Poem Brut #93 – Operation Yellow Hammer & other poems
WST1 : This piece depicts Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1 in three formats: a drawing of syndromic, heterochromia eyes, with the double helix replacing the nose; a handwritten explanation of the underlying genetics; and a typed haiku describing my resultant appearance.
The Deafhearing community of Martha’s Vineyard : Due to hereditary deafness on the island, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language became a lingua franca for its deafhearing community; since it was probably similar to British Sign Language, I have represented it by fingerspelling M V S L in British Sign Language (BSL).
‘Write a light poem about the zoo’ : This piece is a promotional flier for the category of ‘light poem’ within the traditional, Welsh medium, local eisteddfod event, which will take place in Rhosllannerchrugog in 2021 (having been postponed); the theme for the competition is ‘The zoo’.
Operation Yellow Hammer — meta : This piece relates to the British Government’s contingency plan for a no-deal Brexit, which was codenamed Yellow Hammer — a reference to the bird, whose call, onomatopoeically, sounds like ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’.
In the 93rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Sara Louise Wheeler.
Thieves in the Night
Among its other uses, I will show you is an effort to do exactly that: a record of one mind’s attempt to imagine its own materiality, and to discover, thereby, something of the world which exists beyond itself. And while this attempt ought to be doomed from the outset, I will show you, like Vantablack, achieves the impossible. By documenting the illnesses of the mind, the errors in cognition, Fowler’s book succeeds in tracing a world which exists beyond consciousness and subjectivity, a world which makes itself known by means of the traumatic ruptures in their fabric. It too is an encounter with total otherness, and it too succeeds in being properly weird – far more so than another alien arrival.
Oscar Mardell reviews Lee Rourke‘s Vantablack and SJ Fowler‘s I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs).