Self Portrait at 27
by: Maria Sledmere , June 14, 2021
by: Maria Sledmere , June 14, 2021
Introduction
On 7 March 2020, I conceived the title neutral milky halo in the context of wanting to say something about nourishment, emotional stasis and everything seeming impossible. I had just written a journal article, ‘Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene’, for Coils of the Serpent’s special issue on ‘Im/Possibility’. I was thinking about how through poetics, dreams and theory we might encounter ‘a possibility (even necessity) of an outside of capitalist realism, a glimpse at a true breaking point for the naturalised illusion of a reality that ostensibly is without alternatives’. (Büscher-Ulbrich, Casper, Kugland & Lieber 2021) The pamphlet began in mid-February and took shape over the early months of lockdown. The halo refers to a kind of aura or ambience enmeshed with but simultaneously extra to the text. This idea and my epigraph in the pamphlet are taken from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, where she writes, ‘a halo arises that transcends the phrase, do you feel it?’—‘The halo is the it’. I wanted to circle around that declaration, weaving myth-scapes out of domestic confinement: processing memory, loss and desire beyond capitalist normality; the sense of ‘becoming a body’ in lyric acts of continuity, impulse and address.
In 2018, I wrote nature sounds without nature sounds: a pamphlet whose title encompasses an infinite, circling tautology which tries to get at what ambience is. Can we have ‘nature sounds’ without actual ‘nature sounds’? What is the supplementary relation of a skylark’s song to a recorded skylark’s song, and how does poetry ethically and aesthetically respond to either? How can the page be a score for the sonic prosodies of ecological loss? I wanted the book to be a medial space where the reader is caught between ecological presence and the alienation of ‘without’, to somehow write all the way around the expression, its acoustic reproductions. neutral milky halo is also about sound: vibration, ornamentation, duration and its affective, relational, somatic potential—the ‘sparkling quantity’ of birdsong, ‘silvery fluid coming out of the clouds’, ‘tessellation of meadows’. The poem ‘Irretrievable Sylvan Midi’ gestures towards a lost midi file whose forest music promises vernal replenishment, however imagined. I was thinking about the science fiction radio drama, Forest 404, where the protagonist Pan discovers rainforest sounds in the 24th century and learns about the nature that cataclysmic history has erased from daily life. Spring 2020 was something I experienced in equal parts outside, equal parts internet. This highly mediated reality can create a joyous, simultaneous experience of presence—the rush of scrolling through everyone’s Instagram sunsets at once—but I realise we are also in the accelerated process of archiving various erasures. There’s a melancholic, ‘lossy’ quality in our urge to reach out, filter, document share and post what catches our eye. What gets discarded or ignored in the process? And of course, all online content bears a real-world burden in the form of carbon expenditure, the metabolic upkeep of data-servers.
Several months after neutral milky halo’s release (Guillemot Press, 2020), I’ve gotten used to reading the pamphlet aloud to people. Each poem seems to result in a kind of suspension: ‘a way to orient in an atmospheric problem-space’. (Choy & Zee 2015) If Covid isn’t an ‘atmospheric problem-space’, I don’t know what is. Suspension means staying with a ‘stuck’ feeling and working through that; not necessarily towards resolution but into ‘art[s] of noticing, of living and thinking with’. (Choy & Zee 2015) Many of neutral milky halo’s poems are short because they are iterations of this lockdown suspension: performances of writing in a time where writing felt nearly impossible. As Denise Riley puts it, ‘You can’t, it seems, take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity’. (2012) It’s telling that ‘Flotsam’, the longest poem in the book, was written before I’d really got my head around the incoming pandemic. Language here performs ongoingness: held fugitive in ‘loops of oil’ and ‘the poem’ which is itself the wreckage of personal and political loss, the trash detritus of what declarations feel possible in the moment, and for that to be a mutual hold and escape.
In poetry, Marie Buck writes, ‘For a single moment your voice is something to someone somewhere—but that’s why it’s just a single moment’. (2020) Do you feel it? David Berman wrote ‘Self Portrait at 28’, a poem where the speaker practices directness and clarity: ‘I am trying to get at something / and I want to talk very plainly to you / so that we are both comforted by the honesty’. At the highly symbolic age of 27, I’ve been thinking about what it means to live and write through this year, to constantly ask, as Bernadette Mayer does at the start of ‘Failures in Infinitives’: ‘why am i doing this?’ ‘Self Portrait at 27’ doesn’t look in the mirror so much as trace the mirror’s fractures to ‘get at something’: I wanted to work through memory and dream, gender, childhood and futurity, to ‘speak plainly’ to moments of realisation that live on in the nerves, that carry as echo, notches of mutation, touch, divination and failure. The poem offers shimmers of intersecting events and intimacies, felt in sensuous narrative potential which nevertheless dissolves into lyrical simultaneity—a haloing language which spins again, runs and coils, which wants to live on.
