Here’s my reading from the launch event Broken Sleep hosted online in December 2020. There’s a playlist of readings from most of the 2020 books published here.
It was my first proper reading from the book and my first reading of poetry for a while, due to lockdown. I also read a bit of work in progress to sound out what I’ve been working on more recently.
Here’s another reading – this one from Steven Fowler’s launch of Great Apes in St John on the Green, Bethnal Green. Steven invited a whole bunch of other Broken Sleep authors along: Alice Wickenden, Rishi Dastidar, Fiona Larkin, Stuart McPherson.
Not much could have topped Steven’s own reading that night – you can find all the readings on his youtube channel along with thousands of other recordings of events he’s hosted over the years, from The Enemies Project, the European Poetry Festival / Camarades and more.