One poem: 6:40

The poem is exactly 640 lines to match the average time I sleep each night (6 hours 40 minutes, says my iPhone). The basic premise for the poem is the portrayal of circadian disruption through various factors which affect sleep and the rhythms of daily life. As Henri Lefebvre writes: ‘To become insomniac, love-struck or bulimic is to enter another eveydayness…’. At various points, I have been all three. While the physical symptoms of each condition may wax and wane like the moon over a lifetime, the poem coagulates all the ways temporal disruption is felt in the body. What Lefebvre identifies as ‘everydayness’ is felt in the poem as the push and pull of presence and absence, a coming to awareness of living, breathing, eating, vomiting time. The exact conditions of the poem emerged from the trifecting experience of being jet-lagged, love-struck and in a fresh environment — having oscillated in a short space of time between Glasgow, Berkeley California and rural Fife. The poem is an ambient field work of those environmental shifts and the delay of their physical imprint in the lyric ‘I’. It attunes to different voices and registers, feels itself split between memories and time zones, stages the intimacy of distance and the emotional minutiae of daily blips in energy. The Fife residency involved field recording, active listening and site-based compositions. The poem metabolises these results into a multi-sensory encounter with time, place, weather, seasonality and the erotics of attention. It can be read in a linear way, or remixed, cut-up into stanzaic time-pieces for improvised performance.