Feelings. We’ve all had them. Lincoln Mitchell’s A Feeling Artist does something to skewer the (often) skewered humanities in a way that we can all enjoy. Pitching a world where feelings are art and that there are people who perform emotions for crowds to react to. It’s an argument for theatrical catharsis on the scale of stand-up comedians. The story does well to highlight something though in that we (me, here, every Friday) spend our time doing: finding the subtext to fiction (and media) that is meant to illuminate the world within. And how it can be lost amongst the theorising.

Ultimately, making a dent in others lives with the emotions you feel and then put on paper, can often be one of the least effective vehicles. Instead, in this story, the boyfriend of our protagonist find his university love — feelings — and takes it online, doing historical feelings for his audience on Twitch.
Here’s the opening:

There is the expected argument between highbrow and lowbrow, and how this means nothing — really — other than each demands the body in different ways. One in the form of the aesthetic performance of social media, and the other in the form of commitment from the body to be the art. Like CA Conrad sometimes says, the ritual must include the whole body — although I am not sure they would differentiate between the two.

Interestingly, this was in the Paris Review. In some way I suppose the knowing self-referential culture of the internet is built from that of academia and universities, and by extension the typically monied reader of the Paris Review. It is funny to read clickbait Buzzfeed titles in such a magazine, parodying the mainstream culture they are outside of.

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Thanks for reading Etch to their own. It was written by Christopher John Eggett, a man with fingers who occasionally leans on a keyboard in really lucky way. Sorry this one was short, but I have been awake for far too many hours this week, I owe you a word each. Please feel free to reply to this with the world you would like me to include in the next issue. ❤

Salo Press has recently started a chapbook series deliciously named The Flirtations.
 
Descansos, by Katherine Osborne is the second flirtation. It is a collection of poems that thread declaratives, dialogue and ominous pseudo-mythic pronouncements to build a kind of stream-of-consciousness from inside the witch’s cauldron.
 
Like all poetry, a lot of it is about setting boundaries as you go. Reading poetry is like playing a game where you not only discover the rules as you go, but that you also might be asked to flip the board and go the other way at any time.
 
Poems like these don’t necessarily want answers to their questions, and mostly spends time turning the “you” of the poems into something else — through renaming, the giving of roles, instructions.
 
The prose poems stand out most, being so unbroken and without breath. Here’s one from later in the collection.

Anne Carson speaks about wanting to turn each word against the previous word, so there is an opposition and tension throughout poetry — this is how you create the folds in her work, that creation of a new idea through stretching something so tight that it turns in on itself. Katherine does this throughout, “I pay you something so now you can mansion off the grid” or “swimbound body” pushing up against “dragging” from the water and the “boat fire”. In the poem above, we have the ending “Victory speech” as the undercutting punchline. We also have the joyous verbing of things like “the other animals are being meadowed to death”
 
In the same way we move around whatever form of story arc there is, we’re asked to “skip to the end” — assumedly missing the long drive and the boring part in the middle. This happens repeatedly, because we are receiving a story told orally somehow, the language is not interrupted by the fact it is written down. The speaker is at liberty to take us where they like.
 
There is something defeated about the world in Descansos, not just in lamenting dying planet being mined and other ecological disasters — tied to notions of our own energy or value — we are told: “Wrong things happen / Without any effort”. And later, in Magical Thinking we are told “my friend, you were not the the one that hurt the animals” — this kind of distancing and reassurance, with the continued suggestion that there are rescuers out there in the form of first responders and emergency contacts out of breath — tells us that we are in need of rescue. The idea is close at hand that we are in peril somehow, not in control and also doing damage to those around us.
 
Pick up Descansos from Salo Press here.

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I had something published, finally, in Human Repair Kit, it’s the first attempt at the whole “read a book, steal some phrases, make a poem” process that I use in a lot of my shorter poems now. It’s really nice that the first thing I wrote in this style is published at the end of 2018. You can see a list of everything I have published this year, here, RTs much appreciated. I may have mentioned it before, but what I didn’t mention was that apparently my new year’s challenge last year was to have something published somewhere. I think I managed it, just about.

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Our dearest Sam has some new poems up in Bitchin’ Kitsch — which is very lovingly laid out. I enjoyed Gaps particularly.

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Dostoyevsky Wannabe are calling out for flash fiction about falling in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with, or something.

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This is what I have been listening to at work the last two days.

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Thanks for reading ETTO, again. It was written by @CJEggett, with barely any thought to the consequences of his actions. Me commuting to my first day of work 2019. You making wise style choices. Us, but you decide which one is the egg.

In the no-mans land of the christmas-to-new-year period, time begins to lose all meaning. So much so that if you were to plan to write a newsletter on a Friday, rounding up your year of reading, that you might misplace that Friday and double-park it with a Saturday.
 
This is the second year of Etch To Their Own. It’s still making me slightly more sane than if I hadn’t begun, which is generally a good thing for everyone except those people I ignore while writing this.
 
Last year I spent some time recalling lines of poetry that I had read throughout the year from memory — and then using that as a guide to run through the work again. This year has been much more to focused on novels, short stories and some other longer-form pieces.
 
