Rosebud Ben-Oni provides us with a little equine bonding in I Guess We’ll Have to be Secretly in Love with Each Other & Leave it at That in Frontier Poetry.
 
 Here’s snippet of the rich, giving, lyrical rush of it:

The poem is an arguement, a betrayal and then the justification of that betrayal because of the truth of it’s harmlessness. Breaking up lines into breathless fragments, in the motion of riding, in the motion of a canter of a walk lets us move between contexts.
 
 The horse might be a metaphor.
 
Speaking to Rosebud over Twitter DM, it’s a goodbye letter to her former lovers — and the lives that could have been lead. This gives us the lyrical context we need to understand lines like:

I think we & planting boxwood & snowdrop

for not our winter
 children, nor sweet box
 or winterberry.

To facetiming winter silence

(Sorry to mangle the layout)

The idea of white winter silences, and the running themes of argued things like children and sweet boxes next to the white christmas and post-christmas blossoms and berries. It’s a collection of boxes that you keep the things of past lovers in.

There’s something important in saying goodbye to previous lovers. It’s hard to do in the context of any current, positive relationship, because it might make a mark on where you are now. But it’s impossible to recognise the person you without the hoofprints made to get there.
 
Find Rosebud on her website, or on twitter. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, among others. Honestly, her current bio is what appears to be an enviable and unachieveable madness of various teaching, writing, and creative gigs.

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So there was that thing with Tyrant Books. The original tweet is here:

There seems to be a particular and nasty dispute between NY Tyrant and one of their writers, Darcie Wilder. I can’t really speak to this, but it is the centre of the ensuing storm surrounding the press.

The response seems a little mad to me. It’s not completely ridicious that a publisher might not want agented authors — it’s difficult to reconcile the middleman. The responses to that tweet make out like NY Tyrant is doing something illegal, perverse, digusting — but it’s simply a choice of business practice. One that says “no rent seekers”. Whether this is good or bad for writers would really depends on whether you would intend to work with this one particular publisher.
 
A great many of the replies involve people who seem to be simply churning what they’ve read in other replies, endless “this is a total red flag” and “predatory” come up so much you have to wonder how the news is spreading — and who to? We can’t assume everyone here has written something that would be suitable for NY Tyrant, a press who publish exciting and challenging work?
 
 NY Tyrant publish the excellent Blake Butler, writer of completely insane tomes, like SKY SAW which was a entirely abusive book to the reader. It really tore at you whenever you tried ot find ground within it. And yet, it was bodily-lyrical, it was an experience. I wouldn’t want to think someone would not submit that because they were worried about getting “ripped off”. The demand that all art should have to take the same path to the public seems strange to me.

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This week’s song is Nicolas Jaar’s Against All Logic, and in particular Minesota 999.

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Her face.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, it was written by @CJEggett and proofread by no one. This week was too kind with poetry for us, and I wish we had more time for it. But my hear beats for the horses that have run me over in the past (true, although the horse is dead) and there are friends in the house who are yet to be sleeping.

The biggest thing from this week is This World Is Full Of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s an abstract story of a metamorphosis forced upon our protagonist unwillingly. There is a story on the doorstep, abandoned, orphaned — that is taken in. And like any small story, there’s a desire to nurture it.

But this isn’t just any short story left unloved on the doorstep — it was an alien using the form of a story to climb inside the brain of our hero, and being using him parasitically. Here’s the opening, it’s broken into chapters with excellent headings like I Did Not Recognize What Sought Me:

The story then continues to fall away into stranger and stranger translations and revisions to the body and the person — and the relationship with the alien story-creature.

Sometimes we get carried away by stories. When you write you can find yourself in a strange state of being where you’re not really thinking about the reality around you as the top priority.

In the excellent second episode of The Paris Review podcast, there is a line that outlines this kind of separation from reality that comes when you put the writing first. It’s from My Wife In Converse by Shelly Oria:

I can use this for my poem I thought, 
This is how I operate these days, like a thief

(It’s at 9 minutes 11 seconds onwards to get the sense of that part alone)

It’s a little bit of the magpie poet brain. The idea that you’re a thief, taking what you want from the world to add into your art. That maybe you’re not listening to the living but instead listening to what the dead or those in fiction would do with the world you’re in. A kind of passivity to the world, where you are one step removed from yourself.

The poem focuses on a relationship in a strange place, when something is maybe broken — and a undertow that you can feel. You can read it here if you have a Paris Review subscription (which I do not). The poem is interesting in it approaches the idea of approaching everything as an amateur, taking classes, being a test case, that the wife could never be anyone’s really because she’s always just trying things.

