Myths #6 BREAKDOWN

MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE

BREAKDOWN edited by Mia Florin-Sefton

MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE PO Box 1, Sheriff Hutton, York, YO60 7YU email w.brown@nawe.co.uk To join NAWE go to www.nawe.co.uk

ISSUE 6: AUTUMN 2015 PUBLISHER AND EDITOR: Wes Brown GUEST EDITOR: Mia Florin Sefton DESIGNER: Estelle Morris The selection copywright © Myths of the Near Future

Myths of the Near Future is published three times a year online and collected into an annual print compendium.

Contents 7

Editorial

8

About Us

9

2000 & Jane Annie Muir

15 16 17 18 19 20

Arboreal August

Two Steps on the Water Orlando Wakes Entanglement Night Wind Featured: Emily Oldham

21

Interview: Dangling on threads of Want Sarah Fletcher

27

Persephone Olivia Bradley

5

29

The Sea Elizabeth Gibson

30

2015 Montana Morris

40

Interview: The grass is itself a child Mario Petrucci

46

Love Mum

47

The Wasp

47

Fly-Over Jonathan Stone

48

The Undertaking Tilly Alexander

49

Distopia Toby Campion

6

EDITORIAL “We need to stop calling it climate change. . . A ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe that mankind has ever encountered” George Monbiot

This summer Myths of the Near Future is calling all young writers, aged 16-25, to use language and the power of expression to challenge and confront the current environmental crisis - what scientists and activists are now calling Climate Breakdown. What role does the young generation, and young writers in particular, have to play in raising public awareness?

How important is rhetoric in re-configuring the relationship between man and the natural world?

The theme “Breakdown” was open to interpretation; however writers choose to relate to the disintegration, collapse of old system. We welcomed a number of submission responding to Roger McFarlane’s burning question: “where is the literature of climate change?” Surely there is an onus on writers to force their readers to face inconvenient truths, hypocrisies and stagnant language?

To the future!

Mia Florin Sefton

7

ABOUT US NAWE is the one organization supporting the development of creative writing of all genres and in all educational and community settings throughout the UK The NAWE Young Writers Hub is a writer development agency for people working creatively with words between the ages of 16 and 25. If you are an older writer, please find our Writers' Compass and other resources here.

We offer listings, support, advice, workshops, events, bursaries and publish a journals of new writing by under 25s called Myths of the Near Future.

Young Writer Membership – £20: for 16-25 year olds. Includes access to the Young Writers' Hub message boards, a profile, access to TLC manuscript assessment bursaries, the weekly Writer’s Compass e-bulletin, feedback and support, access to the online archive and a print compendium of our publication for young writers, Myths of the Near Future. www.nawe.co.uk/young-writers-hub

8

2000 & JANE In the year 2000 a girl was born, who (Along with millions of others) had the good fortune Of being whatever the year was then So in 2002 she was 2 and in 2010 she was 10.

As Jane grew older and found choices and vocabulary She became more and more visible in her singularity, Things that had seemed coincidence fell into a theme: Jane had a severe fear of the machine.

It was in the year 2020 that I first encountered Jane When I got home and there, on the TV, was her name.

It must be said that in those days TV worked a bit differently, You didn’t only watch but were actually Part of the program, all over the country, Cameras were put up in our homes And outside we were watched by the ones on our phones Or the ones in the streets, or in stations or shops, Gone was the box that you turned on and off Now the TV watched you, from your trusty phone Whether you were asleep or awake, with friends or alone, You always had the chance to be part of the game show You could suddenly be live, and asked if you know The answer to a question that could win you a car Whenever, whoever, wherever you are.

And the most popular program became watching each other Eating or sleeping or having a shower.

The production team were there to trim and edit And transform daily life into entertainment.

This show, ‘Neighbours’, had to be planned meticulously By producers and editors, who took the lives of you or me That maybe one in a million is extraordinary And make it into hair-raising, goose-pimpling TV. Between the TV industry and the politicians There was a sort of coalition: Every person was required to supply Their life-story to the show, or they suffered a fine And these stories were twisted and moulded to fit 9

And every citizen was required to do their bit To make it as exciting as it could be When it was their turn to play themselves on TV.

What the viewers wanted most were love-stories But love, like TV, was - in these days - done differently.

Instead of catching each others’ eyes while crossing a street, Or any of the other ways two people can meet These sorts of unions were always made online On dating websites of thousands of different kinds, This way no one ever got the wrong idea Because the rules of each site were laid out crystal clear, What was wanted: 4 kids, a companion, a career.

Pregnancy also became unfashionable Couples chose to adopt children even when they were able To give birth naturally, because then they could choose A boy or a girl, and skip all the pain, and the time they would lose, It was also common for single men or women To adopt a baby and raise it alone And save themselves all the pressure and all of the heartbreak That comes with finding and keeping a mate.

Of course, our Jane wasn’t part of this frivolity In fact, she was the only person not to watch TV. In 2020, Jane lived alone In the house that had always been her home.

She worked as a painter of old-fashioned signs Which survived, as the only left of its kind, Because although our lives were now much more fast There was still some nostalgia for the near-distant past.

But now, I’m sure you’re wondering how it could be That Jane, with her strange fear of the machine Could have suddenly become a star of the small screen.

Our Jane gladly paid the monthly fine To not see a screen and to stay off of mine, In fact, she was the only person in the country to do so, And that’s exactly how she became the star of our show.

She was the most authentic actor of all Because of having no idea at all That she was being seen by her entire country (and in dubbed versions overseas, probably) And the alienness of her from her contemporaries Made her seem a naïve curiosity: 10

None of her rivals could rouse such shock As her sudden collapse into tears as she finished a book, It was this earnestness that most people had forgotten As they lived their lives at the touch of a button, It was the way she still looked at the world around her Through her own eyes, and they looked at it with her.

The quick among you will have asked already If she didn’t own a phone then how could she Be watched in this way? The truth is quite unsavoury She was tricked, and it upsets me To think of how I relished watching at her sake And for that I have an apology to make.

The trickster of Jane, as I’m sure you’d like to know Was a man called Joseph, who went by Joe, An Irishman, who came to London in search Of work, his dream was to be on the stage.

So he found a cheap room without windows or space And relied on the hope that his handsome face Would win him the part of Hamlet or Romeo.

But he soon realised, just as so many had before, That the life of an actor is lonely and poor And that is why he turned up at the studio door Of ‘Neighbours’, to audition for a role in TV That asked for an attractive man, such as he, To be paid generously for something experimental Which was bound to be popular, though its morals questionable: This young man was to be Transformed into the perfect partner for a certain young lady Who had captured the hearts of the contemporary audience To create a new and epic small-screen Romance.

The makers of ‘Neighbours’ had watched our Jane closely And gone to extreme lengths to understand her personality, They had talked to people who knew her, and offered money For information. Then they broke in and read her diary.

And this is where they found the golden clues About what sort of a man they needed to use To win the heart of this lonely girl Who didn’t quite fit into the fast-moving world.

Joe got the job, not only for his good-looks, 11

And despite knowing nothing at all about books, It was his skills at impersonation That made him the right man for Jane, and the nation, He had seen every black and white movie, every musical And remembered the gestures and one-liners of them all, He knew how to wink and to flirt like James Bond, He knew how to brood, how to ask, and respond In a way that would make any woman swoon And more than that, fall in love, and fall in love soon.

The fact that Jane had never seen a film was the best part of all Because to her he would seem completely original, And so our Joe was in, and had two months to prepare, He was given a hotel room on the twenty-fourth floor And all the facts about Jane the producers had bled And a list of summaries of all the books she’d ever read And they styled him into her perfect companion And finally sent him off to rescue her from the dragon Of isolation, in her little flat above her little shop And make every heart in the UK stop.

And so the producers used our young Jane They used all of her loneliness and all of her pain To rake in the equally vulnerable viewers Whose lives were equally lonely as hers But different, in that she seemed to choose to be so, And to make the most real reality show In the history of television.

II

Joe stood for a few moments outside of the shop Then went to ring the bell, but then, stopped And stood for few moments holding his breath, Meanwhile upstairs Jane was perfecting an ‘F’ When the bell rang, and so she went downstairs to see Why or what or who it would be.

He followed her up the steep stairs to her place And thousands of viewers watched the look on her face When she turned to look at our new found hero And asked him his name, and he said it was Joe And he asked her for hers, though of course he knew Because of what he’d been instructed to do.

12

And so we all listened while they, alone, spoke, Then Joe had to go, but he’d come back next week, And our smiles faded, the audience, I mean Because we weren’t used to waiting, and it was not Fair that we had to wait a whole week to find out What would happen. But these big TV people used the cruel knowledge That falling in love isn’t as quick as making porridge It needs time to brew like a good cup of tea And if we really cared, we’d just have to wait and see.

Now, like us, try to imagine how Joe must have been feeling When he thought about what he was actually doing.

But he came back every week, and it really was fascinating To watch their connection growing and growing and growing, And the fact that it was happening in real time Alongside the daily events of mine Made it all the better, I forgot Joe was an actor And he seemed to forget it too when he was with her.

He didn’t have to lie much about his life-history He just had to add in a vast library Of books he’d never read, but he didn’t pretend That he was entirely the same as Jane to that end, He didn’t say that he’d never watched, or enjoyed, TV But for Jane it was obviously enough that he Didn’t think she was freakish or backwards for preferring The sound of silence to the sound of a computer’s purring.

And I don’t know if it was spontaneous or pre-planned By the producers that on the fifth week he’d take Jane’s hand And pull her close and kiss her right there in the street, And she cried, really, it was really too sweet To be true, and it wasn’t, but to me it seemed real As real as anything I’ve ever felt, or still feel.

So the young love of Joe and Jane took the weekly spot On the box, and whether you watched it or not You couldn’t avoid hearing and knowing their names Except, of course, if your name was Jane Who had become the unlikely heroine of her own strange story

13

And, without knowing, would go down in history And celebrated by the world for her naivety In believing that this sort of real love was possible And sustainable – which, of course, is laughable.

Annie Muir

14

ARBOREAL The tree didn’t speak when asked for a consecration. I didn’t dare to whisper-hug the silence, waiting for nirvana, so I forced my neck against the giant’s heart. A kind of autumn-bark solitude. That can’t be very comfortable, can it? someone said, but the tree and I listened to the shallows without judgement. I wriggled to free us from picture-stillness, the tree and I and its church.

Sorry, I said. I know you’re not a postcard. It can be hard to tell.

There was a branch in my eye that night. It fell out when I blinked and someone cursed the sight. (Why did I blink?)

Maybe the tree spoke when there wasn’t any sound, or when I wasn’t there to hear. I still feel the pins and needles, sound-rings shadowing history, but vibrations are weaker than they were.

Annie Muir

15

AUGUST The rain called in an undertone– shy, maybe, we’re all shy. The wrong season rocked us to sleep: August, blank. Bilious. The sky snapped into broken conversation. (Did anyone cry to complain?) (Well, are we allowed to complain?) The sun rubs the need from its hollow eyes – don’t take advantage. A whisper-hurricane. They say she kissed the wind to calm its nerves, the flatterer! And flowers loved her – so they claim – colours winking through acrylic. Trees creaked. I met you then, there, on the breezy road, slapping leaves cold from your hair. Don’t take advantage of the rain, I said.

Emily Oldham

16

TWO STEPS ON THE WATER After Kate Bush Light is a cool guide to progress and wishful thinking. Teeth worry a tongue,

waiting for the smile: the ninth is always the sweetest. Ice is smoother

than water, though the cult of frost fairs ended long ago. Two steps

are not irrevocable. Nor are promises.

The wolf-tide nipped my toes. (Help me, please!) It didn’t force me forwards. I wanted to. The earth’s too

self-conscious to take her shoes off, but ice slides quietly into spring. Two steps on the water. I promise myself to stand before the wave.

Emily Oldham

17

ORLANDO WAKES “He stretched himself. He rose… he was a woman.” – Virginia Woolf,

Orlando

There could be no doubt: of love, of life, of all such conclusions. He slept, arm across his eyes: a bridge to his imagination.

Imagine lying in weakness for six whole days, the world says. What a man,

he! (O, imagine that!) Then, since the earth curves even on her off-days, he wakes on the lovely Sabbath, he.

She wakes, and stretches, and asks for a bathtub.

The world peers at her out of miring eyes,

cursed in verdict. She is not, she. The flower blooms and fades, plucks its petals out to arch an eyebrow, self congratulation. What self ? What change? She wants another, to feel the cold promise of fresh

words even in winter. Days will lengthen soon, fade and bloom, stretch their legs as she lies and lets time bathe her, she.

18

ENTANGLEMENT I found a loose thread in my hair.

Your hand waved past your throat. Oh God, you said.

Mine or yours I couldn’t tell.

Do I sleep like I think? I might have, before your curtains blurred between seasons. You closed them and I couldn’t tell

because eyelashes stretch time past knowing. Sleep’s crutches.

A cerebellum floating in a vat.

Mine or yours I couldn’t tell.

You sewed the nerves into a tape, then played it. Knotted honesty.

At last, the voice straggled into silence. What it said I couldn’t tell.

Emily Oldham

19

NIGHT WIND Closed curtain night. Outside, through silent hours of sunless fantasies, the trees sway giddy-limbed. Rock-a-bye baby the world. Downstairs, a snap of voices. Blur anger. And repeat.

It’s not enough to lie back and to breathe out in gourmet-thought.

It’s not enough, it’s not – the tyre-wind deflates against what seems to be the natural course of things. The shush of trees as they bow left and right to pacify translucent grim queen clouds.

Whisper superstition through night-fog. It’s not enough.

Emily Oldham

20

DANGLING ON THREADS OF WANT An inteview with Sarah Fletcher Sarah Fletcher is a young British-American poet. In 2012, she was a Foyle Young Poet, and in 2012 and 2013, won the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize.

She has been published in The Rialto, The London Magazine, The Morning Star, Ink Sweat & Tears, and had her work commended in The Bridport Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and displayed at Olympic Park. Her pamphlet Kissing Angles is published by Dead Ink.

You have previously described yourself as an apolitical poet and seem to want to avoid characterizations of your work as attempts at social and feminist commentary. Firstly, what, and who, do you write for?

I think it’s a lie when most writers say they write for themselves. Especially published authors. But writing and inspiration are a hard phenomena to explain because to say that writers write for others as well sounds like a lie.

At least, it sounds like a lie for me. The act of writing is so strange, so random—hence why many writers describe the phenomena of having voices in their head during inspiration—that it’s less “who do you write for” but rather what compels someone to write. And then, once something is written, what compels someone to publish it? I heard someone who likened poetry publishing to Catholic confession. The idea of having to be redeemed in front of everyone, having to stand naked and raw in front of everyone, and still get some kind of power or acceptance from it. In this way, I think there’s a weird power exchanging in writing that can be thrilling: it’s powerful to put yourself on the page in a heated moment, and then totally masochistic to give your most personal, most compulsive, most strange thoughts to someone else to judge.

And when you don’t even know what compels you to write, or why you write, it’s hard to start even thinking about who you write for. I find that writing, inspired writing, at least, needs the conditions of a tornado to occur: tons of elements need to be working, synched together, pulling and pushing against each other, or there’s nothing at all. So in short, really, I don’t really know who I write for; your question had me trying to imagine the ideal reader of my book, who I’d want to speak to, and I can’t.

21

“I’m dangling on the threads of want”. Your pamphlet Kissing Angles seems to be incredibly invested in the workings and manifestations of desire and breakdown of sexual relationships. What is about desire, and specifically the perversion, self-destruction and masochism of sexual desire, that so intrigues you?

What intrigues me, I think, is that we can’t imagine desire without imagining self-destruction and masochism and perversion alongside of it. I’m doing my dissertation on masochism and the sexualisation of power differences in relationship to literature at the minute and I think what I find most intriguing is that these things are just tied to our idea of romance. Like, think about fairy tales. Think about famous muses in literature. Shakespeare. Think about pornography. I feel like romance isn’t seen as romantic unless there is some kind of sacrifice, which becomes some kind of masochism, on the part of either side. I think I’m a bit obsessed with it because I feel like it’s how we’re raised to see sex as a society: a girl consents to sacrifice her honour or individuality. It will always hurt the first time. But she’ll smile the whole way through because. Things like that. I know that sounds really bleak, but I want to really interrogate in poetry why this is the default, and who is really benefiting from it.

It was Foucault who said “where there is desire, the power relation is already present”. Concerned with depicting heterosexual desire, your poems are also inextricably invested in exploring sexual power relations and many of the women in your poems seem to suffer subordination and subjection: “He’ll grab her breast and she’ll squeal like a bitch”. Is it fair to say that many of your female characters participate in their own subordination? How do you understand the relationship between sex and power?

