Abstract
languishing, cute was conceived as a collaborative pamphlet about indie popstar Caroline Polachek. After the first draft gushed out of us on to a Google Doc in one intense fortnight circa August 2022, we realised it was a full-blown ‘playlist’ of jittery missives propelling Scottish canon forever tied to speculation (Edwin Morgan, Alasdair Gray, Naomi Mitchison …) into maximalist “high femme goth surrealism” via hyperpop, Celtic futurism and digital culture. Here we tend towards e-pistolary contemplations of retro-adolescence, fizzy ecology and mercurial slippy gurlhood to complicate notions of Scottish identity, nationhood, ecology, nostalgia and more.
Composed of two distinct halves, along with a middle section of poems written together, work within has previously been featured in The Poetry Review, Deleuzine and PROTOTYPE.
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[…] Messy as a teenage tumblr, flashy as a strobe light, this is two exceptionally generous poets bouncing off the walls of the backrooms with the energy of a thousand monster energies… here ~The Glitch~ is not a glitch but a stitch between windows, the glue between a b2b set, the rhythmic green hills of algorithmic infinity … and yet these re-mixes and e-mails traverse an internet of metal and cable, the business of poetry is conducted by staples through sheets of reconstituted tree::: there’s something old-school, decidedly analogue about all this. It feels like you could feel it. It feels like the push of a button, the caress of a bright cool screen. Actually no it feels warm and coarse, a cosy transmission rumbling, re-tuning itself like you’re flicking from station to radio station, flickering between noise & dialectical noise, patterns emerging in the static as the ether unknots itself, and the stuff of life comes spilling out […]
-- Dan Power
Endless aureate refreshment from Maria Sledmere and Ian Macartney, languishing, cute is a collection with all its push notifications turned on that still finds headspace to pay attention on the DL to form and poetic inheritance. There’s Sledmere’s elliptical take on William Carlos Williams’ fridge raid (with Kylie Minogue R osé instead of plums), the odd sestina, and plentiful nods to that Scottish experimentalist Edwin Morgan range from embedded songs of the Loch Nes[s]presso Monster to Macartney’s predictive geographies in time-travelling poems indebted to Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland.
Music and singers from the early years of our current century ripple in undersong below poems, occasionally hitting darkling notes. The whole is presented as a double A-side LP, or perhaps a double album, with solo releases from each poet bracketing an EP-length segment with their remixes of each other’s work. In truth, the mutual referencing reaches deep into either end of this generous tracklist with poems often prefaced by epigraphs from Sledmere in Macartney’s set, and vice versa.
The structure operates like a cross-fade from one poet’s voice into another, or a journey on known and deterritorialized train lines that transit the reader around the collection. With spins to further Scottish topographies from Maybole to Lerwick, Sledmere and Macartney are often found shuttling east and west ‘w/ eloquent glitches’ across Scotland’s central belt, heading increasingly into CAPITALS when Macartney’s voice announces us into Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley/Edenbruh/the London of Scotland.
The internet’s vertigo is never far away from poems presenting like listicles. Sadly for any wannabe monetised content, in languishing, cute these poets may be trading futures, but their hacked hypernature is funding nobody’s wellness retreat.
-- Iain Morrison
Composed of two distinct halves, along with a middle section of poems written together, work within has previously been featured in The Poetry Review, Deleuzine and PROTOTYPE.
/
[…] Messy as a teenage tumblr, flashy as a strobe light, this is two exceptionally generous poets bouncing off the walls of the backrooms with the energy of a thousand monster energies… here ~The Glitch~ is not a glitch but a stitch between windows, the glue between a b2b set, the rhythmic green hills of algorithmic infinity … and yet these re-mixes and e-mails traverse an internet of metal and cable, the business of poetry is conducted by staples through sheets of reconstituted tree::: there’s something old-school, decidedly analogue about all this. It feels like you could feel it. It feels like the push of a button, the caress of a bright cool screen. Actually no it feels warm and coarse, a cosy transmission rumbling, re-tuning itself like you’re flicking from station to radio station, flickering between noise & dialectical noise, patterns emerging in the static as the ether unknots itself, and the stuff of life comes spilling out […]
-- Dan Power
Endless aureate refreshment from Maria Sledmere and Ian Macartney, languishing, cute is a collection with all its push notifications turned on that still finds headspace to pay attention on the DL to form and poetic inheritance. There’s Sledmere’s elliptical take on William Carlos Williams’ fridge raid (with Kylie Minogue R osé instead of plums), the odd sestina, and plentiful nods to that Scottish experimentalist Edwin Morgan range from embedded songs of the Loch Nes[s]presso Monster to Macartney’s predictive geographies in time-travelling poems indebted to Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland.
Music and singers from the early years of our current century ripple in undersong below poems, occasionally hitting darkling notes. The whole is presented as a double A-side LP, or perhaps a double album, with solo releases from each poet bracketing an EP-length segment with their remixes of each other’s work. In truth, the mutual referencing reaches deep into either end of this generous tracklist with poems often prefaced by epigraphs from Sledmere in Macartney’s set, and vice versa.
The structure operates like a cross-fade from one poet’s voice into another, or a journey on known and deterritorialized train lines that transit the reader around the collection. With spins to further Scottish topographies from Maybole to Lerwick, Sledmere and Macartney are often found shuttling east and west ‘w/ eloquent glitches’ across Scotland’s central belt, heading increasingly into CAPITALS when Macartney’s voice announces us into Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley/Edenbruh/the London of Scotland.
The internet’s vertigo is never far away from poems presenting like listicles. Sadly for any wannabe monetised content, in languishing, cute these poets may be trading futures, but their hacked hypernature is funding nobody’s wellness retreat.
-- Iain Morrison
Original language | English |
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Place of Publication | Tarland |
Number of pages | 100 |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2025 |
Keywords
- ecopoetry
- sci-fi poetry
- Caroline Polachek
- pop music
- lyric
- collaboration
- song
- Scottish poetry
- Scotland
- infinity
- sleep
- Celtic
- hyper
- Glasgow
- Edinburgh
- ekphrasis