Enjoy this little flash, Crazy Bears published by the always wonderful Spelk Fiction, by Kapka Nilan.

It’s easy to see how this story could spin out into everything else. I think that’s what I like most about flash fiction, the suggestion that there is more — a connecting cosmos of people, feeling and moment. Here we are helped with the idea of travel and sense of not having a home — a doctor with desires to always move on whose child always gets bruised.

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I have three poems out in Bone & Ink right now. Another Essay, a poem which uses the “pick interesting things from a book and then build out a poem from the scraps” methodology on a really charming/trashy book called Torture Throughout The Ages, and a very light bit of verse which embarrassingly I feel does a “wot if nature woz an iPhone tho?” thing.
 
 You can read these poems over here.
 
 I am very resistant to mentions of technology or brands in my poetry. It might be because it cheapens it in some ways. Other people seem to like it. I mentioned an iPhone once over here, which was, I suppose, really, me just borrowing a line from Ariel Pink’s Picture Me Gone.

“I left my body down in Mexico / Give the find my iPhone app a try”

But even in homage/parody/whatever I am resistant to it, it feels like the breaking of a spell. Not sure what kind of “purity” I am looking for here, but I think I am resisting a fixed point in time — as if the text is meant to last forever, remaining fresh.

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This article, about the idea of novels in flash, is extremely good at exploring the form.
 
 The form is described as a series of flash fictions that create an overarching theme/story while also being consumable as separate flash pieces.
 
 David Mitchell once discussed how he was planning to make Slade House a series of 100 short chapters (or was it 1000?). I feel this is similar, the idea of micro-stories building up to a whole.
 
 Part of me thinks of the idea of NiF as a genre that didn’t need inventing, or wouldn’t need inventing if there wasn’t a strange distrust of short novels or novellas. Short, experimental work that uses a mixture of forms exists all over the place, but little identifies as NiF in the way Bottled Goods does. I’m looking forward to how standalone each piece could be, as it appeals to the intertextuality and networking I love the most about my favourite writers.

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This week’s song is a really good mix by Jimmy Munoz, titled: A 4 G 3 L 0 Mix
 
 It’s full of low grooves and R&B stuff. I got quite a lot done while listening to it.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. Next week is issue #100 and I have nothing planned for you at all, much like the Dalmatians, it’s possible the 101 one will be the miraculous one. I’m finally reading Kaveh Akbar’s Calling A Wolf A Wolf and it is exactly as good as I was hoping. We need some new conventions, naming conventions for files containing poetry. Sam’s Visual Verse poem has appeared which is fun to compare with mine and the others for the similarities that arise from starting from the same image — creases, folds, and a sense of home.

Juila Armfield’s The Great Awake, from issue 23 of The White Review is a story of misplaced desires, and an incredible personification of sleep. Sleep begin appearing to people, strange quiet wraiths, little ghosts that spend their time in your presence, but don’t necessarily interrupt. A hovering concept that now fills a space as a body. The Sleeps are tall, pale, and when they arrive their host no longer sleeps themselves.

In the city, which is where sleeps mostly seem to be appearing, Sleeps eventually become normalised. Those with Sleeps, who are no longer sleep themselves become lazy. They can always do it later, they think, always having time later now that their day is no longer opened by a period of unconsciousness.

Not everyone get a sleep at the same time however. There’s the obvious envy of those who now no longer sleep, a return to normal, but this envy goes both ways — those do sleep feel like they are missing something, that they are somehow not keeping up with this step change of how people’s live are arranged.

The story is told through small moments, longing looks and changes of behaviour — the denial of those who do sleep that they are indeed tired, before their inevitable dropping off.

It’s partly about the the horror of those efficiency fantasies we all have “if only I had a few more hours in the day” — the very real trade offs that would exist, and the way it would inhabit your life. It’s a kind of haunting, a ghost story, where being free of sleep meant that you had a stranger in your house and having a deep sense of difference from some other people because the experience is personal. A little like when we miss sleep in our normal lives, the pain is very much one that can’t be communicated, the frustration that comes with it is one that isn’t easily explained because the sense of failure is so basic. Ultimately the story is empathetic, wanting to show kindness to those who want sleep and those without it.

