Face Front, True Believers!

 

It's no exaggeration to say that The Author Has Been Tweeting: A Graphic Poem, copies of which began shipping this very morning, represents the beginning of something I've wanted to do for something like a quarter of a century. I don't mean the subject matter, obviously: who could have predicted, back then, how the person who inspired its (entirely fictional, and there's a disclaimer on the back to that effect) main character would turn out? No, I mean the form: the idea of doing a poem as a comic. I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'm surprised people don't do it more, because it just seems to me that the two forms - sequential art and poetry - go together so well, and complement each other in fascinating ways. A poem moves from verse to verse on the way to its conclusion: a comic does much the same thing, moving panel by panel. So many great passages in comics feel like a kind of poetry anyway: why not try doing that deliberately? As I say: a great idea. 

But not an original one. Because, like most great ideas in comics, it comes from (or at least I got the idea from) Mr Alan Moore. 

When I said 'something like a quarter of a century' in the first paragraph I was allowing for the possibility that I might not necessarily have picked up a copy of Caliber Press' Alan Moore's Songbook when it first came out, in 1998; but, you know, I could very well have done. I was an inveterate haunter of my local branch of Forbidden Planet in those days, regularly popping in to spend some of my student loan money on the new issues of Preacher, The Invisibles or anything else that caught my eye. And, at some point, this collection of work written by Moore for Caliber's series of Negative Burn anthologies must have fishhooked my ocular socket, because I bought it, I devoured it and, years later, it's still one of my favourite entries in Moore's canon. Note that I don't say the best: it obviously isn't that, it's a caprice compared to, say, Promethea, a mere bagatelle when set beside From Hell (which also, incidentally, combines comics and poetry - Gull, the absolute madman, is always slipping into iambics to deliver his various speeches, especially on his epic coach ride through London with Netley; as indeed does V in his eponymous series), but, well - how can you not love a comic which features a jaded Godzilla, fantastically drawn by Art Adams, declaring that he's tired of 'Trampling Tokyo'?

Moore's Songbook - and yeah, sure, he called them songs and he even actually sung some of the fuckers but a song that you read on the page, if it's good, if it hangs together and is deep enough, is still a poem, just ask Leonard Cohen - was proof of concept, and for years I dreamed of working with an artist to set some of my own work, not to music, but to images in the same way as various artists, commissioned by Caliber, had done for Moore. But it remained a dream, a project for a rainy day or that moment all artists dream of when someone with access to several suitcases full of large-denomination bills asks you 'so. What would you really like to do?' until last year, when I started drawing and learned, to my surprise, that not only did I not suck at it, but that if I worked at it I could get pretty good. 

And now here I am with The Author Has Been Tweeting, my first graphic poetry zine (there will be more), which you can buy from my store on ko-fi right now! Putting this together has been a fascinating process and I'll probably talk more about it in future entries - in particular, as someone who regularly creates videos to go with her poems, I want to talk about the cinematic qualities of comics as a poetry medium - but for now it's just turned five on Friday evening and I feel like having a celebratory beer. So, until the next time, Gojira, Gojira, GO! 

Books and their Binding

 I have two habits, both bad, when it comes to my projects. The first, and probably the most annoying, is that of announcing I will do a thing, then it never happening. Some of you will probably have realised by now that the second volume of Albian Dreams has slipped into this category. Ditto definitely the anthology of my criticism I was going to put together, and most probably the idea of making a YouTube video of my essay about what I'm going to refer to here as that Todd Field movie to save myself the hassle of looking up how to do that bloody accent over the 'a' on here again. Chalk it up to my ADHD, I guess. 

But running that habit close in terms of annoyance is a similar but slightly different one, probably also a result of the aforementioned neuroatypicality, which is that of not announcing something I'm actively working on but assuming I have at some point, such that I wind up, as I did in my last entry, offhandedly referring to a project I have not only never openly announced on here, but have not in fact even alluded to. 

