This suicide note was typed feverishly on my grandmother’s typewriter. I’m not suicidal, just to be clear. I only wondered what I’d say if I had to say something before offing myself. Turns out, not too much.
In the 71st of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Medha Singh.
I’ve been a joiner for 20(!) years now spending a great deal of time looking at architectural drawings. A lot of my writing process is made up of notes scrawled on these drawings or on scraps of wood at my bench and these restrictions of thought and process have heavily influenced my forthcoming book Contained (Hesterglock Press). These four texts/drawings are ideas that I’m kicking around for the final manuscript.
In the 70th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by David Turner.
“Sky Writing” is a multi-layered project.
We found the images — prints from a disposable camera — at a thrift store. I free-wrote on the images with marker, and Karolina “translated” my asemic writing into English.
I then letterpressed her text on Domtar Feltweave paper and attached the images, which I mounted on black card stock.
In the 16th of the Duos series and 69th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ryan Mihaly and Karolina Zapal.
Do we think that it is sad and regrettable that such a charming family has to leave their house, but that there is simply nothing to be done?
We do, sadly.
Do we think the memories that a family has of the house they lived in mean nothing?
Of course not.
Do we think that those memories remain in the house, having seeped into the fabric of the building?
We think that probably a bit sentimental.
In the 68th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael O’Mahony.
Awoken several times in the night for weeks, I began rising in the dark to write down my dreams. Sometimes it was easier to draw a line instead, to indicate something more of an affect or intensity. Other times the dreams were ripe with narrative. Mostly I was semi-conscious; everything was often a mess. I’d start to write of a moment and find the marks of a previous dream seeping through its surface, the bounds of one dream would bleed into the next. There was often the appearance of memory. I spilled black ink on my sheets, I fell asleep at the curl of an imprecise letter. These are some of the more legible pages.
In the 67th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Maria Sledmere.
While on the surface these might just be abstract poems they are apt and true explorations of my own experience of loss, love, death of relationships, rebirth, objectification, heartbreak and sex work (to name a few). I like to think of them as my own subconscious musing on the concept of family, the idea of marriage, the inevitability of bad luck and the fundamental beauty of the mundane.
The marriage of the books, two of which are my only real physical evidence of a father, excluding my own existence, and the third being a Greek classic bought with my boyfriend, which despite the painfully obvious Freudian undertones also shows the marriage of the two foreign languages together to create something weirder/perhaps more beautiful than themselves.
In the 66th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Kathy Pendrill.
I’m interested in the layers of meaning a found text can yield. Redactions are a way of simultaneously uncovering and creating new meanings. The process also creates a unique tension in that the accidental erasure of the wrong word or phrase cannot be rectified; errors have to be accommodated.
Blackout and the companion piece blue deserted suburbs are redacted from a contemporary thriller. in little scraps of paper is redacted from a lesser-known Victorian novel.
In the 65th edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Julie Mellor.
About a year ago I invented a poet called A F Briony who wrote her prose poems on 5″ x 3″ index cards. I wrote some examples, no planning before hand, just write until the card runs out. I did nothing in particular with them, and didn’t plan to. On moving house I rediscovered one of the pieces I had written was still knocking about (the others gone to the bin). The remaining card is clearly caught up with: homogenisation, connection via proximity, loss of difference between people and objects. I cut the card up, rearranged it, folded it, dropped the pieces on the floor – opposing its theme of coming together. Of course, the irregular fragments unavoidably make new associations. Words are made to mean something again. Either/or it’s combining. I particularly like: tence, now disparate / quilt on certain cold.
In the 64th edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Oliver Tong.
It is an alphabet I made using a Henry Hanson Steel Alphabet Stamp Set.
I tried to catch the character of the letter in each diagram.
In the 63rd edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Susan Connolly.
I discovered these images while “reading” newsprint sources using cello tape, thus collecting ink residue in a kind of analog sampling process. Maybe this evidence confirms the unfathomable world hidden behind the clutter of advertising and news reports with their nakedly cynical purposes. I’m always searching for these alternate spaces; I find them reassuring.
In the 62nd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Jeff Bagato.
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