It’s kind of like the “half victim/half compliant” thing Simone de Beauvoir talks about. And I think a lot of my female characters are really obsessed with “keeping up the performance” of femininity in their romantic relationships in the sense that they often speak about their bodies in third person, as separate entities, and are always half-mother-half-at-mercy of their lovers. But yeah, I do think they participate in their own subordination in many ways. There’s an interesting thing I read recently - it was an article about pornography - that talks about how, for men, the shame from humiliation is in the non-consent, while the shame for women is in the consent. Think of a guy who falls asleep at a party to wake up somehow femininised, in a pair of panties maybe, or a guy who feels like he’s been “tricked” into a gay situation by a transwoman. The shame there is related to the lack of agency they’ve had in these situations. Meanwhile, this paper 22

argued that with women, the utter shame is in their participation. In the example of pornography they used, it’s they a woman’s ‘yes’ is somehow revealing some kind of eternal truth about her; and not only her, but all women: how they are all the type of person to say yes to their degradation and take active agency in it. I feel like it’s the boiling frog syndrome: if a frog is put into boiling water, it’ll jump out right away. If it’s in water that just gets hotter and hotter to a boil, it’ll stay until it dies. This is how I see my women who choose these relationships or even seek them out in these poems: how much of a choice do they really have?

My biggest regret about Kissing Angles is that a lot of people read it as romantic. Which goes to show much much, like the great Foucault quote suggests, we can’t really extradite romance from power and pain. One person even described it as sex positive! As if some of the women are part of a kinky power play. I get anxiety that I’ve accidentally romanticised these relationships when I get those types of review. But my political views have changed; when I was writing Kissing Angles, I probably would have argued that it was romantic and that these women were somehow empowered. I’d also have argued that authors have no moral responsibility to the reader, and I don’t believe that anymore either. Because of this, my new poems are very different in being stubbornly stripped down and depressing.

“The body recognizes loss before the mind”. The poems In Kissing Angles are littered with strong physical imagery and an obsession with the experience of the female body. I’m thinking particularly of Clock Watching, Sex Education, The Judgement and The Matador. Yet you don’t characterize your work as feminist- why not?

I think I don’t necessarily understand what makes something feminist or not feminist, and that by my own definition of feminism, my poems aren’t really feminist. My poems are certainly about power, which in my mind, makes them inherently political (something I would’ve probably rolled my eyes at six months ago), but I’m still stuck on the feminist label. My feminism is more about liberation and I don’t see how my poems are liberating anyone.

Perhaps they’re moreso accidental protest poems in depicting these unhealthy relationships than ‘feminist poems’. I like that idea: all poetry as protest poetry against a malignant society. My Kissing Angles poems are also pretty preoccupied with making the personal political, which I used to disagree with, but would accept as a label now. They don’t seem to depict the female body in any sort of self-love way but rather under a self-objectifying, more brutal lens. Perhaps the body I depict is a radically female body in the brutally acted upon it, but I’m still not sure. It’s certainly not am “empowered” body.

23

The contemporary urge to describe things as feminist or not feminist kind of devalues feminism to me—I want to reserve the label for things I actually see as feminist. When we could have my poem of romantic, unhealthy relationship poems be seen as feminist, and when we have violent pornography seen as feminist; when we have anything a woman chooses to do be seen as ‘empowering’, I can’t but to feel like that takes the power away from radical actions and hurts the movement. It’s similar to the “everyone who believes in equality is a feminist” spiel that’s become so popular; now everyone can be a feminist, including misogynists. I know rapists who identify as feminists! I know I’m on a bit of a soapbox now, because I’m generally very skeptical of where the third wave is going, but it bothers me and makes me queasy about the feminist label in general, but especially in art. Some days I’ve just wanted to stop using it myself and just go by “women’s liberationist” or something, just in that I felt so distanced from the contemporary movement—but then we get caught up in semantics over action. The closest I’ll come to embracing the feminist label as an artistic label at the moment is that I write about the world as I experience it around me, and if others want to label that expression as feminist, then perhaps that says something about the world we’re living in.

Given that you have cited your major influences as Robert Lowell, Don Patterson and Ted Hughes, did you feel the need to add a feminine voice to this tradition? Does the sex of these poets matter?

I do think the sex of the poets matters—I’ve started reading more women recently who I really love. Liz Berry’s Black Country is fantastic. It really depicts the animalness of sex and weirdness of gender dynamics in a way that’s so beautiful and incomparable. I wish I could recommend more poets, but I’m actually reading a lot of theory recently because of my dissertation.

I think more people should read theory though—I find so many of the authors engaging! I was really intimidated in the beginning because it’s supposed to be seen as difficult and now am crusading more people should casually flick through it like they may a novel. It’s more accessible than poetry, I think, to me. I’m really into Cixous, a fantastic female voice. But I’m also really excited about lots of young women writing poetry at the minute—there’s so many young poets who are doing interesting things and it’s refreshing to me. Watch out for Flora de Falbe and Imogen Cassels; they’re really fantastic. I do think the feminine voice has been notoriously undervalued as girly or petty, so I am trying to incorporate more female authors in my reading experience.

In previous interviews you have talked about wanting to distance yourself from the tradition of confessional writing. Why? What do you 24

wish to avoid with the connotations surrounding confessional poets and how would you define “confessional” writing in contrast to your work? Do you think younger writers, in particular, tend to be dismissed or pigeon-holed as “confessional”?

I think I used to be against the phrase “confessional” because it was really used to devalue the work of teenagers, particularly teenage girls. We don’t really take “emotional teenage girls” seriously, and when I was starting out writing, I was super determined to be taken seriously. But instead of insisting I be taken seriously on my terms, as an admittedly emotional teenage girl, I decided to change and be taken seriously on their terms. I often did ridiculous things to disguise my age when submitting to places. I wrote dramatic monologues and tried to subdue emotion. Now, I embrace the confessional label a bit more—but I still wouldn’t apply it to a lot of Kissing Angles. My narrators have terrible secrets to confess: romantic delusions of Orlando Bloom, love affairs with nazis. But I still relate the label ‘confessional’ to a poem someone reads in the author’s voice, or in relationship to the author’s life. A poem that reads like autobiography, which Kissing Angles doesn’t have so much. Though perhaps that’s too strict of a label: after all, Frida Kahlo saw her most surreal of paintings as confessional.

And by that definition, I do think a lot of Kissing Angles is confessional. I also think I railed against the label a bit because I’m a pretty private person, and “death of the author” was an easy costume to hide behind from armchair Freuds in my family or friend group analysing my work.

As a young writer how important do you find the internet and social media for promoting and communicating your work? What advice would you give other young writers about how best to harness this formidable and constantly evolving platform?

I’m a bit torn on this. I’d suggest most authors use Twitter and Facebook to discuss poetry, because there certainly is a community there and opportunity there, but I’m not part of that community. The biggest advice I’d give to young writers is: find other friends who write. Make a community in real life. Talk to young writers, and maybe the internet can help you with this.

But feel no pressure to conform to a community and feel no anxiety about missing out on opportunities because your charisma and wit don’t strictly translate over to Facebook or Twitter. That said, there are tons of interesting new mediums people are using online for their work. Experiment. I’m always a bit terrified to put the internet in my poetry, because by technology’s fastchanging nature, I don’t want to date my poems. But so many poets more innovative than myself are doing incredibly interesting things regarding the internet. In short: experiment, see what’s out there, but don’t feel pressure.

25

Perhaps this is naive and optimistic, but I genuinely believe that good poets don’t need to constantly self promote and will end up being read regardless and eventually.

What is the best and worst advice you have received as a poet and a writer?

I like this question, because I feel strongly about some of the bad advice I’ve been giving! I really resent older poets who make it out that artists have to suffer for their work, or let poetry become them and consume them. I used to be super competitive and make poetry a massive personality trait of mine; I was the ‘poet girl’. This worked well when I was being published loads, but really lowered my self esteem when I was stuck: then what was I? Now I’m a lot healthier and just write poetry when I’m inspired, and more relaxed about sending to magazines. So I’d really want to tell younger poets they don’t have to be competitive or feel “live or die” about poetry.

Just do it because you love it. The best advice had to be the old cliche: read everything you can, and don’t be too quick to find yourself a “poetry community”. And don’t become bitter. I kind of see bitterness as the opposite of poetry, because poetry has to burrow down and find the hurt or the exuberance or the anxiety and soak in it. Poetry is pretty congruent to vulnerability to me, and I see more bitter poets out there than I’d like to.

Stay open and excited about the world!

Lastly, to link to this issue’s theme, have you recently read anything you would describe as climate change literature? Do you think poets and artists have a public responsibility to creatively engage with this world crisis?