Which brings us to stuckfearkarma. 

stuckfearkarma is my newest poetry pamphlet, and the first pamphlet since names and songs of women which I have chosen not to publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, because I am increasingly unhappy about having any association with Jeff Bezos and the rest of his creepy fascist chums. It's true that KDP is an extremely convenient platform, but frankly I'm sick of using platforms associated with a class of people who are, on a daily basis, making the planet harder and harder to live on with their bloated egos and their TESCREAL bullshit. I think the moment that finally made me decide that I want to start transitioning my publishing output, such as it is, away from this deeply spiritually bald man was the moment when he decided to boorishly pop a bottle of champagne to cut off William Shatner's ruminations on his extremely high atmosphere (emphatically not 'space') flight: 

Here was a man, Shatner, whose defining work as an actor is inextricably linked with sci-fi dreams of space colonisation confronting, in real time, the deep depression he felt on looking down at our fragile planet from a point of our atmosphere on the very border of space. I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe what Shatner is dealing with here as cosmic horror. It is notoriously the case with him that what he says when out of character is usually at best wrong-headed and at worst utterly repellent but here, for the first time in years, it seemed he had something genuinely interesting, even revelatory, to say. 

And because the richest man in the world couldn't stand the fact that for a few short minutes he wasn't the centre of attention, he barged into frame and started spraying fizzy plonk around like he'd won a fucking grand prix. 

Wanker. 

In fact, more than just a wanker. Let's face it: Jeff Bezos is a cunt. 

And it has been a long-standing principle of mine that I don't work with cunts. I won't be on the same bill as them. I won't be published by them. I won't be friends or make nice with them. It's harmed my career in many ways, but I'd rather stick by my principles than sell out for success. And things have reached a point where I feel I have to apply that principle to the platform I have self-published most of my work on for the past decade. 

So stuckfearkarma will be self-published in a much more old-fashioned way. And as I was considering that, another thought struck me: what if, as well as publishing it, I bound every copy myself? What if I celebrated this change by making a genuinely handmade object? 

So I learned bookbinding. 

Which, for what I wanted to do, turned out to be a bit of a faff. Because in order to learn all the techniques, I had to make two hardback notebooks before I could learn what I needed to do to hand-bind the pamphlets, which is basically just a simple bit of sewing. 

Although to be honest, I've never been that great at sewing, either. 

Still, I learned a lot. Not just how to passably sew up some fascicles but hammering out spines, enrobing boards in fabric, and lettering both by hand and machine. I'm not going to be volunteering for any restoration projects any time soon, but I'm grateful for the experience. And, despite my cackhandedness and my long covid making some of the tasks involved physically exhausting, I think the final products - at least of this apprentice work - looked pretty good in the end. 

That being said - I don't know if I will go with my original plan of manually binding the pamphlets. stuckfearkarma will still come out - but I may just get it printed in the traditional fashion. I might even just have it stapled. What with moving and various other things I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and I simply don't feel I can spare the time to sit my ass down and sew up dozens of spines. And besides, there's one other little matter to deal with before the pamphlet comes out.

Which is that I am publishing The Author Has Been Tweeting, the graphic poem I've been working on for the past few weeks, as a zine. So GET HYPE for that!

Proof of Life

 This is just a quick entry to let those of you still reading this know I am in fact still alive. My intention to try and write something, if not every day, then at least every week, has taken a fairly comprehensive beating in the last few weeks, though I am a little buoyed up by the realisation that this entry, when it goes live, will mean this blog already has as many entries for 2025 as it does for the whole of 2024. This is largely to do with my having moved or, more precisely, me still being in the process of moving - having been forced out of my old flat due to a disagreement with the landlord about what constituted a reasonable amount of rent for the property, I am currently staying with family while trying to find somewhere else to live. I'm sure it will come as a shock to you that this is not proving easy: as an underemployed multiply mentally and physically disabled fat trans woman on benefits you would think private landlords would be goring each other like bulls in Pamplona as they beat a path to my door but this does not, in fact, seem to be the case? Weird. And my attempts at sorting out social housing are proving similarly frustrating though there, at least, I have people on the case. But obviously all of this is taking up a lot of my time, so snatching a moment to jot down an update here and there has been difficult. 

One thing I have been managing to snatch time for fairly consistently has been preparing a new version of one of the earliest projects I attempted when I started drawing a little over a year ago - specifically, creating a comic book version of my poem 'The Author Has Been Tweeting'. It's been gratifying to see how much my skills have improved, especially when it comes to drawing stuff outside of my usual comfort zone like boats, furniture, architecture etc. There's a two-panel page in this which I'm really proud of not just in terms of subject matter but in terms of my understanding how comic book pages work - the weird cinematics of the comic strip space. I'm thinking that when this is finished and I can get it scanned I might release it somehow as a zine. 