The moral that emerges, if there is one at all, is that the way writing grounds you is through its ability to take over your whole self.

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It’s a game we play.

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This is an amazing set of submission guidelines from spam.zine.

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Please take a moment to look at this amazing object that has been created by C A Conrad, which is for sale for a number of dollars. C A Conrad is one of my favourite poets ever. The way the process is applied to the work that is created is wonderful, and obviously we’d expect nothing less than this when given a lunchbox to tart up!

Just look at it, a portable crystal grid:

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This week’s song was going to be Four Tet’s excellent Planet. But then I got an email that there are some remixes of NxWorries kicking around now — so I’m going to give you that instead.

Sadly Suede and Lyk Dis aren’t quite as good as the originals (1 | 2) on first listen. But we’ll see how it goes over a few more plays.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, I hope that I have improved your life in some way. Please tweet me if we have because, honestly, it makes me feel great. This has been a good week because I finished the long sad thing — you know, that silly thing I started as a kind of grief object — you know, the thing I don’t talk about — it’s 20k words now, when it started as 20 lines — hopefully it’s good. Reasons to get up. You should read this thing by my dear friend Sam. You should read this thing on friendship, which I like because it’s kind of about the art of the long conversation. Sometimes you end up having a conversation over decades, and sometimes these are the best kind. If you’d like to start a long conversation with me, drop yourself into my DMs and we’ll become notable persons of letters — later to be published in the Paris Review, we can hope.

This might be another sad one today, so I apologise. It’s not a sad because of the publication in print of a non-fiction piece I wrote about writing eulogies in the excellent The Creative Truth. It’s sad for entirely another reason. We’ll come to that later.

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If you have ever run a large enough website, you will be familiar with the kind of spam you get that has been through so many processes that, in many ways, it has become poetry. To that end, please enjoy this poem produced by the whirring of modern technology and the oppressive forward march of global capitalism.

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Matthew Bevis held my attention for some time over here. This discussion takes us through the world of attention and distraction, and the ways in which distraction plays as a catalyst for the work that needs our attention. We know that it is moments of relaxation in which we find ourselves wandering to some of our greatest work — and that we are only the driver of our selves, we do not tend to all functions. There is an engine room somewhere where you can leave a problem when you become distracted, and someone helpful with take it away and fix it. You’ll return for it, and it will be there, but you’ll know how it can be fixed.

I like this little slice of it that I like:

More than a little. I’m writing this sentence as a distraction from a book about poetry that I’m meant to be writing, but also with a hunch that the book may get written via the distraction, that something in the book needs to get worked out — or worked through — by my not attending to it. Or perhaps the book was really always a distraction, and wherever the non-book resides is the place I’m supposed to be.

I like the idea of the non-book, a non-object that we will never get round to writing — and everything we do will be a distraction from it.

(Matthew goes on for a bit, it’s very good. Give it your time when you need a long stretch of something to be distracted from)

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I enjoyed this in Black Warrior Review by Paige Lewis

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I spent a little time this week going back to some of those really powerful pivotal books for me. Things like The Book Of Frank by C A CONRAD, Diary of Red by Anne Carson, POND by Claire-Louise Bennett. I just dipped in, it was nice, just to wander back to spots I remember from the books and reconnect with the permission that is provided when you read something kind of transcindental.

And of course, much of it is very funny:

It’s nice to remind yourself of what is it you want to do and those you consider having let you even attempt it.

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Did you know that The Paris Review has a podcast? It’s brilliant. Car Crash While Hitchhiking is rendered in such a stunning way that does not take anything away from the language. Usually the dramatising of poetry in such a way makes me a little disappointed. This was not the case.

It also, to my entire delight, contains a reading of one of the most wonderful of Sadie Steins columns from the magazine, about dancing alone.

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This week’s song is Post Requisite by Flying Lotus

The video is weird and… good? Worth a watch if you’re in the right frame of mind for something awful.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It’s been a funny week, but there has been good things in it. The sad thing, which I promised you at the start is this: I wrote to the hospital my father died in, to ask for his medical records. Why? I don’t know, really. But then, that’s it, I didn’t know. I wanted some facts, some figures, some record of it all. Something to hold on to regarding the way in which he died that an expert would understand. I don’t know if this makes any particular sense, but there is a desire. I got my response finally, from the kind people there that this information had been destroyed. They wait for 8 years, they they destroy the information. Anyway, if you have a question, I would say: don’t wait.

Do you pick up stray books? If you saw a book unaccompanied on a bus, lonely, lost, would you take it home or would you hand it in?