I haven’t read much climate change literature, though I’d be really interested to—Matthew Griffith is a poet I know who has engaged with climate change, and I like his poems. I know Carol Ann Duffy has just compiled what I’ve heard is a fantastic anthology on the topic. I think it’s important for poets to engage with world crises in any sort, because humans aren’t necessarily persuaded by logic and are rather ruled by emotion. So many humans now all the facts and ins and outs of climate change statistics and are still off doing the same things that contribute to it. Meanwhile, emotional appeals really hit home: imagining the last snowman, an apocalyptic love story, nostalgia about a summer they’ll never experience again. Poets have the power to hit home with this, and they should utilise that. In this way, I do think poets can change how we think about these things and remain optimistic.

26

PERSEPHONE 510 BC Pomegranate seeds, a chain of six, a necklace and pelts of white-furred bears for bridal bed, the sum of months for bare-faced sun, the gifts he gave, her dowry, half a year for winter cold.

Her mother’s dress was hemmed with sacrificial blood; she clutched her disapproval to her, scowled.

Her husband’s smile, as slow and sweet as ice, she kissed with her ripe lips; what might she plant in them?

2015 AD Nowadays, when she wakes only the cold is lying with her like a disappointed lover.

Their house is full of emptiness, but she no longer chokes on the silence, tasting of nothing, invisible, poisonous.

Every day, the sun has risen and melted away a little more love, trickling it through the cracks in the floorboards.

Their mattress has been tilled to the springs the barren furrows run a hundred miles between them.

In that draught, her lips crack like the desert floorshe meets him rarely.

They come together like storm systems raw with lightning.

She thinks of the white pelt folded in plastic bag in the attic, rotted, crumbling, worth millions, an exotic rarity.

27

She thinks of the kitchen knives, of his chilly blood drunk by her mother’s northern vineyards.

She thinks of that plastic bag.

She could suffocate him, bury him in her mother’s greenhouse, under the sunflowers who's hot petals curl like burning paper.

After all, blood is thicker than pomegranate juice.

Olivia Bradley

28

THE SEA I looked down from an airborne wing and saw a sea that hurt my soul, so different was she from that image of a perfect swath of ordinary blue. She was a blue that cannot be described in words. In numbers, maybe, or one of those other deeper languages we’ll never understand or master. All I can say is that she was a blue of everything, of all time, and her surface was torn by jagged, perfect lines of silver and pearl. Of course it made sense that she carried such scars from holding in and up so much glory, for so long. From guiding, feeding, murmuring love and hope to the universe. There will be a trace.

Elizabeth Gibson

29

2015 Montana Morris 07:00:00 06:59:59 06:59:58. He had waited for her. On the seventh day he had sent for her, his saviour, and he hadn’t had a moments rest since. She urged her feet forwards despite her better judgement and the automated doors hissed shut behind her. He locks both the inner and outer doors with a full biometric system and an offhanded shrug. With all the confidence she can manifest the tears in her eyes stay put when she looks at him. He breaks eye contact first politely giving her the illusion of power.

‘You’re finally here’ he suppresses a smile ‘please sit.’

He gestures to the room in a slow sweeping motion betraying an infantile exhibitionalism.

With a further show of false bravado she takes another step into the room, glancing around in a habitual gesture that she passes off as natural.

The small apartment type complex is a testament to strategic design. She tries to recall the exact sq.ft. from the blueprints but there hadn’t been much time andTea? Coffee? Water?’

Now bored of waiting for the acknowledgement of engineering brilliance that he feels his design is worthy of he has resorted to his least practiced forte, pleasantries. The questions catch her off guard and with the sharp shake of her head the tears fall freely and an indelicate sniffle does nothing to stem the flow.

‘They told me you were a mad man but...’

She trails off and her darting eyes mean that she has lost her train of thought much to his irritation. The offered pleasantry is still unanswered and rather than brood over the unintended insult at her lack of reply he attempts another show of manners. He disappears into one of the two adjoining areas and she breathes a small sigh of something akin to relief.

When he returns he is holding two glasses of water, each glass has three ice cubes shaped into the infinity symbol. She is still standing by the door taking shallow breaths that remind him with piercing clarity that the air is finite.

‘No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. Do you know who said this?’

When he has placed the glasses on the table her gaze meets his again but her tears have dried and the accusation in the way she scans his face is thinly veiled. He thinks of telling her that he and remorse parted ways a 30

long time ago but in striving for conversational conventions he waits for an answer to his question.

He sits at the table. Watching. Waiting.

If it were at all possible he would say that she launched herself at the table. Despite the poetic impulse he does not have the specific data to calculate time taken for her to move, and therefore can definitively ascertain the act of launching. Therefore he settles with the notion that she moves quickly, and although far less prosaic it accurately and simply explains how she crosses the room and slams both fists on the table before he has a chance to react. The glasses are startled far more easily than he is and his immediate shock soon dissipates under a compulsion for observation.

‘I will not play this game! Where is it?’

The question is phrased as carefully as her limited tolerance for the English language will allow. Although intended to be a declaration of strength, a demand, he watches as her sympathetic nervous system betrays her best attempt at control. Her reaction to the globus pharyngis response means that the last word ‘it’ is less of a shout and more of a hiss at the sudden release of air.

‘They took my daughter. You tell me where it is, they let her go.’

She slumps into the chair opposite him and hangs her head, staring into the nothingness. He waits and she holds the position perfectly but the flicker of her eyelashes gives her away. She is staring at her lap, at her hands folded into her lap, at the imitation African print fabric watch that she is wearing, the white label of which is sticking out. It reads: Made in China.

‘Maybe they give you back your daughter but probably not. In fact you can feel comforted by the fact that she is probably already dead.’

She flinches and the implication of his words causes her body to shake uncontrollably with anger.

‘She no have to die.’

She grips the fabric of her skirts, bunching the colourful layers of material into a pattern that is beautiful in its haphazard creation. He smiles.

‘We all die Miss-’ at the pause she looks up not quite daring to look above his shirt collar- which is of course starched. ‘Miss?’

She considers holding on to her name but she can’t think of a lie.

‘Sarah Tigisti.’

He inwardly curses at the readiness of her exposure and makes the assessment that she no longer cares enough to lie. It is a dangerous thing to bargain with someone who already feels like they have lost everything... or near enough everything.

‘How long did they give you?’ he says ‘You have a name?’

Her evasion is neither graceful nor refined. He takes a long drink of water and gestures to her untouched glass. She ignores him.

31

‘It’s Michael. How long?’

‘Michael.’ She repeats the name, unblinking, watching him watch her. He leans back in his chair, interlocking his fingers over his stomach, and waits.

‘Michael, why my daughter’s life is not worth saving?’

The question isn’t unreasonable and yet he finds himself bored with the mundane path this conversation is taking. Uncomfortable in the silence she has taken to stretching the fingers of her left hand in an attempt to disguise her glance at the watch.

‘First I have to ascertain if the world is worth saving, if humanity is worth dying for. I have to know that there something left on this piece of rock worth the sacrifices.’

‘There are lives worth saving!’

He laughs and it’s a harsh echo of the sentiment. The sound is swallowed by the furnishings and the stale air.

‘What is it you think the sacrifices are? Everybody dies.’

‘Let me guess, more Aristotle?’

She is fleetingly proud at having subverted his opinion of her. The inclination of his eyebrow is the only sign of his surprise. With the same speed that she sat down with, she once again challenges his perception of an instant. On the other side of the room she beats her fist against the glass door and it does not even register her efforts with a shake. Instead she bangs on the door and when her hands begin to ache she takes to yelling.

‘He’s mad! He’s mad! He’s mad!’

She repeats her assessment over and over. He considers laughing again, but in the time taken to consider the act any pretence of humour in the situation is now buried under the weight of the silence.

He eyes her curiously, aware that somewhere in the deep recesses of his consciousness his morbid fascination to her reaction is inappropriate.

At the hoarseness in her throat she stops yelling.

‘Miss- Sarah, how long did they give you?’

When she drags her eyes away from the reflection in the heat sensitive glass the expression of hatred genuinely surprises him. He manages to think through a dossier of statistics on soundproofing and on the clinical symptoms for Narcissistic Personality Disorder before she answers.

‘They said 7 hours’ she looks at the watch forming an irritating patch of sweaty skin ‘an hour ago.’

06:00:00 05:59:59 05:59:58 She is on the floor in what someone with a flair for dramatics might call a dishevelled heap. In the adjoining room closest to the table he turns up the air saturation, two people need more air than one, and returns with a tissue.

‘I’m sorry’ he offers ‘about your daughter.’

32

Although distinctly unaware of feeling any excess sadness despite learning of her daughter’s situation this seems to be along the right lines. It occurs to him that societal conventions would deem the death sad and unnecessary; she may be one of few relatively innocent that die in all this. He stops pacing and sighs with the knowledge that the integrity of innocence as a currency is something that his plan exploits.

