PERVERSE 7B
Smith
Stephenson
Nadjarian
Pollard
Shanks
Hullo there,
Welcome to the second part of issue 7. I hope you like these poems as much as I do.
Do I need to say something about terror? Possibly. It is a very loaded word. The final poem took me aback when I first read it, but I think it does a good job of calling attention to the strangeness of both the phenomenon and the language used by the media to describe it. Maybe I won’t say anything, on reflection. I think the poem says it.
Enjoy.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS It may be best to view these poems on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or else a phone turned sideways.
Matthew M C Smith
Portrait of North
Inspired by Piotr Illich’s 1922 painting, a painted black canvas with a single speck of white at the centre of the portrait.
In front of its black square in this gallery space, I fall inwards, ungrounded,
losing myself, propelled to the artist’s vanishing point. It is tiny,
central, a single brush stroke, an orb of snowstorm’s heart,
specked in midnight. Sheer rush to true north, a rushing
through and through that stroke, a spot
of white pigment.
Paul Stephenson
Namesake
after Nicolas Tredell
Tod not Todorov. Tod not Tzvetan, son of Todor Todorov Borov and Haritian (née Peeva) Todorova. Tod not Todorov. Not born in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, a one-party communist state from 1946 to 1989. Tod not Todorov. Not with an attitude of detachment from political and social issues. Tod not Todorov. No desire to avoid the dogmas of communist literary criticism. Not inclined towards a formalist approach to literary study. Tod not Todorov. Not graduating from the University of Sofia in 1961. Not heading to Paris in 1963 at the age of twenty-four to pursue a doctorate with a soon-to-be famous supervisor, Roland Barthes. Tod not Todorov. Not a yet-to-become French citizen with ample time for research and writing, without the obligation to teach. Tod not Todorov. Not deploying his knowledge of Russian. And not translating into French esoteric and elusive formalist texts. Tod not Todorov. Never co-founding the influential journal Poétique in 1970, which promoted formalist and structuralist literary theory and analysis. Not Todorov but Tod. Preferring prose. Into letterpress type, wooden printing blocks. Fancying fonts. Not Todorov but Tod. Spending teenage summers in Romania, a school year in Lewes. Not Todorov but Tod. Liking frogs. Middle name Greenfield, gift from his mother. Tod not Tod.
Nora Nadjarian
Emily, I never wrote a poem about butterflies
It was always about a cockroach or a forest of abandoned memories. She says there is no point in staring at a dead light. I say: You and I are so alike, your words devastate me. I write and I read the poems out loud and she listens. I throw her a phrase for the fun of it and she asks what language, and I say I don’t know, do you need to know? She says language is a game but a very lovely one. There are no two identical ones, anywhere. In some languages a J is a Y. In some languages a sentence is music. Some languages are dying. Some languages are already ghosts. She tells me to stop writing grief, to take it to the river and drown it. How can I? It’s my grief and yours, it’s yours, too, it’s ours. I say to her: think of words we wrote, then drowned, just think, how ugly our hands. We sit and study our hands, these terrible, terrified hands, because we can’t look each other in the eye.
Clare Pollard
The Pub Crawl
It starts with a weak shandy
with her father in the beer-garden,
like a glass of fitful summer sleep.
A pint of snakebite next, in that bar with soft-porn on the screens –
it tickles as the boy who bought it yells into her ear –
then the fresher’s pint, tequila slammer chaser
(how grotesque, to lick the toad of her clenched hand).
Remember Stella Artois?
They drink one because it’s very expensive, then they stop.
A crisp, small beer served with jamon and a gilda –
olive, anchovy and picked chilli on a skewer –
in Bilbao, in early evening’s busy glamour.
Perhaps this is the best beer?
Such pleasure to be truly quenched.
One round at The Golden Heart, under a Tracy Emin neon.
The Shakespeare, The Prince George, The Marquis, The Pride.
A darts board; Turkish carpet; Scampi Fries.
A zero-alcohol beer she pretends is real,
syrupy like the word nursery,
then a cheeky pint with him in the afternoon,
in a pub with those little wooden windows,
a snug by a fire,
the baby napping in the pram.
The pint she drinks alone on a Friday night
because she’s got to go home and do bedtime
and it’s Friday damn it,
whilst handsome young princes rescue glass turrets.
The can of ‘Pump up the Jam’
where she realises she’s middle aged
because it actually calls itself a ‘Jam Doughnut Pale Ale’.