Self Portrait at 27
After David Berman
I.
I want to exist in shorthand for something unseen
and consent to be used
in general contribution to product development
distributed across seance
the trauma rhizome of family
Do I have to consent to everything
in being born early?
I know this title is stolen and dumb like
spending all your money on sugar and beer
just to be with someone, plagiarising
their most vulnerable cache of fantasy
holed up after the walk
on this particular day in what was once called ‘the country’
I don’t have a dog anymore
I imagine going forward
only as a VHS sensation
of landscaped psychedelia: gelatinous grasslands
and time swamps, soft-boy forests, clearing refusals
of the rippling and needle
Got narrative stuck in the whorl of my smallest finger
which is called Pinkie
like the man who did the murder
in the novel Brighton Rock
with a heroine called Rose
whose good-natured waitressing
and boundless love I aspired to…
Stop if this is boring
you can put everything down and return
to the happy errata of that Saturday, lying
on sundown hillside south of the city
put this book aside, delete him
how did you know
it would truly get worse
in the whisper network of like
who out of all of us might be the first to die
but you watch while I piss in the evergreen
trees we don’t know the name of
I wouldn’t mind being alive with you
at least a little while longer, can we try out
to know it is nothing
like going on a new medication
there is no river here to follow, only
a trapped nerve in the side of this monstera
I have been nursing
with tap water
the only child I’ll ever have
Will never send messages, even if scientists
are training spinach to do so, there are certain things
even a plant can’t say.
II.
But is this plain talk?
At some age or other
I forgot the word nature altogether
then it came back last night: climbing
the rowan tree with Simon, collecting
shells, mushing dream red berries
at the inflamed end of summer
before the English kids went back to school
we’d already gone
with wasps beneath our fingernails
watching the extended trailer
of jaded teenage years to come
Scottish, come high water
Like that time we brought whisky
to the corridors in solace, learned the art
of peeling labels to signify open sexual interest
leaving curls of fluorescent, capital rind and glue
where you might one day decide to find me independent
sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium
chloride, sulfate, hydrogen
carbonate, darling
In a convex altitude at the angle of my birth
not breathing
because I am so close to you in math class, my insides smeared
like a painting by Cecily Brown, you know the kind
where you don’t know where to look
it’s all strokes after all
like the dream I had where C. was stroking my hair
in Platonic cave, we were all gathered
to celebrate
listening to his girlfriend’s album
I was turned inside out
And every electrical stroke another moment
where I might live for all that, in commentary
become flesh
what palette you say was the same
in lavender blood wash of rose water
how much time am I supposed to stay in front of the painting
in the poem
in the dream of all this
in the album?
Green kindness
I wish I had some kind of animal to witness
bounding the hillside in the film
about the housing conditions of Glasgow in the 1970s
however many years old allows you to out-run
the rats, the trash
could we imagine
democratising the colour gold as beautifully?
III.
All that is seen in the glass is meadow
and places to roll around the outside-time
of dreaming tiredness
after tiredness
still operating machinery
or lyrical moodboard
misremembering allergies
only to be again here
Where I am asked what exactly is meant by this
going on not naming the mountains to be nineteen
in tenderness till I won’t die, speak plainly
The way a swan unfurls to seem sexy
reminds me of the napkins in this cafe
I frequented as a child, in memory I was alone
ejected too soon from school
the women fed us neat white
psychodynamic sandwiches
filled with chocolate spread
and never asked, “are you okay?”
A mortal line runs down the feminine
among my kin, bright charity pink
I am always told to check my breasts
which seem not to belong to this body
this poem
looking for lumps and clots
until in the dark
weighted
become another pop vector
wondering will I bleed today?
IV.
Listening to Judee Sill’s Heart Food
in the second I wake up in Ayrshire
ferry terminals
singing this island song
to the island sabotage
of no-time
Is spiralling out of all the I’s
left speaking in the meadow-ware
we plug in when there is nothing left
soft or hard
but the slow rush without sundialling
back from the dead — all is well
to instead draw salt
or the pressurised, vascular abstraction
of how I am feeling
pinned
is uncanny
in your arms
to go through the door
Flippantly therapised
I want to save my heart and its ache
for other situations, L. says
Your writings are always such little gems
in the email from Spain
I stud myself with D.’s policy on managing emotions
which is to say
everything else can be done but this
to delete and
every song in the world
has something tangent to say about love
but never the full aporia glow
of the nothing-not-nothing
put Marlboro out on your touchpad feeling
We need a word for everyone posting pictures
of sunset on the internet all at once
ashen pixels
between the months of January and October
155 mentions of ‘heart’
in the algorithmic consequence of being born
too early, I developed a blue
anatomical fondness for pain cliché.