‘You made this happen.’ The statement is an accusation, the truth of which he cannot deny.

‘Yes.’ ‘You made me come here.’

Again he considers that through a series of events some of which he initiated she has ended up here.

‘Yes.’ ‘I make you do nothing. You make me kill those people.’

At this he sneers at her. It’s an ugly gesture that curls his lips over his teeth, raising the glasses on the bridge of his nose. No, no that he had not made her do. With uncharacteristic impulsivity he reaches for the linen of her top and manages to drag her as far as the table before she gets her feet under herself. Later he will contemplate exactly why the situation descends into violence; he has always thought himself above such compulsions...to an extent. It takes the sharp sound that the flesh of her palm makes when connecting with his cheek to bring him back to the present.

‘You killed because you wanted to!’ He says.

She shakes her head incredulously.

‘No. I kill because you tell me to, you make me!’

He snatches the barely cold glass of water off the table and she flinches in response. Holding the glass to his cheek he seems to rethink his approach.

‘You are no victim of diminished capacity, not in this! I told you that the lake drying was a result of climate change and could have been prevented by the three people you killed. I told you their names, where to find them and the date of the IPCC conference. I may have gotten you the passports, bought you the tickets and even told you how to make the poison, but at best I am an accessory. Right now the only murderer in this room is you. So do you want to understand the plan or not?’

Clutching her stinging palm she briefly glances at the watch then shakes her head.

‘No. Just tell me where it is?’

‘I can’t! Haven’t you been listen-’ The sudden lack of air means that he cannot finish the sentence.

With her hands wrapped around his neck he can feel the fabric of the watch, hear the ticking of the second hand and the dull thud of...something else.

33

In a desperate bid to stay conscious he claws at her arms. With his last breath he uses a dying man’s best weapon.

‘Are-you-sure-you-want-to-make-it-four?’

Guilt.

She stares at his unconscious body half expecting to see a manifestation of Buddha crawl from his open mouth. Only half. She waits a while longer watching to see if he changes into a hyena. She considers searching him for the evil eye but decides to keep her distance just in case.

Taking her first detailed look at the living room she wanders towards the bookcase. Careful to keep him in view she bends to scan the shelves from the bottom up. She is surprised at the books on philosophy, structural engineering and various applications for biology. Considering he has chosen to spend an indefinite amount of time alone she expected more books about people. On further consideration after spending time with him she retracts her surprise.

Walking past him to the adjoining room near the table she is confronted by numerous shelves of dried, canned and dehydrated food. Her nose wrinkles at the prospect of canned chicken pie and she walks down the aisles as one would in a low budget supermarket that doesn’t sell anything you want. Three large machines line the outer wall and even she is disappointed in her inability to identify their functions. He groans in the other room and she rushes towards the sound. Confident in his potential to regain consciousness she reaches for her headscarf and uses the length of fabric to bind his hands. She decides that he could still turn into a hyena and superstitiously avoids his nails.

When she emerges from the other adjoining room that serves as a bedroom and bathroom he is awake and alert.

‘Find anything good?’ She stares at him. He grins. To say he smiles would be an insult to the feeling of joy that a smile should convey. ‘How long do you have now?’

The question is the hung elephant in the room, dangling from a noose, and swaying in an invisible breeze. She glances down at the watch to quell her own unease, she doesn’t even intend to answer him but‘Four hours...but I no-I should have five, they said seven which should now be five. What happened? Why they do this?’ She whispers to herself but the sound carries across the space easily.

‘That would be for trying to kill me.’

04:00:00 03:59:59 03:59:58 She screams, a wordless angry sound that has him wincing.

To her credit she has not advanced towards him.

‘Buda! Buda! Buda!’

She drops to her knees, pointing at him, snarling at him, spitting 34

at him. Not being able to scratch his nose momentarily distracts him from his musing.

‘I thought you were Tigray-Tigrinya, not Amhara.’

The last scream dies on her lips.

‘How you know this? What evil is this?’

She is on her feet and in front of him, her finger a breath away from his face.

‘Not evil, Google. Although-’ The unwelcome proximity to her hand means that he hears it again, the ticking...and the other sound.

‘-I know what the internet is. Do not treat me like a child!’

She slumps on the floor a small distance away from him and leans her weight against the chair.

‘You tell them to take my time?’

He shakes his head and fights the temptation to correct her use of the possessive pronoun. Time, he thinks, does not belong to anyone man...or woman.

‘They need me alive.’

‘Why? Who are they?’

He tries to sit and fails miserably without the use of his hands.

‘Let’s try one vastly over complicated exposition at a time.’ He inclines his head towards his hands in a jerking motion and rolls his shoulders to reiterate his point. ‘Shall we?’

‘Where is it?’

He sighs.

‘The Ark, that’s what they are looking for, that’s what they want.’

She shrugs at the explanation, none of this is new. ‘But I can’t tell you where it is because it doesn’t exist and I can’t tell you who they are because technically neither do they.’ She moves to lunge for him again and he holds his hands up instinctively. They both stare at his splayed hands and she scuttles across the floor clutching at the bookcase. ‘I am not going to hurt you.’ They both stand at the same time. ‘I could have strangled you already,’ he continues ‘or grabbed one of the kitchen knives over there’ he gestures offhandedly towards the kitchenette ‘but I haven’t and I won’t. If I was going to kill you I would probably choose to poison you and you would already be dead.’

With that he sits at the table and waits.

‘The poison that you tell me to make-’ -Ricin.’

‘Ricin.’ She stops and he motions for her to continue by emulating his best attempt at a non-verbal apology. ‘I get the seeds-’ at a look from her he halts his interjection in the poised straightening of his finger. ‘-the 35

castor seeds. I kill the three IPCC men that you say were corrupt and I followed your plan-’ At the three slow deprecating claps she stops speaking.

‘-you play the distraught mother beautifully and even the waylaid undereducated Ethiopian but we are skirting around the issue.’ His voice takes on a slightly manic pace and she considers grabbing a book to protect herself but a glance at the watch dampens the festivities of the adrenaline partying in her blood. ‘The Ark, the physical presence of a vessel capable of transporting pairs of humans or animals does not exist.’

She presses her hands together in prayer but is unsure of how to begin.

Doubt clouds her good intentions as she decides whether or not the God she believes in grants prayers to murderers. Eventually she decides that allknowing, all-powerful and all-loving seems to be one too many expectations.

Instead of a traditional prayer she settles for chanting.

‘-my daughter- my daughter- my daughter-’ He considers telling her that her daughter is dead. He also considers asking the corrupt mercenaries walking around upstairs in his house for proof of the girl’s death. She chants insistently for so long that he even considers telling her the truth; but the chest cannot be opened without the key. Despite his decided lack of tolerance for the conventions of human behaviour, knowledge he understands, power he understands and the complicated symbiosis of the relationship. The key would no doubt be lost to him if he told her that he’d order the humane execution of her daughter; her daughter who carried the same virus that killed her son and was slowly killing off her tribe. His logic of saving her the burial of another child would fall on deaf ears he concluded, similarly to her chanting prayer.

‘Tigray-Tigrinya or Amhara?’

‘The Buddha in the North is the same as the buddha in the South.’

She runs into the adjoining room closest to the glass doors and slams the door shut. He knows that there is no lock on the door but he allows her a brief respite. Drinking her glass of room temperature water he smiles.

Tigray-Tigrinya is perfect at least that way he won’t have to waste time explaining The Ark. He also decides that the uncomfortable bedfellows in her conscience of desperation and guilt are going to have to roll over to make space for their new companion...death.

They would die soon and he needed his unwilling companion to be ready.

02:00:00 01:59:59 01:59:58 In the room within the room she sits on the tiled floor and cries.

The sobbing drains her and eventually she acknowledges the futility.

Proceeding to wipe her dripping nose on her sleeve she is startled by the watch, more accurately by the time. When she storms out of the bathroom the acid of an accusation is dripping from her eyes she is surprised to find 36

the bedroom empty. When she enters the main room she pushes her wrist under his nose.

‘Why they take more time?’

He gestures to the mirrored glass doors and says: ‘Think of it like pay-per-view.’

‘They see everything?’

Her question is more a hiss than anything else.

‘No, they have a 30 second window every half an hour where the glass becomes transparent.’

‘But the mirror-’ ‘-the mirror stays the same, my nightmares don’t need more faces.’

He is struck ever so briefly by a sense of poetic justice before she interrupts his train of thought.

‘Put yourself in my shoe.’

His irritation at the lack of the plural puts a harsh tone in his response.