The pint that makes her need a piss
in freezing toilets with a flooded floor and crude scraped graffiti
like the toilets when she was sixteen,
so she sits on the toilet trying to concentrate, telling herself:
you’re alive now! Remember this!
For fuck’s sake!
REMEMBER YOU’RE ALIVE!
The last pint sits, redolent, on its damp mat.
She is old now,
eating pig-skin with musty fingers,
whilst the bell rings.
They are kicking out.
They are putting up the chairs.
Michael Naghten Shanks
The Sushi Terrorist Mystery
For days I felt the restaurant’s quietness
conveying terror.
The viral video of a man’s mouth
sucking slowly on sashimi—
returning each piece with solemnity
to the communal conveyer belt—
inspired copycats to film themselves
doing equally filthy acts.
This wave of sushi terrorism compelled us
to install surveillance cameras.
Pushback was inevitable,
customers citing their right to privacy, but
as far as I was concerned
everyone was a suspected saboteur.
What wills a person to suck the edamame
destined for another?
I can’t escape
the terror of this thought…
This thought haunts me
like the image of my yellowing tongue
licking the yakitori.
Contributor Notes
Matthew M C Smith
https://twitter.com/MatthewMCSmith; https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/matthew-m-c-smith
Matthew M C Smith is a Swansea poet with work in Poetry Wales, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lonely Crowd and Iamb Poet. His collection The Keeper of Aeons is published with The Broken Spine.
Note on ‘Portrait of North’:
“‘Portrait of North’ started as a daydream about a black canvas with a single white dot on it and a mysterious Russian painter. The white dot represents north. This painting is entirely fictional. It will get painted.”
Paul Stephenson
https://twitter.com/stephenson_pj; https://paulstep.com
Paul Stephenson has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. His debut collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in summer 2023.
Note on ‘Namesake’:
“The poem appears in my recent debut collection Hard Drive (Carcanet, 2023). The poem tries to explore my late partner by playing with the opposition of names – the first name ‘Tod’ and the surname ‘Todorov’ (the French-Bulgarian historian and philosopher) – and using negation to catalogue who he wasn’t rather than who he was, though towards the end of the poem I flip things round to use the affirmative. It draws on an article by Nicolas Tredell ‘Todorov our Contemporary’ from PN Review.”
Nora Nadjarian
https://twitter.com/NoraNadj; www.noranadjarian.com
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and fiction writer from Cyprus. A finalist in the Mslexia poetry competition 2021, she was recently published in The Interpreter’s House and Anthropocene. Her collection Iktsuarpok will be published by Broken Sleep Books (2024).
Note on ‘Emily, I never wrote a poem about butterflies’:
“At the time, I was thinking quite a lot about how a poem comes into being. How easily is it shaped and how important is the role of language? I wanted the ambiguity in the run-on title (Is Emily an invented character? Is it Emily Dickinson?) to unsettle the reader. I wanted throughout a push/pull in a dialogue which could be internal, or not.”
Clare Pollard
https://twitter.com/poetclare; http://clarepollard.wordpress.com
Clare Pollard is a poet and novelist. She is currently a judge for the National Poetry Competition. Her children’s novel The Untameables and adult novel The Modern Fairies are forthcoming in Spring 2024.
Note on ‘The Pub Crawl’:
“I have always loved the John Cheever short story ‘The Swimmer’, in which a man decides to return home via all the swimming pools in the gardens of the suburban couples he knows. But he drinks too much; becomes disorientated; the seasons and moods of his friends change. By the time he gets home his house is deserted. His whole life has passed him by.
After hearing the legendary Annie Freud reading her poem ‘Immortality for Jewish Girls’ about pubs past – “The Cock Tavern, / The Wheatsheaf / and The Coach and Horses / with its Richard Harris look-a-likes” – I was inspired to try and write something like ‘The Swimmer’ but it’s a pub crawl.”
Michael Naghten Shanks
https://twitter.com/mnsghost; https://cargocollective.com/michaelnaghtenshanks
Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Ireland. His most recent pamphlet, The Architecture of Red Caviar Sandwiches, was published by If a Leaf Falls Press in 2019. He is writing his debut collection with support from the Arts Council of Ireland. His poem was first published in Berlin Lit.
Note on ‘The Sushi Terrorist Mystery’:
“The poem took root after reading an article about sushi terrorism in Japan and began as an attempt to dig into the dirt beneath those impish impulses every person has in order to understand them better.”