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This week’s song is the KEXP performance from Caspian.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, a newsletter about poetry, literature and writing by Christopher John Eggett. I drove a long way this evening to arrive in Dorset to see a friend, which can be very distracting, and this would be the main reason you did not receive this newsletter on a Friday. I am sorry for the hours of delay ❤. If you are not here, I miss you. If you are, I can bloody hear you snoring.

Olga Tokarczuk’s extremely metal titled Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is a murder mystery of sorts. Set in a remote Polish village on the boarder of the Czech Republic, atop a plateau, it fairly gently presents a string of bodies to our hero — Janina an old woman whose understanding of the fates of people in the world is set in the bedrock of astrology and a deep love of William Blake, where the title of the novel comes from.

The setting is lushly described, threatening and dense. The events of the story spring from the disappearance of Janina’s two dogs, and the human bodies that keep turning up.

Janina, who doesn’t like to be called that, is at first called across to another neighbour of hers — one of the only three who stay for the winter on the plateau — finding him dead. Mysteriously he has choked on a deer bone, one that he had caught in his snares in the forest. Mysteriously there are deer all around his house, seeming to watch him.

This revenge-disney scene is one we’re treated to repeatedly throughout the murders, suggestions of foxes luring our fur farmers to the woods, or beetles devouring a corpse almost immediately. Janina has a deep affection for animals, believing that hunting should be treated as murder and that, with the later bodies found in her town, that the animals are the perpetrators of the crime. After all, the stars say it.

The Blake influence and the astrology leads to a wild kind of proper-nouning — we are treated to someone being a Person with a capital puh, discussions of a Blakeian Fall and other ideals held out in the fashion of the time which is: if it is important, capitalise it. These are markers for the times that Janina heads off into what she believes to be the Truth — compared to the moments she is less sure about the world and herself.

Olga provides the reader with lovely images through Janina, someone who wants to leave her body sometimes, and becomes a kind of jellyfish self

These moment of fancy are the real treat of the book, which keeps you reading between the nuisance of bodies coming up. The writing is one of small ideas expressed well, and the way that we observe the uncertainity of our protagonist throughout small and sometimes seemingly meaningless part of her life gives a fly on the wall effect. Of course, we also get to be part of her visitations from dead relatives, her secretly-naming each person in the village and town, and her interesting Theories.

There are parts of this novel where one might suspect the protagonist is a witch, or in some other way capable of creating the world around her in the shape that she wants. Her remoteness and the way that she uses the stars suggests that this might be the case on several occasions. And this might be part of the centre of the book, the fact she is treated as an outsider means that she is not meant to have any power upon society, and if she were, she would be a witch.

Equally, her interpreting the planets and the companionship of Dizzy, a translator of Blake, shows how their way of seeing the world (loose, interpretive), and how it buts up against the traditionalists she is surrounded by. There’s no real room for someone like her in their world and she finds endless friction there.

It’s a strange, wandering, whodunit, with endless charm — but you might forget to ask the question of who dunnit really.

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This week’s song is Slow Show by The National.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett who is extremely full of delicious squid and quite brown and fat at the moment, like a turkey getting ready for Christmas. Although I am unsure if they feed turkey’s delicious pygmy squid. I’ve been on holiday somewhere warm and once volcanic, but can’t wait to hurry home to some drizzle and nippy winds. ❤

I have returned to Chelsey Minnis this week, to give her some more attention than I did while at a wedding.
 
Baby, I Don’t Care is one of the best books of poetry I have read this year. It’s completely of itself and feels a little like a self-help guide. Chelsey created the book by ambiently (or directly) lifting lines from old films on the Turner Movie Channel. As such every line is a kind of proposition, a demand of someone else, or an expression of the current power statuses held in the room.
 
The way that each poem is addressed to someone — because they are resown lines of dialogue — presents a manic tone throughout. In my favourite poem in the collection, Romance, you can see this manic tone at its most fun:

The off-handed phrasing allows the real meaning to be implied between the hyperbole — and still does everything a poem about love or falling in love, or indeed enjoying the idea of falling in love with someone else mutually as a game, is supposed to do. It still says “we were meant to meet,” and: “this is risky and dangerous” and: “we will likely be rewarded with something exciting possibly ultimately painful”. Here the speaker in the poem, which is almost always a woman, is advancing the game with lines that play with the current boundaries while also offering their own kind of paradox to unpick. Sharing adjoining rooms, a favourite colour being wine, slightly impossible thing that would disarm.
 