‘I would only have to walk 10 steps barefoot to know that this is so much bigger than you. This is bigger than anything we can conceive, not me, not you, nor your daughter and not the greedy power hungry tyrants up there’ he gestures above their heads ‘with their feet on my sofas!’He slams his hand onto the scanner and types a quick series of numbers. The inner set of mirrored doors slide open.

‘If you’re so sure that this stops here then leave. I’ll come with you and they will give you back your daughter.’

With a small voice she says: ‘I thought I killed the corrupt ones.’

His laugh is high-pitched and unnaturally breathy.

‘They’re all corrupt, it was just a question of whose morality was drowning the quickest in the most blood. Congrats you killed 3, just 28 to go not all of them will be bad, not all of them will deserve to die and not all of them will but decisions have to be made.’

The doors slide shut.

‘If you know this, all of this! If you can do all of this!’ She gestures wildly to the apartment-complex sitting under a secluded estate. ‘Why I am here?’

‘You’re here because I needed time and you have the key!’

‘The key! What key?’

‘The numbers, the ones on the dead men, what were they?’

The irony of his dependence on her is not lost on him.

‘Four, five and four. If that’s everything then why you didn’t ask in the beginning?’

He is still stuck at the simplicity of the three numbers that for him represent a key. Three numbers, the date of the Earth save for a decimal point.

37

‘I am the chest, you are the key. I am the Ark of the Covenant and I have The Ten Commandments to stop Climate Change right-’ he gestures to his head ‘-here.’

‘Ten Commandments!’ she screams.

In all honesty he thought that she would handle the truth better and they are running out of time. Both sets of doors open without prompt.

He grabs the biometric grip pattern recognition 9×19mm Glock 26 from where it has been stuck under the table and motions for her to cover her mouth.

‘Try to breathe as little as possible’ he says. ‘The Ricin that I have been leaking into the air supply upstairs for the past seven days just reached a lethal dose.’

She nods. To her credit he notes that she does not cry, or scream or refuse to follow him. The pair make their way out of the complex, down, the corridor and up the stairs into the reception room of the main house. She doesn’t stop to think, she can’t stop to breathe. She does not glance at the bodies, neither does he. He holds his gun steady. They make their way room by room, step by step until they reach a play den.

The walls are a spanning mural of the story of Noah and the Ark. The furniture is all handcrafted in dark wood and pale green silk. He does not stare at the room as she does; engraved into his memory he does not need one last look.

The panel door is hidden behind the door to The Ark. He makes light work of the wallpaper with a switchblade that he pulls from his sock. His efforts reveal a door and subsequent corridor. The light from the windows in the den show a long corridor.

As soon as the door closes he turns to her and says: ‘It’s safe to breathe.’

The corridor is an endless path of grey tiles. She takes long gasping pulls as they run down the corridor in the dark. She knows that things like this happen to other people but as they run and the air gets thicker she focuses her efforts on breathing.

Pity, she decides, can wait until later.

He comes to a sudden stop and she does her best not to crash into him.

Despite his attempt to open the door slowly the sudden light means they squint against the glare. After the light the deafening roar of traffic assaults them. He points at the sign that says the nearest service station is two miles away. She nods, not trusting herself to speak.

01:00:00 00:59:59 00:59:58 When they reach the service station, the heat stings his numb face. They have made it. Outside the restaurant there is a homeless man sitting on the pavement holding a sign. It reads: Spare some change?

‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ Both are startled by the man’s admission. ‘You’re on the news about those men-the murders...’

She winces but his dirty fingernail is not pointing at her. She glances from the homeless man to him and back but he does not seem surprised.

‘Give him your watch.’

The man’s face brightens at the prospect of receiving 38

something...anything. His collection pot is empty. She unclasps the watch and hands it over.

‘Thank you Mr, thank you Miss. You was never here, I never saw nothing.’

In the nondescript car, parked in a bay close to the exit they sit and the magnitude of what they know makes it difficult to breathe. They could change the fate of the world.

‘What are the numbers for?’ she says ‘They’re the pass code that unlocks the original IPCC report that was meant to be published in 2013.’

‘That says what?’ She sighs as she puts her seatbelt on.

‘It says that we are hurtling towards self-destruction far quicker than anyone could have predicted.’

‘I could have said this.’

‘I know’ he pauses ‘but they didn’t say it and that was their mistake. Why do you think they wanted The Ark to be real so badly?’

She nods holding her hands in prayer, thumbs hooked under her chin. He pulls away and they leave the service station.

‘Where we go now?’

‘I have a place.’

They drive along for awhile before she is once again disturbed by her own thoughts.

‘My daughter?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why you make me give him the watch?’

He doesn’t answer for awhile and then his voice is quiet with the sickness of regret. ‘It was a bomb.’

Hot fat tears spill quickly and soak her cheeks.

‘You killed him.’

‘No,’ he says ‘it was meant to kill you. That man was just a victim of circumstance as many others will be if we go through with this.’

‘I-’ She was going to protest, to insist that only God has the power to decide life or death. Instead she asks: ‘What the first commandment is?’

He smiles then, a ghost of humanity tracing his lips. ‘Knowledge is the first commandment. What is so delicate that even mentioning it breaks it?’

She thinks for long enough that the landscape starts to change before her eyes as they near the city. She has stopped crying now.

‘Silence.’

00:00:00 00:00:00

39

THE GRASS IS ITSELF A CHILD An interview with Mario Petrucci Mario Petrucci is a metaphysical poet of international standing, an ecologist and PhD physicist. He is the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3, and has received major literary prizes across the board (National Poetry Competition (3rd); four times winner of the London Writers competition; Bridport Prize (winner); New London Writers Award). His book-length poem on Chernobyl, Heavy Water (Enitharmon 2004), captured the prestigious Arvon Prize for poetry and forms the backbone of a powerful new film (Seventh Art Productions). His other volumes include Flowers of Sulphur (2007), i tulips (2010) and the waltz in my blood (2011). He devises courses for the Poetry School, the Poetry Society’s Poetryclass initiative and Arvon/Foyle Young Poets. Mario is something of a frontiersman in creative writing projects in the public domain, engaging successfully with the various Imperial War Museum sites and delivering groundbreaking writing packs that tie into science (The Royal Society/ Royal Literary Fund) and ecology (Poetry Society). His remarkable poetry soundscape, Tales from the Bridge, was a centrepiece of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry. Mario lives in north London. www.mariopetrucci.com

For several years you’ve defined yourself as an eco-poet, while this year saw the announcement of the first major eco-poetry award: The Resurgence Poetry Prize. Firstly, do you consider eco-poetry to be a growing genre, and how would you choose to define it? Secondly, is poetry necessarily concerned with ethics and inevitably implicated in the reassessment of core value and systems? Does art have a public role and do poets have a public responsibility? Against this, W. H. Auden famously said “poetry makes nothing happen” whilst Keats claimed “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”…

We might need to go back a step. There are, at the very least, three factors in society that hold back a fully creative contemporary consciousness that’s in harmony with ecology: bad ‘memes’, ‘Radical Inertia’ and ‘Framed Questions’. A meme is a self-replicating unit, a recurring splinter, of culture.

Memes propagate from generation to generation, often mutating as they go [think of a famous folk melody, a TV catchphrase, a political idea that makes a neat headline]. In fact, the idea of a meme is probably, itself, a meme. I don’t completely believe in memes; but when I look at some of the ways in 40

which assumptions, values and behaviours concerning the environment are perpetuated against the tide of data that calls for change, the notion of a ‘bad meme’ does seem to offer a useful partial idea. Next, Radical Inertia. That’s a deep resistance to change, encountered when an existing way of doing or seeing things is ingrained in us – not just ideas, but infrastructure, laws, etc.

We’d come up hard against Radical Inertia if we tried to abolish the use of fossil fuels, say, or TV, or adverts. Finally, Framed Questions are questions with an agenda, posed so that only certain ‘answers’ are possible. They happen in politics and art because so many of our assumptions are largely invisible to us [the idea that economic growth is always good, and so on].

“Shall we build 5 or 10 nuclear power stations in our term of government?”

That’s a Framed Question. If you think about it, so is: “As a poet, how do I find my voice?”

What can poetry do about this three-legged stool of trouble? Well, by heightening our awareness of the detailed texture of perception, by revealing private and collective thinking, by making the habitual and familiar unfamiliar – that is, through ‘defamiliarisation’ – great poetry can saw through all three legs on which denial and unsustainability squatly sit. Another strength of poetry is its ability to transform us. Transformation dents Radical Inertia.

Rilke: “What is your most pressing injunction, if not for transformation?”