Yes, I am still working on stuckfearkarma too. I have an MSS ready to go in PDF format there, and just need to sort out the cover and get it printed. Whether I can stick to my original plan of handbinding the pamphlets remains to be seen, however. I guess it depends on how important that is to people compared to getting hold of a copy sooner rather than later. However I wind up publishing it, though, it won't be through Kindle Direct Publishing - I'm thinking it's time to get out from the shackles of the Bezoid permanently. Which might mean delisting the existing books I have on KDP at some point and looking at getting some new editions printed, maybe even working with an actual publisher, assuming any would have me. Who knows? Maybe it might be time to do a selected...

Other projects I'm working on include a new video for my YouTube channel about an old sci-fi story I've been thinking about a lot lately. Unlike a lot of my videos, which I tend to produce as just visual companions to essays posted on here, I feel like this one really does need to be done in video format - it just feels more 'tubey'. There might even be a couple of companion videos to go with it, because I've been rereading a bunch of other old stories by the same guy and I have Thoughts about those, too. If you want an idea of the general vibe, check out that thing I wrote about Elon Musk a few years ago, but with some more stuff about AI, art, and how hard the basic assumptions of some of that embarrassingly old sci-fi seem to be to shift, in the case of certain peoples' minds at least. A deficiency of imagination. 

Finally, with one fairly obvious exception: the pictures accompanying this entry were all taken at Minster Acres Retreat Centre on a retreat with some colleagues from the local Recovery College at which I volunteer. This is not something I discuss in any great detail on this blog, both for reasons of general confidentiality and my own tendency towards reticence on some aspects of my life, and to be honest this is not going to change much. But I am, as I've mentioned before, in the process of developing a programme of creative writing workshops for students there, so I imagine some insights from the process of devising and giving said workshops may well find their way into this blog in some general way. 

And at some point, I need to write a piece about Paul Schrader that I really am not looking forward to writing, but given how much I've written about his movies, and how much many of them have influenced my own ethical outlook, I guess I kind of have to. 

Eggshells on a Butcher's Flag

Eggshells on a Butcher’s Flag

For: Jarman, Rudkin, Gupta, Gray

You tell me you have to walk on eggshells,
and I wonder what eggshells you mean.
Is it the fact you can’t call me a fag
because the same blood flows in both our veins?

Is it that you can’t say how much
I disappoint your sense of your own manhood
when I paint my face and talk
like I’m a girl?

Is it the thought that all the other men
laugh at you behind your scrum-half’s back,
snickering if I’m the best you managed,
there must be something wrong with you as well?

Let me tell you something: for years I woke each morning wishing
for a love I thought was cut off 
 by the cage of hair impaling 
every inch of a body I feared 

would never move the way it wished to
for fear of fingers which might, first, 
just point and laugh - then, later, curl
into corrective fists; for years I woke up knowing

that the hands I wished would touch me,
the strong hands of a tough and boylike girl
enclosing mine and giving me a space
where I could yield in ways that your man’s world

would never let me, making me feel safe enough
to let my body tumble, without fear, into joy,
were just a fantasy that I span to myself 
in my spurned lover’s bed, back in that house
where you still saw me as a boy, where

every move was policed…

But they weren’t fantasy. I have been held
and held in turn those hands,
faced down the pointing fingers and the fists,
and plucked and burned and alchemised away

the spines that once imprisoned me;
have loved in ways that your straight pride
could never let itself be loved, and lost so many 
that your stones will never honour. 

Like one I knew who fought 
to earn the things you took for granted,
and in doing so proved more a man
than you will ever be, and grew beyond
even that patriarchally
prized category,

yet died alone, despairing
that the world you think so just -
no, not a world that you think just,
a world that’s given you so much

and yet by which you still feel slighted -
would refuse to grant them space
which you assume you take by right.
Oh, you could never stand one night

in that Bengali’s platform shoes,
yet you insist we listen to your
clapped-out Clapton blues 
about how people hate this country

as if that hatred only ever went in one
direction; as if that hatred didn’t form
its own long, proud tradition of prick-kicking,
as if that hate were not a higher, purer way

of loving Britain, as if we who work 
as if we live in the first days of something better
were not your one hope of deliverance
from the true bringers of terror, 

who advance with an absorbent flag
in one hand and with Trident in the other
then use the chloroform infused 
in butcher’s apron rag to smother

you right back into your stupor…
But you’ll never see those crooks for
what they are. Just as you’ll never see
the one who really walks on eggshells 
isn’t you. It’s me. 

