Author: Matthew Andrews

‘N in Scrabble’ / Other Po-et-ry

I’ve removed the 29 poem-posts of work from my pamphlet N in Scrabble (OtHeRwIsE uNpUbLiShEd PoEmS oct 2019 – march 2020) as it’s now published / available in the form of a PDF here. Five poems have been removed and another from the same period added.

Soon there will be a pamphlet, and somewhat later a collection, available in print from presses other than Soviet District / my own self-publication. I also have individal poems forthcoming in places I’ll link to as and when they appear there. I know that sounds vague but everybody’s publication schedule has gone off-kilter so there’s no point saying ‘this will be published in July’ if that’s unlikely to happen (I’m not sure what’s going on with Mineral no. 4, for example, in which I’ll have a piece as mentioned in a previous post).

On a related note in the next few weeks I’ll be putting out an insistent call for submissions to Pragma, with more detail of what the thing wants to be and what we’re looking for, as well as directly soliciting work from a few people and of course getting around to reading through what’s been recieved thus far.

Thank you for reading. Don’t die. Abolish the police.

Virtual Commodities, Material Dreams

Obscene title aside ‘The Imagined Band’ is now up on the Youtube, both as a single full album video with vaguely accurate timestamps and a playlist of individual songs. Also check your preferred artist exploitation matrix / streaming service if you wish to supply me with some undeserved pennies.

50 hAnD-nUmBeReD “””lImItEd EdItIoN””” CDs are available to order from Bandcamp for £6 + P&P (the price of a Wetherspoons pint over the cost of production). 为人民服务 !!!

 

Dead Poet Salon

I’ve recorded a reading of an old poem of mine from May 2018 for Petersfield Bookshop’s ‘Dead Poet Salon’ online open-mic (which, as with my International Poetry Circle videos, is posted on the @PragmaJournal Twitter account again as I still intractably/unhelpfully refuse to return to using social media ‘personally’). Anyway. The poem’s called ‘For Roger, For Jack’, written as a tribute/’exaltation’/whatever of the life and work of R. F. Langley (on whom I started writing a Master’s dissertation last year, which will be finished One Day when I’m able/mentally well enough/etc).

The video can be found here. For accessibility reasons and so on the text of the poem can be downloaded here: For Roger For Jack.

Cheers. I’m a little uneasy about some of this online ‘poetry explosion’ vis-à-vis COVID-19 (readers treating poetry as some sort of tonic/coping strategy/intellectual health food), but from a writing or ‘productive’ perspective it’s deeply necessary to be working at the moment just as per any other occasion of extreme biopolitical interpellation (plus, as I’m doing on this blog, attempting to account/compensate for delays to publication). It’s excellent to have these sort of attempts at ‘communal’ performance opportunities during pandemic-lockdown, at least. I’ve started working on a long ‘observational prosimetrum’ about the isolation period, entangling three immediate and false-transcendental narratives/trajectories (of the coronavirus, trying to get sober, and an inescapable and incommunicative platonic heart-longing) with journal/diary entries, both my own and others, as a concentration on the apparent impossibility of nature writing at a time when anthro-infrastructure is under attack by a virus ‘of and against nature’ while trying to avoid conceding to an ecofascist ‘Earth’s revenge’ myth… And a lot more besides, including reflections on why that cunt James Corden is in my dreams being beaten up by John Ashbery and James Baldwin (and that other Fred Perry prick from that sitcom is being spit roasted by Paul Celan and Ezra Pound). Enough about that project, though. I hope you enjoy the reading-video.