The entire book is like being repeatedly disarmed, but on a different theme for each section as the collection wanders through all the major milestones of life.

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Visual Verse very kindly judged my poem to be one of three lead poems for their 5 year anniversary issue. I’m quite pleased with what came out in the allotted hour time. See me here.

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Rosebud has something a little romantic up in Sixth Finch, over here. She is exploring the longer side of love this time — and the way that everything is bartered for a built over time.

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This weeks’ song is Romance, by Beth Gibbons. Because this seems to be the theme.

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Thank you for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett and he doesn’t know what’s put him in this mood either, if it’s your fault please make yourself known. It’s been another scruffy one, but then, when hasn’t one been scruffy? I am off on holiday in a couple of hours, think of me when you’re at work and I am struggling to enjoy some nice sunshine and a swim ❤

Wilder, by Claire Wahmanholm, is a poetry collection of post-civilisation world-building where all agency is removed from the survivors. The poems are glimpsed out of an incomplete view of the world (there isn’t a complete world to view anymore) and fragments (which have a little bit of an intentionally fragmented Sappho about them).

This view is one where everyone is made a child by the disappearance of them, seen here in The Witch and Poem After All Of The Children Have Disappeared.

Part mythic and part eco-death, the poems take in a rural landscape turned against the people who want to live on it. Repeated drownings, Woolf-like walkings out into the finality of water, and the making peace with it abound.

They use nostalgia, relaxation tapes, treatments, to hold back the sense that there isn’t anything in the world that looks like a future anymore. The poetry becomes prose poetry as the collection continues, as if the loss of some kind of innocence makes for the death of the line-breaks dancing down the page. It is stark in its earthy expressions of grief and loss, and toward the end comes to conclusions of an existence that is about existing at all, rather than with some greater goal.

Through these poems Claire builds a complete world where the earth hates humans back. It reminds me in part of David Ohle’s Motorman, and the way the environment seems to be throwing itself back at the people within it and the surface-skimming presentation of each weird element.

You can pick up a copy from Milkweed here.

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Salo Press have their first chapbooks up in their Flirtations series. I’ve asked to see them as they look particularly ace — more to follow.

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I am back on the Anne Carson Interview scrounge, and this is a good one — including the liquid library.

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This week’s song is I’ll Drown by Soley

Don’t tell me that I never bring you a cheerful issue of ETTO :)

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Thank you for reading Etch To Their Own. This week it was written with man-fluish hands by @CJEggett. Hear the song of my people. You can probably already sing along. Extremely spooky. I am finding it hard to leave good feelings alone, and not just slip into them as if they are my real life — nice to be able to have an entire life of daydreams to wander off into of course.

Mathias Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a kind of tragic farce of stuff. The story is one of Michelangelo, yes, that one, and his trip to Constantinople at the request of the Sultan to design him a glorious bridge.

The sculptor feels rejected by the pope and overlooked by his people — so takes a journey that could be considered treasonous in order to fulfil this brief. He makes notes, lists of objects, descriptions and movements. This listing of the passive visible objects are part of the metaphor for his struggle to realise the bridge he has been enlisted to build and his inability to possess a dancer he has taken a fancy to. This is mirrored in his poet companion, who falls in love with him, and is unable to see him as an unpossessable object. And Michelangelo is the same in viewing himself — as much as his life is rich and full, he becomes a statue himself when approached by beauty.

Here’s some snippets:

The story is one where you can feel the objects in a scene being moved around, everything has a heft and can be tracked around a room, through a street. This physicality is undercut with the eventual epilogue of destruction.

Pick up Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants.

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I was recommended this interview with Murakami in The Guardian today. Alongside this quote from the piece:

When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, that was the age of idealism. We believed the world would get better if we tried. People today don’t believe that, and I think that’s very sad. People say my books are weird, but beyond the weirdness, there should be a better world. It’s just that we have to experience the weirdness before we get to the better world. That’s the fundamental structure of my stories: you have to go through the darkness, through the underground, before you get to the light.