This started out as an attempt to transcribe, from an audio recording, an old poem of mine which has been much on my mind lately; but in the process of doing so I found myself changing some of the lines because things which were then worries and uncertainties are now things I have experienced; and then it expanded further to include a national critique, deriving largely from the fact one of the things I bonded with one of the four dedicatees over was a shared love of Derek Jarman's writing. It may expand further still: I feel there may be work to do to stitch the national back into the personal here, but by the time I came to what is currently the last verse it was very late (or, depending on how you look at it, very early) and I badly needed sleep. 

The pictures are an attempt at drawing Rachel Reeves sulking on the front bench which wound up looking more like an Alasdair Gray woman, and a study from Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha. 

The Peace I Want

Alasdair Gray, from a photo used

in his obituary in the Paris Review.

I haven't drawn much this month.I haven't written much. I haven't updated this blog. I haven't done much of anything. Early in the month I had to go through a brutal two-hour telephone interrogation as part of my

PIP application. Then less than a week later I learned that a fellow poet had taken their own life. This stirred a whole bunch of complicated feelings, not least around my own almost constant desire to do the

same. In the past few weeks my sleep has been all over the place - long nights lying awake looking at abstracts of overdose autopsies, dropping off midafternoon, sleeping either too much or too little.

Then this weekend I got my decision letter -shockingly early, given how long I was advised to wait, but the reason for that became clear when I realised it was a refusal apparently written to be as insulting as possible. Not a rational surprise - they almost always refuse initially- but still an emotional blow. And all this against the background of the Starmerite regime's ongoing war against trans and disabled people, and the fact I need to find somewhere new to live by July.

I've been rereading Gray's 'Lanark' lately. Gray is forensic and unstinting in showing what a horrible place this world can be for those on the wrong end of it-how utterly and unrelentingly it destroys, body and soul, those of us who can't mutilate ourselves into something adapted to mesh with its cogs, and who instead wind up being slowly, painfully ground down. That's been on my mind a lot this month.

'Stay alive out of spite!' they say, and it's true that part of me, knowing full well that there are people out there who would happily see me dead, wants to keep going to cheat them of that victory. But it keeps getting harder. And increasingly I just want it to be over. I want the peace of knowing there's no more of it to come.

Our Revolution... (video)

 

Our Revolution Will Not Be Illegalised

I am not a TV,

a CD, a TS, a TG,

a scam, a trap, a troon,

a 'huge problem for a sane world'

(though I may be a problem for you);

I am a biological woman

and my bloods will show you that's true,

but long before I got on hormones,

and long before you ruled,

I knew just who and what I was.

I knew it when I sang the words

to Jackie's Strength on my own in my room,

refusing the pull of my diaphragm,

sanctioning breath to my throat,

awake and alive and aligned with myself

in ways outside the scope of your court. 

I knew it in moments of pushing my body

so hard I could throw it aside: knew

when other girls threw me, knew in the honesty

miles forced upon me, the oneness I felt

with the play of a sword, and in dancing,

and dancing, and dancing, and dancing,

I knew it in the way I felt suits fit me,

knew it on my wedding day

when we both joked that I looked like a lesbian, 

knew it in the things we did for years before our marriage;

knew when my first girlfriend held my hands

in her much bigger hands;

knew on my back in a dozen beds where

other bodies helped mine understand.

What I know that I am remains constant

whatever the laws of this land

which beggars itself for the bucks of rich bigots,

where a judge, as a boon to his neighbour the litigant,

can make thousands of people no longer legitimate

with one lazy stroke of his doddering hand

- an absolute bargain for seventy grand,

but meaningless. I've always known what I am

and no bent court can change that. I'm not a KC,

I'm something more worthwhile, that I fought to be,

and I assure you that silk looks much better on me:

an all-natural trans woman, already free.