Hey, don’t write
something too beautiful for this early
in the morning
warm wishes
Remember we stood on the docks and sung
‘The Kiss’ so loud the tourists stopped from their maps
to look at millennial sincerity in its fullest derangement
so much to say
sweet communion and all that mist
V.
I developed omen, a thirst
in writing this, while the Stansted 15 are released
from insane charges of terror-related offence
and my nan in her eighties is still not vaccinated
somewhere north of London
and we can’t go outside
not really
it’s all sugar and mud
and the infinite cold
Had I chained myself custodial to the poem
I would have finished it
Under the weighted blanket of someone else’s earnestness
a cloud does not pass go
or phone you back
drink lager
before coming water
without fund
the hospital where I would have been born
is under lockdown following one or more kinds of incident
Don’t try to write about this—you just called me
out of blue with serenity
said it will never snow
so long as you both will live
in the very full sky
sucked out of sun
fucking whiteness
so we decide lightly to kill
our tiny lungs
like crushing leaves
it’s just sex I suppose
The gentle motion of a wave is not
the same as a runway
VI.
And remember me by cookies:
skinny, sincerity, milk chocolate, caramel, jasmine
acts of self-harm I forgot
how to complete the form
when it asked for plans ahead, genders, I could take
this sort of design for my thighs
Like the swan thighs you want to read in the poem
Require a certain maintenance of touch
squat, lift and curve
you know the score, space bar, soft chorus
in hard-up loch for the taking
of theatrical sips
inside me
lambing season
on memory foam mattresses
the depths of industrial depot
how you hold us
gives way to sensual pulp
and meat
VII.
Stop thistling melodic the autumn
woundedness, stress-eating oranges
all morning legitimate
everyone says take it easy
do star jumps for only
every year of my life.
On the eve of Brexit I was in the Flying Duck
at some kind of drag show, after a garage band
did the whole thing
lipstick karaoke
your cheek broken drumkit
before the pandemic
flashing life before eyes, no setlist, punk butterfly
shred in the basement sweat
of fallen watching, between us squashed
everyone takes off their tops
I mean everyone, I drank endless pints of water
and knew this to be absolutely right and wrong.
The squall, new singles, captivating debuts
and stars that freckle the sea
will sign us
longitudinal rainfall
you have to think like a thin person
delete your cookies
elaborate contours
of the obsessively ordinary, to be everything
to be hilarious, consent
to be an indie front who speaks
instead of singing, twisting cigarette
to be stubbing the sentence out on your wrist
to just do this, at the bottom
of everything, to not think twice
to have party without bodies, to dance
lovely alone in your room to be blue
percolation of crisis to be this
violent loss to be sweetly returned
to sender, exhausted
to be sent up
date your browser
or techno disorder to have been so born
in your mother’s cry-laughter emoji
the trendy resurrection of smoking
arranging your legs around mine
is precarious, dressing for weather on Mars
Donald Trump’s visit cost Police Scotland £3.2m
to wait in the room with the flowering
window to fall
of snow is the issue, minor harmonising
assigned at birth the alien sense of
having been here before
not to be boy
or simply girl
I’m sorry
the moment pulled a strange bug from your hair
to be literal, to be no more yellow
turning the chord from blue, to forget
every flag, I love you
is a song in that smile you are giving
me or anyone for aphasia
sweeping this back
clear and sunny blonde
completely converted
to waste five years of my life
or the beautiful thing we made from it
climate slogans all over Sauchiehall Street
chalked up to be fucked
by apocalypse
thrash style, save all the animals
we killed, refreshing
another 404 of the future
won’t erase
incident, not to exist
in glitching
the same as before
every flower
with a tiny camera inside it
bends towards sunlight
once upon temperature
recorded sometime
in 1993, 1995
despite the rain
very careless
never driving below ninety
for any length of stanza
I could go for empty
miles in the car
and everyone kissing
bubbles
at the end of the night
not to go flat
in every extravagant
hustle for air
that’s us
REFERENCES
Buck, Marie (2020), Unsolved Mysteries, New York: Roof Books.
Büscher-Ulbrich, Dennis, Cord-Christian Casper, Emmanuel Tristan Kugland & Marlon Lieber (2021), ‘Im/Possibility: On the Production, Distribution, and Articulation of the Possible and the Impossible’, Coils of the Serpent, Vol. 8, pp. 1-13.
Choy, Timothy & Jerry Zee (2015), ‘Condition—Suspension’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 210-223.
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