[The Ninth Elegy; my translation]. One reasonably expects some of our poetry, at least, to have transformative potential stored in its DNA. Moreover, where poetry opens us to wider truths, when it reveals our selves to ourselves, it facilitates a breaking up of Framed Questions. Great poetry often challenges the dominant ideology and stimulates radical shifts in perspective, cracking Framed Questions open with its forensic, interrogating insights and its plural/fluxile trajectories through mind and heart. Poetry can also nurture connection, empathy and sensitivity: qualities that are essential to ecoconservation. What’s more, good poetry can be meme-proof, because it can’t be pinned down to one-eyed meanings, that charge of the Cyclops herd. It operates on several levels at once, across apparent boundaries and hermetic dimensions. Australian poet, Les Murray, said: “Only poetry recognises and maintains the centrality of absolutely everywhere”. Maybe poetry is one way to generate Lorca’s “Green wind” that eventually makes contact, all to all.

Finally, all genuine art is a kind of ‘what if ?’ It encourages us, indeed can train us, through its ‘what ifs’, to recreate ourselves, to re-engender our world, to recognise patterns [even those habits in ourselves we might prefer initially not to look at] and to shift them. Great art deflates denial. Great art, if we let it, reboots consciousness.

But art can be part of the disease too. Remember all that awful pro-war verse of the IWW. So, am I referring to the avant-garde? Not necessarily. What 41

I’m really indicating, maybe, is any poetry that possesses a more radical, authentic intent, or that observes so intimately and sensitively that we’re profoundly changed by it. Poetry that pierces. Poetry that can ramify, into the culture, the integrity and insight of those individuals who are still, in some way, more fully awake, more completely connected. Any poetry that does this becomes, by association, “eco-poetry” [or at least a close cousin to it] because without these motivations, mobilisations and re-awakenings of the human spirit we remain individually trapped in ourselves as we are, in our seemingly separate and disconnected selves, whilst being trammelled collectively by the myriad systems of unsustainability and deadness that our culture has invested so much in for so long. You ask: is such poetry on the rise? Well, it depends where you look. Rather than point the finger, though, let me instead say this: we need to find, from somewhere, the capacity and generosity for deep-moving change that leads us to greater harmonyhumility with respect to [and for] ecology. First and foremost, in this, one is helped by having rich and actual relationships with the environment: we can’t all just read about it in sealed tower blocks. But reading, too, is also part of human experience, so poetry contributes something powerful and important, even if it’s just a seed-crystal for a much larger development.

So, when you read a poem, ask yourself: does this language contribute to the enterprise outlined above? Never mind about definitions or reputations or fads or trends; one of the chief concerns, for me, in answering the question posed at the start of this interview, is how far the art/poetry I’m experiencing is part of the cultural wound or part of its healing. Is it perpetuating unhelpful memes, especially those I might not immediately register? And that’s not just about ‘content’, or what the poem is, on its surface, saying: it’s also about the taproots of language itself.

As for the Auden quote, may I turn that on its head? That phrase of his is too often used to suggest that poetry is, at heart, ineffectual and impractical; but, later in the same poem, Auden writes: “With your unconstraining voice/ Still persuade us to rejoice”. That’s a clue, I think, to how we might re-read the preceding phrase. Perhaps the sense here is not: Poetry makes nothing happen, but: Poetry does not make anything happen. So, poetry doesn’t force, cajole or constrain; it persuades. It guides us to openings, possibilities, and ultimately to that empowering ‘nothing’ which occasionally suggests itself, tangibly, beyond content – rather like the carrier wave in a radio signal.

And Keats? I won’t argue with Keats – except to observe that perhaps poets and their readers can be owls as well as Eagles….

In your work Bosco, a wonderful example of “eco-poetry”, you make no explicit reference to climate change as such. Similarly in the poem “in hay waist-deep was” in i tulips, a poem set in the future after the 42

onset of severe climate change, you avoid using any language commonly associated with “global warming”. Is this deliberate and, if so, why?

Deliberate, yes, in that the poem demands an absence of that kind of rhetoric. The reader’s encouraged connection with the poem’s hayfield, whose men are telling their outlandish [though possibly true] stories – this comes first. The poem is a partial antidote to those brutal futuristic visions we’ve been exposed to, mostly characterised by what we will have harrowingly and irreversibly lost. This poem emphasises, instead, the eternal values we will in all likelihood retain, or even augment. It is telling, indeed sharing, its story rather than selling a story, contrary to what a great deal of commercial literature now seems to have to do. That’s one way in which, I hope, the poem evades being another form of Framed Question. .

How about your most recent work, crib? Compared to earlier works, there seems to be a significant effort to condense and compress your language even further, stripping back all verbal excess and focussing on an almost ‘concrete’ visual simplicity. The poems are largely about your relationship with, love for, and tender observation of, your son. However, there are still many references to ecology and a strong sense that the natural world provides the live and sensitive backdrop against which one is able to describe and understand a very human connection: “ground so down you /go so shallow /& grave //let damp /life seep in /mould to you //as you ascend /make you /green”. Is crib “eco-poetry”?

Perhaps one way to answer this is to quote an excerpt from the back cover of the book: “In its fascination with infant consciousness, crib adds a distinctive strand to Petrucci’s immense i tulips sequence. Bringing wakefulness and sleep to archetypal pitch, these lines extend paternity into fresh dimensions that encompass ecology, geology and cosmology until, with Walt Whitman, we witness how ‘the grass is itself a child’.” So, indeed, for me, it’s very much a book of eco-poems, at least in part. crib itself is an extended excerpt from a strand of 111 poems, which are themselves contained within the much larger overall project of 1111 poems entitled i tulips; so, you see the onion skins, the nested relationships in how the poems came to be written, the suggestion of ecology in the very way the book was conceived. Even if the primary concern in crib is ‘father and son’, how can our chief-most relationships not have something to do with [capital ‘R’] Relationship – this R-word being, in a way, what ecology is. And isn’t good parenting – or an intimate and closely attentive, watchful registering – a kind of metaphor for what we need to be like, or what Gaia may be like 43

towards our species, in terms of readjusting and re-balancing what’s happening around us and therefore to us? Aren’t the falterings of a child at least a partial metaphor, too, for the problematic consciousness of the modern adult, of modern culture, of a species, that fails to comprehend itself and its rightful place in things? Like the book’s boy, are we urgently seeking a language: the language of ecology? And is scientific, rational knowledge enough for us? Does it hinder or augment? Is a technological relationship – whether it’s your enwombed child displayed on a monitor or a proposed scientific management and maintenance of global climate – really the best relationship, or even a relationship at all? I suppose these kinds of question might be imaginatively extrapolated from crib.

Lastly, you work a lot on educational projects, encouraging the younger generation to engage with poetics. Do you believe that contemporary society is in danger of undervaluing the importance of poetry and its educational value? Do you believe poetry is a powerful tool in helping the younger generation to reconfigure, redefine and reassess their relationship with the environment?

The extent to which most individuals – even if immersed in great poetry – can effect a genuine shift in themselves, let alone in our most ingrained collective assumptions and systems… I admit, that’s something I do worry about. Even Marx couldn’t foresee the mutating tenacity of our capitalintensive systems and their associated ideologies, systems that now seem to have almost outgrown, in part, human intervention and that get more socially entrenched and personally invasive by the month. Look up ‘TTIP’ online if you don’t know what it is, and quake in your bindings. The problem here is that poetry, even if it stands against such things, generally isn’t a mass-communication form, partly because it isn’t a major art form in our culture anyway, and partly because it operates on individuals so differently [which is part of its inherent strength]. Most people I meet outside poetry don’t use poetry much as a way of growing themselves. That said, I’m infinitely optimistic about what poetry is able to achieve in honest hands and ears, particularly when I’ve worked in schools; in any case, I’m deeply and prejudicially vocational about poetry, so I’ll swim with the poetry dolphins until I’m drowned or saved; most of all, I sense that we’ll probably need humanity to overcome Radical Inertia in ways that themselves imitate how ecology works. If so, poetry could well turn out to be an essential [even if minor] ‘species’ in the deeply enmeshed and webby totality of what society is and how it manifests future self-inspections and self-alterations.

True, one might easily assume that film or music are far more potent social ‘carriers’ of the eco-message, especially for younger people; but you never 44

know where those knotholes of opportunity and change will be in the homogeneous planks of cultural wood. Just as business and materialist society tend to undervalue ecology, so too do they tend to undervalue anything, like poetry, that has kinship with ecology [I mean, anything that has something in it to do with Relationship]. And yet, a single poem in the classroom, if it’s the right poem for that person, can rechannel a life.

