The Tower of Babel
In the summer of 2010 I found myself collecting and downloading reproductions of works of art that referenced the Tower of Babel which I pasted into a new sketchbook. By the end of the summer, I had painted a series of 12 towers on A1 paper, another 12 ‘Small Towers’, this time around a foot square in format, and a number of studies and sketchbook pages on the same theme.
Interviews with Nine Poets
Mercurius editor Nidia Hernandez takes the poetic pulse of 2022 by interviewing nine poets at the Miami Book Fair: Robert Pinksy, Victoria Redel, John Freeman, Su Cho, Sherry Shenoda, Diane Thiel, Kemi Alabi, Shelley Puhak, and Peter Balakian. Listening to these remarkable voices is an excellent way of wrapping up 2022 and ushering in 2023…
This Voice
This Voice is a multi-media work by Andrew Hodgson. Presented here are: This Voice (1), an audio-visual work commissioned for Humber Mouth - Hull Literature Festival, 2021, and the text for a companion piece, This Voice (2).
Blanca Varela
“Blanca Varela is neither pleased with her discoveries nor drunk with her songs. With the instinct of the true poet, she knows when to be silent” - Octavio Paz
Noir
Noir is a new piece from Imogen Reid, first published in Praxis, Eds: Andrew Hodgson, Chris Clarke and Rosie Snajdr, Manchester, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021.
MUEUM
Mercurius is delighted to share a chapter from SJ Fowler’s novella MUEUM. A work of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.
Réka Nyitrai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The surreal has always played a pivotal role in my writing, essentially as a tool / strategy for dealing with suppressed emotions; uninviting reality, and unfulfilled dreams and desires. My poems afford an opportunity to disrupt the everyday with the unusual.
Go On, extract
An exclusive extract from Tania Hershman’s debut novel: "How to tell your story? “I want to talk,” the Author says on page 1. The Narrator who has been assigned to assist her knows that what is needed now is permission. “Go on,” says the Narrator - and a book is born.
Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.
As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on."
The Climate and the Dreamers
Two poems
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS extract
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS is an anti-novel, a modern epic poem and method-poem in action. Using umpteen numerical and circadian constraints, melville spent one year harvesting and re-planting imperatives, assertions, instructions and ‘facts’ – so you don’t have to! The language of corporate, cultural and state instruction is our new lingua franca, but what, and how, are these instructions instructing us? Read this book to find out. A must-read for anyone who exists today, or tomorrow.
Excavating Kafka
My handmade collages are intended as a rebuke to the lifeless perfection of Photoshopped images. They are also intended to provoke an authentic response by combining images in a way that challenges old habits of seeing.
Thank you but how am I free?
I am a free and full of hope.
Although.
In Twigs Nor Sky
This selection of wee poems moves through English countryside, from winter into spring. There are so many forgotten gods & demons hiding in England’s landscapes ... and now – after the great ‘transformation’ caused by a tiny dangerous organism, and as our planet’s weathers change ever more quickly – these presences – through all earth’s landscapes – seem to be becoming more noticeable again.
Let’s Go Round Again
1. 200
The canal’s tinge is grey suds and the level is too high, but these things are not our concern. Come out from the overhanging canopy still dripping the remnants of a shower into the lapping water, and creamy chippings glare, the sky the bright but dark blue of high summer. A storm has come and gone, not even a black smudge at the edge of memory.
Five Poems
While referencing the Judea-Christian tradition, these poems were influenced by my encounters with Zen, Shinto, and religious naturalism in Japan, where I have lived most of my adult life.
Gabriel Gudding Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“If art partly functions by pulling us out of our common habits of perception, maybe it necessarily offers a foretaste of the way the real will transgress against itself in crime, catastrophe, and accident: poetry's untidiness seems to adumbrate the unvraveling of everything…”
Walk in the Dark
An essay on walking at night through London, a city that has always been loved by nocturnal ramblers and insomniacs, of which Dickens is only the most famous.
Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Moon River’
When I was a kid, “Moon River” was part of the atmosphere. For several years in the early sixties it was ubiquitous, a persistent favorite on middle-of-the-road radio and on TV variety shows, de rigueur for every “pop” singer, one of those grownup survivors in a rock & roll world.
Whale Therapy
“There comes a point when you will try anything. Harriet described herself as a whale therapist and said she would use techniques associated with these giant sea mammals to ease my anxieties. It seemed like a reasonable idea – I'd heard of equine therapy – so I turned up at a large detached house on the Loop Road in Whitehaven and waited for my instructions.”
Beachcombing
These prose poems express the mess of hope, fear, memory, longing and, above all, uncertainty that’s left behind when the desiccated three-word slogan of our brave new soundbite world has been tossed away.
The never-ending quest…
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