Interview by Zoë Brigley
“Poetry doesn’t only have to exist as words on a page in a standard house font. We read them out loud, we listen to others, we watch them be performed… This poem is about noisy overlapping messages, it’s about everything being too much“
86K SUPERHIGHWAY
…endless looping | breaking flashes scrolling | heightened vision | REMEMBER TO BLINK | remember | to absorb | the story changes | the story stays | the same |but edited| the dizziness buffers | news cyclones | spin cycles | CLEANSE YOUR EYES | whitewash | machine learning | artificial | information falls | from the clouds | SEEING EVERYTHING | seeing nothing | there | are eighty-six thousand and four-hundred seconds | in a day | if you SLEEP enough | you can never be intelligent enough | REMEMBER TO BLINK | tearing mascara runs | tears streak black | sunken | eyes | Cofiwch Dryweryn | ruined village spires reappear | and I can't tell WHAT KIND OF CRISIS | this is | you | shouldn't have to suffer to be aware | the spark of resistance | scorch the forests | REMEMBER TO BLINK | please just give me something | to block the noise | PLANT TREES | to soak | for shade | for oxygen | but social housing | and lock yourself in your room | HIDE | under a doorway | LIE | under a table | under your bed | CLOSE YOUR EYES | lie | to yourself | LIE DOWN |because sometimes|self-protection is bliss…
This is an intriguing poem in terms of its formatting. It reminds me of Modernist manifestos or maybe also the Manics’ use of shouty capital letters. What inspired the formatting?
I wrote the majority of this poem in a day (17th August 2022) with the song “Low” by Cracker on repeat in my headphones as part of an ekphrastic project. I rarely write to a form, normally getting a feel for the rhythm and structure during the writing process. I sent myself an email that morning – just four very long unpunctuated lines. The words have remained mostly intact, and the editing process was about finding the right layout.
It was the themes in this stream-of-consciousness flow that influenced the formatting. It’s primarily about information overload and nothing typifies that more for me than the scrolling tickers that run across the screen on news channels – as if the story being presented isn’t newsworthy enough? That prompted the ellipses that bookmark the piece, creating a fragment of C21st existence, not the whole history book.
Sometimes a message on the ticker relates to the one before, and if you miss it, there’s a horrible feeling that you’re maybe lacking a little context sometimes. Trying to reflect this I wanted to break up the text without creating stopping points, and allowing the images and specific words to bleed and blend into each other – for example: and I can’t tell WHAT KIND OF CRISIS | this is | you | shouldn’t have to suffer to be aware can be read as “and I can’t tell what kind of crisis this is” “this is you” “you shouldn’t have to suffer to be aware”.
Poetry doesn’t only have to exist as words on a page in a standard house font. We read them out loud, we listen to others, we watch them be performed. I love graphic design, typography and posters. I made a really nice Instagrammable 7” square image for this poem, in the style of the record that inspired it – but it wasn’t enough. This poem is about noisy overlapping messages, it’s about everything being too much, so I started to posterize it. An advertisement for being overwhelmed, with key points clear for those of us without the concentration spam to read the fine print.
When a poem has something to say, like this one does (I hope), I like the idea of it being distributed at rallies or fly posted on boarded-up shop-fronts. There’s too many words for a placard, but with the main demands in bold it certainly takes a prompt from the activism of modernism, situationism, and political sloganeering. And the Manics have been a massive influence on my writing, both in terms of themes and style, and I think that having that complete aesthetic consistency across content and visual presentation is vital to my satisfaction with my work.
You use commands a great deal in this poem. It’s a little bit reminiscent of the ‘Choose Life’ speech in Trainspotting. I think you are a bit of a film buff? But it seems to me to have the same sense of having directives hurled at you?
Commands are a great rhetorical tool for engaging directly with the reader / listener. Stop, Look and Listen; Remember, remember the 5th of November; Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself. Explicit and memorable. But in this poem, these commands are just phrases and words that are reminders or notions in an inner monologue. They only become commands when I capitalize and put them in bold. Am I telling you or myself to remember to blink? Or all of us?
I was born in 1977, the year of punk rock and Star Wars, and rebellion has always been an intrinsic almost romantic belief in my life, and my default setting. When the film Trainspotting came out, and that poster (and bad pastiches) of it were everywhere – bus-stops, magazines, and my friends’ walls – and it summed-up everything that felt a boring, safe option to us, everything we tail-end Gen X’ers had to rebel against. And the very thing we ended up doing anyway, because it turned out that owning a starter home was preferable to overdosing on heroin.