Instead, this year I am just going to round up those stand out works for me. I think most of them were published this year, but some might be older. One of them is an ancient text, so that one might be a few years out of date.

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This year ended with a few crackers, Baby I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis — an exciting exploration of what happens when you subsist on a diet of old fashioned movies and let that language flow into your poetry. I love the propositioning nature of it, especially in poems like Romance that I featured here. It’s hard to be this effortlessly in-tone throughout. It doesn’t get boring, despite the consistency, because the next line promises to move things along, and usually not quite in the direction you would like.
 
We also had two very good short stories at the end of the year in the form of The Great Awake and The Freshening. Both have a really good stab at the lack of satisfaction you receive from getting something you want, or something you think you want.
 
This thing by Rosebud on the idea of a conscious poem tickled me — the idea of poem as some universal matter that we are all made of. In that way that people say that everyone is made of stars, despite the fact that we are all very much made of meat. If we’re not talking about comic resonance we are of course talking about horses. This is probably my second favourite Rosebud poem.
 
It all began here. In July. Or not. This frankly bonkers creation myth was a treat. Enjoy a game of football with the devil(ish) and attempts from gods to create humans from various materials with hilarious results.
 
Jos Charles gave us Feeld this year. It’s a combination of medieval sounding English and internet speak to explore the way trans identity exists as a field and a feeling, a space to move about in that is also a contained area.
 
Paige Lewis gave us many lovely things this year, including a meditation on godlike distance and most importantly from the start of the year, the fold out in the centre of Poetry: You Can Take Off Your Sweater I’ve Made Today Warm. The latter explores a disintegrating authority, and the reading that comes with it is magic.
 
Two wonderful anthologies came along this year, a liberated canon and on violence.
 
Sometimes I forget that I read this book. When I remember I feel dirty. Amygdalatropolis is a book about the worst the internet can do to someone, and what they can do to others with this kind of insidious culture of so-what.
 
Max Ritvo came to me twice this year, once in his collection and once in his letters. The latter is a particularly moving set of exchanges between Max and Sarah Ruhl, long term teacher and friend. You can see their relationship develop throughout the book, coming from the early distance of their introduction into the deep love built through the shared text they build between one another.
 
And probably my favourite thing from the year, the known fact that we are two future corpses about to fall in love.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, especially those of you who have been along for the whole two years. It’s still helping :)

I’ve been spending some time with Kaveh Akbar this week. I usually pick at whatever he has out there in the world, but I’ve finally dived into Calling a Wolf a Wolf after buying it for a friend (and buying myself a copy, of course).
 
 The collection explores Kaveh’s escape form addiction, and as such has the kind of pleading that he does throughout a great deal of his poems. Many poems express a wish to escape, and also the equality of perspective that comes from this his addiction.
 
 He explores how understanding the rot at the centre of human experience levels things out. Through understanding that humanity is a kind of barely twitching carcass of whims, we understand the equality with nature and the freedom that brings. It cuts through the usual layers of society and class that we get caught up with. It is without pantomime (although, of course, still a little camp every now and again).
 
 It’s not that Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t performative in some way, but it feels personal in a way that a lot of collections don’t. It’s a cliche to even say that, but this is the refreshing part of it — that every kind of post-modern edge that you apply to the surface of the book slips away, dangerously.
 
 Lines like:

“Are you going to finish that tongue my love? / I’ll chew it up and spit it down your throat”

should be a threat, really — and would be elsewhere, but the mode of Kaveh’s writing isn’t one where violence has power. Here you are lead to different interpretations, because the writer comes to you as victim of himself: ideas of feeding as birds do, freedom from the burden of healing with speech, for example.
 
 Here’s the poem that above is from, No is a complete sentence:

Naturally, the book is filled with lines that will haunt me until I plagiarise them in a draft: “it’s been January for months in both directions” and “look under the bandages — and entire saint!” stand out, along with the long loved motto “here I am dying at an average pace”. Not to get to excited, but this is the kind of thing we come to poetry for often — the utility of expressing something we have experienced in word that are new. Turning language it’s its proper purpose of letting us experience the world, rather than just recording it.

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It’s not really a sport that I enjoy, or can even stomach watching for the most part, but this documentary, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, presented my Chapo Trap House favourite, Felix, is excellent.
 
 The documentary is kind of like having someone read a wikipedia article to you, but with occasional images of incredible human destruction. Felix joins together the history of MMA to the atomisation of culture over the last 50 years, the rise of the global right and US imperialism to powerful effect.
 
 You know when you get cornered at a party with someone who only wants to talk about their one subject? Imagine that, but instead it blossoms out into an impossibly wide ranging worldview that is deeply entertaining and enriching.

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This is a powerful grief essay that uses its whole body. Probably not one if you’ve been having a cry at Christmas pop songs.

