It’s just the little things
I want a cuddle, a kiss
just having a laugh, having a chat
about how long’s that tree been there for
just general stuff
Chrissy runs (ran?) Perverse Magazine, a newsletter zine I very much enjoyed (and which featured something of mine in issue 3C). Looks like it’s on hiatus, or has been migrating to Substack. Either way, it has been a surprising stash of poems-in-your-inbox over the 6 issues.
Chrissy’s pamphlet is one of several from Broken Sleep using cut-up/collage techniques. Some of my favourites include Ollie Tong’s semi-serious Reflection Mapping and my favourite, Cathleen Allyn Conway’s American Ingénue, which cuts up phrases from Brett Easton Ellis novels and Sweet Valley High novels, to fantastic, hilarious effect.
In the funny vein, I am the Table takes its source material from contestants on Love Island, presenting them as a long poem of short soundbites interspersed with little heart emoticons. It’s akin to one of those social media accounts that pastes out of context phrases from TV series over stills.
A lot of the pamphlet’s energy accrues from the sheer volume of beautiful nonsense the contestants come out with. You can imagine them sitting about on loungers, recovering from hangovers, trying to maintain a sense of composure for the cameras, their terrifyingly extroverted natures demanding they fill every silence with whatever gibberish comes to mind. Behind the poetry, a composite narcissist begins to form, capable of quipping and bantering in their idiosyncratic sur-realiTVy, unintelligible to outsiders or viewers except as a slow-motion speedboat crashing into a tropical reef.
This isn’t the kind of voice I wanted to stay with for very long, but the pamphlet’s brevity made me laugh a lot. As with actual reality, banality fills the bulk of the contestants’ daily lives and mouths, which is why (I guess) these reality shows have to excerpt an entire week’s worth of material into their weekly (? yes, I’ve no idea…) episodes. I imagine Chrissy must have sat through several seasons to scrounge this little pamphlet up. No wonder she didn’t manage an issue of Perverse in 2022.