Being told what to think, how to behave, how to live, isn’t always dictatorial and something to rebel against, despite my primary instincts. Sometimes these imperatives are useful and vital. I’m not a very practical human being, so if I’m told “Do Not Remove This Cover” by a sticker on an appliance, then it’s for my own good. But when these commands are shaped by political opinion or subjected to spin and bias, that’s where it becomes a challenge to comply.
There seems to be little room for discourse in political thinking anymore, no middle ground. We live in a world where every topic is a dichotomy – issues are black or white, for or against, and you have to choose a side, which can then compromise your views on other subjects. Freedom of speech seems a great virtuous and noble idea until it becomes freedom of hate speech, at which point you censor speech, and censorship is a tool of repression. My bold text is setting out a contradicting set of instructions: “seeing everything” “remember to blink” but also “sleep” and “close your eyes”. Which should you do?
This poem contains explanatory instructions about how I try and cope with an untold number of crises and events, when I myself have fatigue and a family to look after. Can I get enough information to know when to trust the media? How can I keep up to date with everything when there are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute? Do we prioritise planting trees or building homes? How can I continue to argue that “Stay Home, Save Lives” should be strictly adhered to when “Eat Out to Help Out” is broadcast through the same channels?
All I know is that I have kids to look after and bills to pay and even before I had cancer /PTSD / fatigue I didn’t have the energy or strength to cope with even thinking about half of these things, so I stopped watching the news and try and hide from it all. It’s not ideal, it’s a little selfish, but it’s working for now.
You reference the graffiti art / political slogan “Cofiwch Dryweryn” in the poem. What significance does that have for you?
There was wonderful image in the Cracker song that led to me adding an underlying ecological theme: the fruit is rusting on the vines. I was writing the poem in the middle of a heatwave, and the tops of the buildings of Capel Celyn became visible as the water levels dropped. What kind of world are we living in that we can see such clear levels of climate change that once-flooded villages reappear, and yet continue burning fossil fuels? Is it a climate crisis or a capitalist crisis?
Cofiwch Dryweryn does a lot of heavy lifting in this poem, not least because it’s bold and highlighted in red in at the centre of this panicking word storm. It took a while for me to feel confident using it here, it wasn’t in that first draft, only “ruined village spires appear”, but I’ve researched and referenced it carefully and used it in a number of ways to bring thematic strands together, and to add a stylistic note too.
As a work of art, the graffiti is brilliant – resistance symbolized. The splash of revolutionary red with the white lettering, reminiscent of days when red was the only flourish on a black and white newspaper, of agitprop screen prints, of Situationists. Paris ‘68 but in mid-Wales. That it’s been repainted over and over to keep the message living. When placing it in the poem I wanted it to be in the correct colour-way – maybe when I make a definitive poster version I’ll use the image itself. Also, when I added it, it made me think of Bill Drummond’s posters, which I love.
Then you have the command aspect: Cofiwch Dryweryn. I was born and raised in England, but moved to Wales over 25 years ago, and realised that as well as Britain trying to take over and exploit the world, English had done the same to Wales. It was only moving here and reading history books that I learned how “we” had flooded a valley in Wales to make a reservoir for our drinking water. Then you read about the causes of the Aberfan disaster, “our” beloved Churchill sending in the army to fight the striking miners of Tonypandy, Thatcher…. Remember Tryweryn, remember everything: this is what we / they did.
Finally, there’s the repetition of contradictory messages, and the black and white nature of political discourse. I care enough about my adopted home country that I believe in independence, but I’m not a nationalist, I can’t align myself with some of the unpleasant views and actions that have been uncovered taking place within some Welsh independence organizations. Cofiwch Dryweryn, sure, but at what cost? Replacing English/ British colonialism with Welsh isolationism or nationalism? Reopening mines when we all know now that coal is bad for the environment? Heritage over futurism?
This is the problem, Zoë. This is why I wrote this poem, because there are still only 86 thousand seconds in a day, but more data and information has been generated, published and shared while I wrote these responses than in all the previous centuries put together. My internet connection works faster than my brain does and there’s no pause button. I’m certainly not English but can I be Welsh? Will we save the planet? I don’t know what I think anymore: I have fatigue, too much on my TBR pile, and not enough time to listen to my records. I need a lie-down.