Returning to those more popular forms: poetry is such a supple organism, it can cross-pollinate with them. I certainly brought all my poetry DNA to bear when co-writing possibly the first ever R&B ecological song [Lover Earth – the track’s available online], and I’ve mixed poetry with film to reach wide audiences. Of course, media like music and film can possess very strong colours in themselves, and one is right to be concerned that stirring poetry’s more subtle hues into them might result in a dullish brown mess.

But be bold: with courage, imagination and sensitivity, combined forms that involve poetry can work.

I have to note, though, some possible impediments to getting the best out of working with young people. I wonder sometimes if there’s too much of a drive towards – if not complete infatuation with – reputation and first publication. There’s nothing entirely wrong with that, in moderation; but is poetry at the moment more concerned with the next wave of semi-celebrity poets and who they are, how important they are, rather than with the various messages we all might have to offer each other? Surely, contemporary poetry’s role isn’t just about generating more and more contemporary poetry? Like many other forms of art, is poetry flirting with celebrity culture, leading us [to frame my own question!] to something hyped, too business/sales-oriented, too concerned with entertainment, something implicated [like market economy] in the creation of winners and losers in an inward-looking and arbitrary literary race rather than a generous and outwardly-oriented act of connection? There are some extraordinary poets around who deserve greater public attention, who would add something unique and challenging to what young people already receive from poetry.

As for me, an artist’s duty, my very first duty, is to grow in every way possible and to help others to do the same [in their own terms, not mine] through Relationship; not to be best-selling, rhetorical, sensational, accessible, famous, entertaining or ‘right’. That duty towards reality and growth isn’t imposed from without; it arises, from the creative act of withinness that poetry engages. Poetry, especially in its more serious and earnest concerns, has to do with its reflections on [and of] the tenuous and tenacious glow of Relationship. The poem – and the poet – need to be first allowed to be fully, reflectively themselves before they can become something ‘useful’ or something ‘else’.

45

LOVE MUM I’d say this hurts me more than it hurts you, but I’ve seen hotter times than this one through: I’m barely warm. Be sure, I’ve had my share of bumps and scrapes, and this does not compare.

A protoplanet smacked my lithosphere full-speed, well-aimed, a smart box on the ear a chunk flew off, knocked me for six, and soon I had a fetching axial tilt, and moon.

From pain, I forged the tides, and spun out seasons.

They called this time ‘Hadean.’ They had reasons, being, as it was, a hell on earth.

Of lakes of fire and brimstone, I’d no dearth.

The Late Heavy Bombardment, too, was fun the volleyed comets blotting out the sun, and on my face, becoming meteorites, like drops of summer rain. I was alright.

But think on this: the sonorous rumbling shake tectonic plates, on gently meeting, make as natural a phenomenon as breath tears down your buildings, spreading fear and death.

You see, the fragile flesh that makes up man can take a lot less than a planet can, And sure, I’m not quite paradise as is, but I’ll be worse if you keep on like this.

Life in the natural world is hard enough make me un-natural, and it’s twice as tough.

But I'll go on. I’m made of stronger stuff.

My point is this, mankind. In all my days don’t ask, it’s rude - I’ve seen a lot of ways to kill yourself. But this one’s surely crowning: three all at once, heat, poisoning, and drowning.

You need me more than I need you. So think, adjust your actions, step back from the brink, and if you doubt, tattoo this to your eye: If you change me, I’ll live, but you will die.

(And if my letter has offended, let these words be comprehended: whilst you lie buried or burned, your children's children wish you’d learned.)

46

THE WASP Life an infant, or a man choking for breath, a wasp - painted in crime-scene warnings - flounders and flags on the asphalt of the station car park.

If it were crushed into a slide and held under a lens, the tell-tale lattice grid of a flyswatter would be imprinted there, no doubt, on it’s cellophane wing. It struggles still, punch-drunk, slow, unathletic - failed.

I raise my shoe. The shadow passes over.

I let it live, as though it might still live.

I watch it leave, wings crushed, and stinger brandished high. I lift my gaze - a jet of silhouetted wings explodes, and flies into the boundless, un-pigeon-proofable skies.

FLY-OVER From the aged pages of a book, pressed like a flower, something petal-looking peeks. I turn to the bookmarked page, and pinch it in the pads of finger and thumb, with care. A crane fly’s wing.

September came and went two terms ago.

Brown, and dry as bone, it scatters dusty scales, like ashes, in my book. I must have killed it, months ago, and failed to bin its corpse.

I let it go, expecting it to drop like an object, straight, inert. It won’t - it spirals, rides a perfect helix to the floor, and stops, a helicopter, sycamore - a ghost returning, not content to be unknown.

Jonathan Stone

47

THE UNDERTAKING It’s a pity aimless dreaming is poison to you, a chemical meandering unmapping the morning to sheets of wide eyes with no sleep.

To idle to you is a slum of closed curtains gormlessly yellowing a pity the gloom.

Your maiming by method is a pity. Your polish slid you slipshod through the dallying dance, your industrial habit out of place, your bustle out of fashion two worn soles, scuffing the steps with dampened clacks. It’s a pity to witness your senses wince, cut at the bud by their common kind.

A stubborn knot direction ties and warns you that it holds the ends and from the cradle to the grave it leads you through the round world straight and piteous.

More’s the pity small filigree missed upon the gate you throng and the youth you lose in certitude, the lightness in gravity, the vitality in execution.

Tilly Alexander

48

DISTOPIA I sit in the job centre.

I can still hear the man outside with his megaphone and bibles shouting “the righteous shall inherit the earth.”

A magazine on the chair next to me tells me Kerry Katona has a Fab Fresh new look and I wonder what she’ll inherit.

A man called Dennis signs my book every week.

I can’t prove that he hates me, but he calls me ‘boy’ and I can only interpret his aggressive use of Lynx deodorant as a personal attack.

He calls himself my work coach.

My eye twitches every time he says it.

It’s been three months since This city gloated me back through its station barriers.

Good enough for you now, am I? Now you’ve had a face full of the big smoke and come back coughing.

My pavement worthy of your soul?

This bastard place.

But it’s true.

I’d had enough of capital.

I couldn’t stand the people who didn’t understand my slang or why I’d shout when they threw out the milk without smelling it first.

So I returned home to this place and now I sit here in the job centre.

I can hear a man outside shouting “the righteous shall inherit the earth” And I went to school with 5 people in this room.

49

Derren King, in the corner, split my friend’s forehead open with a chair in fifth period Maths.

I remember the blood that joy-rode down his face like the cars out the window.

They’re friends on Facebook now.

I look around and wonder how many people have sat in this room And been forced to explain themselves while the faces on the magazines watch.

I remember when my dad used to come here.

He’d worked since he was 15; spent 20 years in a classroom stopping children breaking other children.

And when the sickness in his bones told him that job was too much for them to take, he came here for help.

To the tune of people on the radio calling him Lazy.

Talking of welfare and cheats and plans to get rid of the lot.

All these King Herods, cutting the heads off every first born to make sure they kill the one they’re afraid of.

Forgetting the story ended with that one getting away.

And becoming a messiah.

And now people in the street shout his words “the righteous shall inherit the earth” And I ask myself what is left to inherit?

Beautiful people, men in suits, pockets full of dirt: they have it all.

I have worked since I was 16.

I have stamps in my passport and a degree and skinny jeans 50

and no one in this city wants to hire me.

I come here for help And hear the same shame in the radio waves that my father faced.

The sound of mercy’s knuckles against a door that no one wants to open.

They have turned us against ourselves and we don’t even get it.

I won’t be able to retire til I’m 70 And I don’t understand the new pension scheme but Karen Brady’s on the adverts and we all love Karen.

I wonder when The Apprentice is on next…

Work hard, think not Break that back because one day you’ll be able to afford another.

Every single person in this room secretly believes one day they will be rich.

Me. Derren King. Even Dennis and his offensive scent.

We all know that one day we will be in the radio waves.

People will care about our fab fresh new looks: we will matter.

The day I realised this would not be the case Was when the sickness in his bones told my father to stop working altogether.

He was too righteous for this earth from the start.

All that graft.

Left with nothing but the knowledge that it is not a stick or a carrot that keeps us going but the promise of glitter on a horizon that will never be reached.

If not for the stolen car retirement age then for infirmity Or people above cracking whips from their radio land Ignoring the splinters in the stilts on which they stand.

So I sit in the job centre.

There is a man outside shouting “the righteous shall inherit the earth” and I am not convinced.

But I look around this room 51

and see hard elbows and full lips and breath.

And realise that’s what he’s saying isn’t it?

Whatever earth ends up in our pockets, we have righteousness in our palms and that is the one thing they can never inherit.

Toby Campion

52