"I goon-march and glide", Part 3
With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent now well-and-truly arrived, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. This is the last of three parts, released substantially later than the first two!
I write a lot. I just don’t publish a lot — of my own work, that is. Partly because much of it takes a long, long time to fully crystallise — I’m still regularly pulling up and rethinking poems that were first drafted well over a decade ago. But also, I find I drift further and further from the general trend. Easy, I know, to fixate on what doesn’t suit you and disparagingly label it ‘the general trend’, but I think it’s not unkind or too reductive to say that the majority of poetry sought and published by English-language editors today constitutes first-hand accounts of relatable experiences taking place in something like the real contemporary world, in which the poet — or someone you can well believe is the poet — is reassuringly present.
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You don’t have to look far, of course, to find complaints about UK poetry being dominated by identity politics. But if we only slightly expand that category to include any poem which revolves around, or circles back to, a persona of the poet conveying something of their values, then I suspect most complainants are caught in their own net.
Work of a different kind is permitted, even celebrated, but less readily, I sense, when the editor or critic does not know the poet from Adam. On the performance circuit, you do find more in the way of fantastical conceits — these, however, are mostly either comically ludicrous or intended as satire. The ‘general trend’, as far as there is one, is surely to look on poetry as, primarily, a performance of the self.
Tiny AssassinsSo what do I think I’m doing that’s so damned different?
Well, one thing I’ve done this summer is make four more A8 microbooks to sell blind-bagged for £2 at book fairs. Each one is made of a single piece of A4 paper, folded and cut into a booklet, held together with a cover jacket folded from an A6 sheet. They’re tiny examples of ‘amalgamatic writing’, in that the contents are a mixture of quotes from various media, very short scholarly extracts, lists and poetry.

The theme for this latest set is ‘Action Princesses’ — a short explanation on the inner back page reads “exploring cult evocations of feminine power and sexuality”. I wrote one new piece for each book, and all of them are the kind of poems I would estimate as having a close-to-zero chance of being considered by editors of most journals. They’re mostly in third-person, and where there’s a speaker, it’s definitely not me. They also belong utterly to the cult genres their protagonists inhabit, even as they (mildly) spoof them. There’s no zoom-out to Cambridge, UK, 2025. This is from ‘Space Princesses’:
One is pinned by her skirt to a cosmic dartboard.
One is lashed by her heart to a handsome meathead.
One is trapped in a shrinking skintight spacesuit.
One is frogged, one spatchcocked, sputnikked, splayed out.
Not for long, though – nothing can hold them forever.
No beam, no jaw, no kiss rolled over and over.
See what I mean? The 21st century’s rejection of b-movie mash-up is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

I have managed to find the odd piece a home. One appears in a wonderful little journal of “computational poetry and literary art” called Taper. Their restrictions on submissions are extreme: “All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag () and the closing body tag (
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