The interview goes into some depth about how Murakami’s understanding of his own work is a way of building a meeting place for him and the reader. It’s an exercise to creating a meeting place for him and the reader to share a feeling — without too my analysis of the symbolism of any of his writing.

Pair with me previously discussing idealised ages with reference to The Years by Annie Earnaux.

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This week’s song is Hotel Yorba, by The White Stripes, chosen my my travelling companion this weekend :)

Dear reader, I am writing this to you from a wedding of one of my oldest friends. As such, it will be short.

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You will probably have seen this explode over your tweet feed, but there is an incredible interview with Chelsey Minnis. Emily Berry discusses the ins and outs of Chelsey’s work here.

There is a particularly good reading of Propositions — a poem built out of overheard lines from trashy old movies of a certain era. The reading starts at 1:37 and includes wonderful lines like

“it’s either a rowboat proposal or a murder”

and

“Now, I am going to tell a very long, very dirty joke,
this could be hard on your pocketbook”

and

“You do the praying and I’ll handle the dice”

The way that each line has some striking demand of another, which says less about the other than the person speaking — which I suppose is all speaking — is the proposition, every one of them has a demand of possession in them. There’s no proposal without saying “hey, here, let us cost each other a great deal”.

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Also have a taste of some older work by Chelsey, in Granta.

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This week’s song is Seasons, again.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. I need to go back to a party ❤

This week I have been particularly interested in Rachel Khong’s The Freshening, published in The Paris Review. It’s a sci-fi tale of Americans vaccinating themselves against race. The Freshening itself in the story is an event where government agents visit your home and inject you with a serum which changes the way you see the world. It makes you see everyone like you — so in the case of our protagonist, as an Asian woman. Once injected she sees everyone as an Asian woman, including her father, people on television, Christopher Reeve as Superman.
 
 Here’s a little snippet:

What I like about all of it is this exploration of tension — the desire for it at least. There are amusing complaints that there is no one looking at her butt at the gym, or that people find their spouses less attractive because they look like themselves.
 
While her grief for her mother is being processed, the lamenting the loss of her mother’s smell — “there’s nothing on earth that smells like her any more” for example, she has feeling of erasure of her own culture in the world around her. When everyone looks like her, including superman,
 
The story doesn’t give us answer of course, it wavers like its characters about whether such a thing would be good or not. Our protagonist is nudged into having a party where a new drug is to be taken, one that lets you see the world as it was before. Our protagonist is confused, the new world they live is is certainly better, but she still misses the old one.
 
Which is the through line with her mother. Her mother who was somewhat cruel, cold, difficult to elicit praise from — and was the only real connection to her heritage. Ridding the world of perceived diversity, in this case, causes a break in history — making the foreignness her mother felt less valid, less valued because she herself is less able to feel the difference her mother felt.

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This week’s song is Towing The Line by Ben Howard. Bit new for me as I’d previously disliked most of his output, it’s grown on me.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. This is me enjoying your poetry when you send it to me to read immediately after writing it. Chickens should be decent too. If I was meant to send you something, don’t worry, it is happening very soon, and then you will wish it hadn’t! Here is a thread of things I did. I am going to be old again soon, so I apologise in advance if I run out of steam — hopefully there’s somewhere for me nearby that isn’t a scrapyard. I have some work coming out in Bone and Ink on the 19th November — one is called Essay on Islands while another is called The Sexual Content of Torture — which shows at least, they have a broad taste in subject matter.

This week I have been spending most of my reading in Poetry and Poetry Review — the poetry magazines for people who like others to know its poetry they’re reading.

Donika Kelly in Poetry offers us Dear- which you can read in full here, or below:

(Big fan of whoever at the Poetry Foundation decided to include the hyphen in the url of the page)

The poem takes us through love that is negotiated through a sharing of space. The idea that like some very old gods there are patterns of people — small animals really — meeting in rhythms that form a practice, that form love through an expression of borders and positions.

These are unarticulated with words — only the statements of scale — to be unlike the ocean because they are not metaphors but small things making motions on repeat.

Here is how I
become a tree
[ ]

and you
[ ]
a body in space

Here there are no words for what they are becoming, because really, they cannot become a tree — there is no way to express a body in space without resorting to metaphor.

You can imagine here that these spaces are for the motions and positions, for the practice of love through meeting in rhythms and making the small ritual actions that signal anything larger than being small animals at all.