Rajat Singh talks about “books out of place” in The Millions this week. The obsession with picking up good books that need a home is familiar to all of us, while it’s possible to leave a second hand bookshop without what you want exactly (because the good book is safe there), it’s very hard to leave a jumble sale, a market, or a general second hand store. Rajat associates this kind of yearning to make these homeless books safe by ordering them in some kind of system of his own devising, freeing them from a library sale or from the jumble of the sidewalk seller.

The Old English word “dustsceawung” means, literally, “a contemplation of dust.” It’s an understanding not of what’s been lost, or the transience of things, but of how the past persists in the present. To consider dust, however, is also to consider the work left to do with things that impinge on us. Dust collects because I haven’t circulated in a book’s ideas, or had a chance to let their words inhabit me.

As someone who has not had a more advanced ordering system in the last decade beyond read vs not read in piles and on shelves, I still feel like I am saving books, but not from disorder, more like into it. From world with it’s conventions and expectations, and into an interior where I’ll put no pressure on them besides occasioanally picking up for reference or one good read.

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An empire of dirt needs a caretaker.

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Have some Danez Smith for the rest of the weekend:

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This week’s song is Lord by Young Fathers:

It’s a bit messy and all over the place, and I think that’s why I like it.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own #43. It’s me, @CJEggett, whom writes these words for you, whether you really want them or not. Please read my great dream tweet, and my follow up: is that a crow circling my lightbulb. I might manage to make some progress on this, this week, it’s very pretty. As are you, for reading these words — I treasure every moment you burn out your retinas on my slob-handed typos ❤

This week has been lovingly consumed by Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet. A collection of short stories with a series of re-articulated and grotesque motifs concerning the strangeness of bodies, sewing machines and unappealing tinned food, and odd systems of oppressive society.

The stories feature characters who accept the world as it exists for them, there’s no rebellion against the systems they are trapped in, beyond minor and limited expressions of civic disobedience — even when they bring a tormentor to a violent end, it is presented as acceptable within the system that they exist within.

In Waxy our heroine lives in a world where women are put through school merely to work in a factory, while the men are educated until they are old enough to take Exams, and earn big Exam prizes. The men are generally coddled, and the society is built around their needs alone. When she finds Paul, an unregistered man, she finds herself happy to an extent. Despite their efforts they have a child, birthed with a bowl movement and soon they are blackmailed by their neighbours.

And so on.

It’s all presented in a very matter of fact way, to explain the way the world exists for these people. In Mermaid little is made of the capturing of a mermaid (who isn’t a romantic top/bottom half, just a general 50/50 spread of fishiness and humanity) to keep the protagonist’ very tall brother company.

A kind of body-horror abounds, but not one that sets and real expectations — there is no rightness in shape, but more a kind of obscure sculpture garden of persons that you wander through. For example, the protagonist’s father in Mermaid was so tall that when he died they wanted twice the amount of money for his coffin. In a fit of stubborness, the son donated his body to science and retained a finger, to be buried in a child’s coffin instead.

This is the flavour of the book. A kind of easy acceptance of the horrible compromise of peoples under strange circumstances. In Edward, Do Not Pamper The Dead — Edward’s parent’s die, but he and his wife keep ti a secret so they should not be assigned others to live with them. When the authorities find out, they are allocated a tiny woman referred to as The Child, and Horace. This unspoken of presence that invades their lives as a force of nature rather than an agreement made by active parties looms over all of the larger society elements in the collection.

They cannot be free of their oppression because they often cannot understand it to be oppression.

The book contains hundreds of tiny moments where something disgusting is switched for another disgusting thing. For example, Horace picks is nose and attaches the bogeys to the wall behind his bed. This is obviously disgusting, but Edward regrets buying Horace the present of liquorice because it turns those bogeys stuck to the wall black, as if it was swarming with flies.

Aside from the powers that loom over the protagonists of the collection — there are the returning themes of women finding a kind of self, comfort, truth, or form. Like in the opening story, Unstitiching:

There are a few stories like this in the collection. Simply a telling of a history. A report on a movement. There’s a deft picking at the neurosis of the world seeing women who exist as themselves. The idea that there is a way to remove the oppressive systems around people, and unstitching can take place that is so fundamental it would be impossible to turn back the unspooling of the movement — a new reality that becomes obvious and in that replaces the old reality.

Pick up The Doll’s Alphabet over here from Fitzcarraldo.

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I don’t know if I made it very clear that I loved the collection? To clarify: I loved it.

I do need some help though. I simply don’t understand the title piece:

Let me know what I’ve missed?

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Please throw a like into this particular tweet.

Tim Clare is back with his particular brand of writing ramble.

Particularly interested in this.