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This week’s jam, in classic festive style, is a mix titled: Swedish Death Candy
 
 It’s exactly what you expect and is very good. Merry Christmas :)

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Thanks for reading ETTO. I’ve had time to write this one, which has been a joy. I’ve seen quite a few lovely people today for the last time for a little while. May your heart be filled with mine pie filling and your veins pumping langourusly with brand butter, for the next week anyway. This is Disappointment. Borja. And there’s Hiromi’s recent work. It’s only a few sleeps to christmas, but I am not sure if I am as excited as these terribily excited chaps. I have been working through this with a buddy over the last few years, and it’s one of the best hallways I have ever played. We have still yet to complete it, but we think we’re nearly there. The world record speedrun for it is 10 minutes long. Fuck you. I helped edit this, it will be a real thing in London. I have a poem out in Human Repair Kit on the 22nd of December, which might be tomorrow depending when you are reading this. It’s about fish diseases, more or less. Our lovely Sammy had some word out this week too, which you’ll have to Ctrl+F for because it’s one of those “here’s everything all at once” kind of online magazine. If I don’t see you before, please enjoy Christmas and become so fat that you become a perfect sphere.

I’m a little late this week, I’ll blame that on the season. Here’s a few things I enjoyed this week.

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Paige Lewis has a slice of her longer poem in Poetry this week. It covers the story of Yael, a classic revengeful woman in Jewish storytelling who brings an enemy into her tent to lull into a stupor before driving nails into his head as he sleeps.

The poem follows the lines of the original story, but its presentation of Yael as a woman with internality and conflict within herself bring answer, more modern dimensions to the story.

The style remains poetic in prose, which is what you’d expect from Paige at this point — an ability to zoom in to different parts of a scene one after another and give each moment its equal importance.

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This weird poetry-on-a-train thing (poets love trains don’t they?) features a small slice of Rosebud Ben-Oni amongst other very good poets. It seems quite jolly, but obviously wouldn’t work on the misery of UK public transport.

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I enjoyed this Jericho Brown poem, Duplex, for the balancing of each side of each coupled line.

A classic balancing of this is and it isn’t, all at once.

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Song of the week is this really exceptional cover of The Smiths This Charming Man by a Japanese Reggae/Ska band called The Swing Easy Orchestra. It sent me on a funny little Smiths tour, and apparently I remember all the words.

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I thought to myself after buying this issue of Poetry that £3 for a Paige Lewis poem is excellent value for money. I have gone almost completely deaf, I will make amends. Unrelated to writing, really, but these buildings of the future need our love. I think it is difficult to always see how good things are from the inside, but then there’s usually room to make them a little better.

Bottled Goods by Sophie Van Llewyn is a “novella in flash” about life under the watchful eye of the secret police in communist Romania.

Last week I shared Sophie’ article on the “novel in flash” as a form. I’m not completely convinced that it is an entirely different form from say, a novella that happens to be slightly experimental throughout. Yes, each section could be read as its own flash fiction, but I think that applies to a great deal of novels anyway. Cut up almost anything and you could have flash fiction

It’s a lovely, slight, book as you’d expect. And it rattles along because many chapters switch form or perspective from the last. We have lists, chapters where the title is longer than the body of the text, a table, quotes with commentary, diary entries and times countdowns.

Here’s an example:

It has the filmic quality of most modernist novels that flick between the formal stations without a flash of static between. There are some quite normal chapters, where the changes are simple switching of perspectives, or something spoken from a different character from the protagonist.

Later, a magical realist twist is very pleasing. I won’t spoil it, because it’s a lovely turn in the book.

One of the main conflicts is between Alina and er mother, and the way that the mother does not approve of the life that Alina had chosen for herself, including her husband, who is from a much poorer family. A class struggle exists within the confines of the communist theatre — which is what the location of many of the events feels like. Everything everyone does in this worlds is in reference ot the secret police, to the favours and pardons that are required at all levels to get what they want.

I feel in a lot of ways this could be read alongside another short book, Omon Ra — which is about the way in which the soviet’s believed that even if they were faking a moon landing, there should be an amount of effort expended somewhere to ensure that there is a kind of balance. The soviet idea that everything must be accounted for somewhere. In this story Omon Ra becomes a cosmonaut in everything but reality.

Something similar is happening here, in Bottled Goods, there is a sense of everything being bargained for. Whether that’s the mother’s love for the daughter with mismatched eyes or the secret service for safety.

This is the sense of there being no objective reality in these worlds — because the truth can simply be changed at any time by the government. Like the chapters and scenes themselves, their format is entirely changeable in a moment — there is a cat and mouse with reality and the state — trying to avoid being caught out and trying to avoid the reality they are trapped in. And you certainly don’t want to have an accident witht he cat.

You can pick up Bottled Goods from Fairlight Books

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. We’re into our third digit. We’re two away from and hand’s worth. I’m very pleased to have come this far with it — nearly two years later we have a nice little community of people who don’t mind my typos so much. This is one of the things I do to try and keep myself human, and for keeping me human, I thank you. This weekend I am wandering around looking at sculptures in Yorkshire, where they keep many of them in a kind of sculpture prison. This stops them wandering on to motorways and causing traffic jams, or into libraries and making too much noise. It means a great deal to me that you’ve ever read a word I have written down, in the order I put them in ❤

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 ❤