And “at different times” — saying that our small lives build love accumulatively. It is the layering of our actions which gives us the meaning we see in the world. Often we expect the world to present us meaning pre-packaged, because we are so used to everything being so laden. So here, with the frank admission that sometimes we have to start small and work at something tells us that we are part of the way meaning is made out in the world, between on another.

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Speaking of repetition, Tim Clare interviewed Ross Sutherland this week on Death of 1000 Cuts, and Ross had some really interesting things to say about how repetition adds meaning into things in a way that is unexpected at first.

(There’s about 8 minutes of waffle at the start, I am sure Tim won’t mind you skipping)

To paraphrase from memory:

Ross would use things like reworking the Fresh Prince intro into a looping poem that, at the start, would seem funny and familiar and as the same words were repeated each time they would come to be less funny. And then, after the crowd realised he wouldn’t stop looping and reciting the words, it would become funny again.

And then, Ross says, at some point you realise that through this repetition the repeated words or ideas morph into something else, as if they become the most important metaphor for anything in your life, a key stone for understanding all.

There’s lots of other really good stuff in the interview but I liked the idea that, like the poem above, that even something as simple as repetition can push meaning into anything.

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I have also recently been working on putting together a full length poetry MS, sort of titled The Essays, using that kind of interesting “essay” format that I have been playing with. If you have no regard for your literary health, and would like to have a read of it for me and provide a little bit of feedback, please let me know.

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Today’s song is a lovely bit of piano from Yann Tiersen called Porz Goret. Listen here, enjoy his earrings.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. Sorry if you’ve heard this one before. It was written by @CJEggett, and he would love you to let him know about any typos. He would love to read whatever you’re working on, or just enter into a ongoing ritual with you. If you couldn’t find the meaning, then maybe you need to read it again ❤

Rosebud Ben-Oni’s recent column in Kenyon Review uses the idea of a “conscious poem” — a poem that knows it exists to ask questions about how poetry comes into existence at all. When is a poem a poem? When you finish writing the last line, the first draft, the first word, the thought, the feeling of the thought, the moment in reality that makes you want to write the poem. You could already be living in a poem and not know it.
 
 And then, as always, off into string and field theory so we can consider how language can be like a universal force in the same way gravity is. I like the way that this comes out because it starts with a scattering of ideas and “aren’t we all dust” but quickly moves towards a creator myth. Imagine the aliens know exactly what they are doing, we’re asked.
 
 And this is reflected again in the anaesthetist — who she asks what it’s like to share time with someone losing it. She writes about her hunger for more time, the “remember to bring me back” going through her head, and these all seem a little like prayers.

“That if it weren’t for the poems lifting you up, would each year obscure the sky a bit more until you’ve forgotten it was there to begin with?”

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As I Have Accidentally Put Two Hands Up by Heikki Huotari in Third Point has some powerful turns of phrase, such as his “bones button on the wrong side” suggesting wrongly-conforming at a fundamental level.

Reading again, you could take the title to be the raising of hands at the request of the police. The supplication gesture of the palms, and not just the raising of hands to answer the question dually. The teachers call, demand the answer and this I suppose is the same play with authority.
 
 The presented idea here is — there are two ways he can answer the question, or that in answer in both ways he is showing the truth of himself.

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Now I’m Bologna by José Olivarez is littered with lines like “people are overrated. give me avocados” and “It’s not so bad being a person” while navigating a discussion of Italian heritage, and how we make who we are. Bologna, the place, is the pun here; he is where he is from as well as what he does and what his parents do.

This is a finding the self through where you’re from kind of poem — which in this case the poet looks at how their experience is one that is seen in terms of the economic value they bring the place they immigrate to. This is the life of their parents, to work in car factories, to dream of a better life within the one they have — to be Lamborghinis. This is a dream that fits their identity, which is then changed by their son who works in a sausage factory. This play of who holds the car keys on a shared identity between generations is one that is deeply aware of the external view.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, I am looking forward to a long sleep. It was written by @CJEggett with well-meaning hands. I am sorry it’s late, you can blame Sammy as she took me out to dinner. A secret painting. Very good twitter thread about poems which might teach care. I care for every one of you in verse and in prose.