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Today’s song is 11 Ecm by Carsten Lindholm:

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Thank you for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett with a very full stomach. It was proofread by no one. Reply to this email to tell me your favourite strange birth in the Camilla Grudova collection, Tweet at me to tell me about a typo, join me on medium to let me know that kind of masochist your are. Remember, a picture a day will keep the thing from It Follows away because it mostly creeps up on you from behind and you’ll probably see it in your front-facing camera?

Hello, have you ever considered letting god into your life? What about just one of the Greek ones turning up? They used to do it a lot, but I guess they don’t get out so much any more.

Today is Philip Whalen’s birthday, or would be if he were still alive. To celebrate, let’s take a peek at Invocation and Theophany:

The whole poem can be read here. The poem is about the invocation, the desire of a poet to bring forth a god to appear in front of him. The first and second verses are about his frustrations, his desperation to make something happen with his word. He’s in the right place, by the sea shouting for deities who represent the deep. And they arrive, in procession — undercut by a conch-honk.

And they ascend, without a glance his way.

This is a very natural way for creative people to approach something like writers block — to ask for some divine help, to experience something unseen to record, to give back “the absolute freedom of action / my own mystery and weight carrying / independent beings…”.

But there is something loose in this in wanting to be consumed by an experience — to be submitted to the sea, to see a god, to be possessed — to give over to someone else to drive what’s in you that your hands can’t ladle out.

Which is similar to a poem published by our (and everyone else’s) fave, Kaveh:

Kaveh is, as always, the best. Here he’s talking about his letting slip of the reins, and hoping someone else with pick them up. Here the request isn’t to be consumed by a moment of divinity and to feature in their story which would tie them to some grand and cosmic point. Here, instead, is the request for:

“God to slider into my head quickly before I do.”

Which apart from be entirely perfect, is about a self in competition with a god to drive the poet. Kaveh is living the moment and not struggling for divinity, and instead this invocation is about a race to possess the body to tell the story.

After all:

“It’s difficult to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having”

Both are looking for their place in the world to have some meaning and that for the stories they tell to have a weight beyond their own existence.

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This week I discovered that there is new Four Tet:

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own #41 — it’s my birthday today (20th October), I am becoming like a well worn pebble in the stream of life (perfectly spherical). Feel free to try and skim me across the lake, at your earliest convenience. You can read old issues of ETTO here. You can read about my life as a dwarf here. You can tell me about typos here. If you would like to climb inside my head before I do, or take me to the beach to see gods ascend, feel free to reply to this email.

Following on, it seems, directly from last week’s ETTO about having some time off to be dead, we have this by Leila Chatti:

Leila uses the structure of the poem to undercut initially presented meanings — “she fishes the black tongue” sounds portentous, until it is recontextualised into the sock. “Slipping coins in the mouth” references the ritual of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead (a payment to cross the river in the afterlife), and the lesson being taught here. It’s mundane, it’s simple, but these are the things where people left their marks through repeated steps and years of finding the right way, for a small thing.

Anyone who has lost someone important to them know the sentiment of them having so much to teach you — and that this isn’t over now that they’re dead. These ghost rattle around inside you after they are gone, or they wrap around you, a kind of headed pelt you can ask questions of as you go. They can answer with the leftover air in their skin. It doesn’t last forever, but it last a long while.

Read it in Breakwater Review.

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I enjoyed this occult calendar.

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This week’s song (mix) is XEN GRIFFEY by THERAVADA

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, I have that Friday feeling we all know and love. Sorry it’s a short one, I have driven to Dorset to see the sea, I hope. This was written by @CJEggett and he only has eye for you.

During a moment of quiet in a Northampton chain pub I found this poem by Martin Glaz Serup on the Zeno Press site. Here’s a little snippet:

The poem is a kind of jaded Lazarus poem — a wish-thinking of not only coming back from the dead, but being dead in the first place, and how that would change and free a person.

It presents the return from the afterlife (or just some nothingness state) as a place. He wants to come back as accessories — gloves, a phone case — frivolous items that add a small layer of pleasure on top of the normal engagement with the world. Coming back as such things would mean being beautiful but weightless — unencumbered with the mundane responsibilities of life and society which we all submit to in some fashion.

“But most of all I would come back because it was possible.”

The poem is about freeing yourself from these things by visiting death. It’s a holiday to nothingness.

In the third stanza he forgets himself — he forgets he is wishing to be back from the dead and instead, describes searching for a “death-like sleep” and the associated locations and places. This was possibly a chance to visit a person, but it is the sleep that stands out — the place has a sense of a holiday about it, a boat, bunks, strong beer. There’s the prayer for sleep and the self-destruction through drink that is that wishing to be elsewhere.

Naturally this flips back — the realisation that we’re not always able to be on holiday. That battle with wish-thinking.

This is something we all do occasionally. We’ve all had our moments of wanting to do nothing, be nothing. And then we have those conversations with ourselves — those conversations seen in The Waste Land about nothing. After all, what is the point of us dreaming ourselves into nothingness?

What is the point of being alive if all you want is to be without anything? The practicality of life — the reality that you do generally have to go on and do something — comes to a meeting point. There is a negotiation that is gone through — you come to the point and ask — what is there to live for then?

BEAUTY! is made of leather, the smell of leather is the smell of beauty
and if I were to come back from the dead, I would come back for beauty
BEAUTY! gets along fine without its opposite
BEAUTY! gets along fine alone
BEAUTY! likes to receive guests on holiday, abroad, by appointment
though Sunday is a bad day

Beauty then! And, later, the act of putting in an effort. Beauty does get on fine without it’s opposite — although a holiday to the land of the dead is where the conversation starts, the freedom isn’t in having been dead and therefore free of your mundane chains of life. It’s in the choice to put in and effort now. Which of course, you can do without a boat trip.

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As is so often the case, I wasn’t aware of this poets work in any meaningful way until they passed away. Susan Elbe:

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We also have this over in Glass, by Stephanie Cui & Jasmine Cui:

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Today’s song is… this whole playlist — to my surprise:

I can also recommend returning to the WAC album, and in particular Time.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett who isn’t tired, you’re tired, the whole system is tired! Your homework this week is to tell a friend about this newsletter, but only while looking them straight in the eye. If you thought this week’s ETTO was a bit depressing — then remember there are people out there really into recycling. You look lovely today.

Here’s an excellently titled piece in Tinderbox by Stevie Edwards: Poem in Which My Student Writes Me to Explain that There Are More of Him, that He Is Not the Only One Who Is Offended by Feminists

Enjoy:

I like the way this one kind of slips off the page, it’s a detatched smearing of thick icing off the edge of the counter-top. The way it moves the pressure from the sexist remark made by one student into the unfulfillment of others — that to make the remark is to be easily marked as someone who would prefer to be playing frisbee or ticking the boxes towards whatever achievement they might want to also tick the box of. In the way that to say “you’re not what I expected” is to show that you’re unable to understand on some basic level that the world exists despite your expectations — and that parsing and understanding that is key to learning.

Which nuzzles next to the other half of the poem, the interior half that plays with the idea of conforming to those expectations — a kind of radical submission. This is rejected for the reality of self-love, identity, and a clearer non-conformity in the act of having a choice.

I spotted this because of the wonderful Nicole McCarthy, who I wrote about the other week here.

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Speak here, speak clear.

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Today’s song is The Rat by The Walkmen — which is a bit old but floated into my life today and was sung-along with as if ten years had not passed between now and the last time I heard it.

You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor
You’ve got a nerve to be calling my number

[…]

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own Number Thirty Eight. You’ve got a nerve, but please don’t stop calling. As always it was written by @CJEggett who is still in joyous, beautiful free-fall. Pick your new home. This rocks, and so do you. Please share that I exist to other people who exist.

This week has been filled with me dipping in and out of A Vision. It’s something I should have read a long time ago, rather than just reading about — because it is entirely bonkers. A Vision is the philosophical/metaphysical work of W B Yeats that he put together while experimenting with automatic writing. It’s where his concept of the gyre comes from (you know, the one from the box-office smash hit, The Second Coming).

The process of the automatic writing, and the writing produced from process and dreams by himself and George (his wife) is described a little like as haunting. As a romantic, Yeats was obviously haunted — or, as he presents somewhere in the opening section titled A Packet For Ezra Pound: “some drop of hysteria still at the bottom of the cup?”

But the descriptions of bringing the work to life via a variety of forces and persons includes descriptions of Frustrations (capital fuh) who come to him as people and feeling and distractions — and, specifically in one movement as a someone who tells Yeats not to make notes because he will summarise at the end, and then forgets his point.

Which is very much my brand.

Anyway, have a look at some of the utter madness inside this work:

Also, I found this to accompany it.

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Today’s song is the excellent Miami by Baxter Dury. Baxter is the son of Ian Dury, and presents something a little similar, but entirely his own. It is a kind of spoken word over repeated loops that lend themselves as a simple canvas bed for his filthy voice.

If you liked Miami, then I can also recommend Palm Trees and most of his other work.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. I am the night chef, you are a river of dead fish, we’re all Miami — except it’s not the famous one. This is a kind of madness. Invite your friends to subscribe to this newsletter via this linkette.