Brooke
Kendall
Mulholland
Sarezale
Wilson
Hullo there,
I hope you’ve been enjoying this issue of PERVERSE. We’re somewhere around the halfway mark now, with poems running till the middle of December. This batch of poems takes us from barking dogs to Bovril, with several sides of love, amongst other things.
It’s looking less likely that we’ll be able to manage an in-person event for December, due to the rocketing festive room hire fees, but hopefully I’ll be able to arrange a zoom event instead, and bring in a few more faces that might not have made it down to London anyway. More information to follow.
Enjoy!
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS Anthony’s poem may display in a different font to the others, depending on where you are viewing this, because Substack has its own rules when it comes to preserving spacing, apologies.
PPS As some poems have long lines, it may be best to view them on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto the back of a grumbling old German Shepherd.
Georgie Brooke
One day I’ll stop giving a fuck
I’ll take my dog out at night and sit on the darkest bench. Yes, something is watching you. It’s me. I’ll blow you a kiss then hang my dog poo bag on a nearby tree. One the way home I’ll be as deranged as possible. I’ll scuttle sideways like a crab across roads. I’ll swing my bag around my neck. I’ll growl from the gut. No more will I confuse loudness with the need to empty myself.
I’ll spend my days locking eyes with the cheesemonger as I slowly eat all of the free samples. I’ll pay for my shopping with only the 1ps. I’ll give each charity shop a jigsaw with one piece missing. You can’t call a thing broken when the last bit of it is out there, behind some sofa, like the spider before I cup it with my bare hands, and whisper ‘Truly, you’re an inspiration,’ before throwing it out of the window. A villain must first be victimised.
I’ll lie myself over the last two remaining seats on the train. I’ll feed duck pâte to the ducks. I’ll train my dog to be my tiny henchman. He will out-bark a German Shepard, whose owners will say ‘Oh sorry! My dog isn’t usually like this!’ I will say ‘Mine is’ and I howl in unison as we chase them out of the park. He’ll raise his heckles. Later when I ask him why, he’ll say ‘to appear larger, taller, more intimidating’, a brave trick, to disguise what it is, just fluff, trying to make itself into what it fears.
Liz Kendall
Non-biodegradable black poo bags
The scrotal swinging
of poo bags hung on branches.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Mary Mulholland
it came out of nowhere
one in four families is affected by rifts; one in three remains unresolved
1. possible presenting issues
marriage; in-laws; values and money; divorce; neglect; emotional abuse; mental health.
2. estrangement
act of alienating, particularly a family member; from French estrangier, treat as a stranger, arouse mutual enmity or indifference in someone with whom there’d formerly been love.
3. root
downward growing part of a plant; with mathematical sense from the 1550s; root as in cause; underground; cultural origin; source of family clan; see also take root; uproot: dig with the snout/ poke about/ gnaw.
4. help
cry of distress; from Old English helpen, support, afford assistance, do good; help, as in maid, serve at table; help yourself, extended to take what is not yours; self-help, charities teach people to fish; help, as in rescue, do their work for them; sometimes can be a euphemism for money.
5. love
People disagree on what love is or how many types there are. Four? Fourteen? Does love mean giving anything that’s asked for? What about tough love? All’s fair in love and war is not most people’s experience in a rift. No love lost. At times all seems lost. For love or money: is there a currency for love? Can love be defined if love has no limits?
Ernesto Sarezale
LOVE POEM IN A ‘BAG OF WORDS’
In[1]:
import pandas as pd
import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize, sent_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
In[2]:
love_poem = pd.read_csv(‘soul_kisses.csv’)
In[3]:
print_bag_of_words(love_poem)
Out[3]:
[(‘like’, 3), (‘apart’, 1), (‘autumn’, 1), (‘back’, 1), (‘Beijing’, 1), (‘bite’, 1), (‘blow’, 1), (‘breath’, 1), (‘brittle’, 1), (‘china’, 1), (‘cracks’, 1), (‘crumbles’, 1), (‘digest’, 1), (‘early’, 1), (‘eat’, 1), (‘erect’, 1), (‘flesh’, 1), (‘floor’, 1), (‘get’, 1), (‘hairy’, 1), (‘hold’, 1), (‘ink’, 1), (‘into’, 1), (‘its’, 1), (‘keep’, 1), (‘kisses’, 1), (‘kissing’, 1), (‘knocked’, 1), (‘lick’, 1), (‘lungs’, 1), (‘marinated’, 1), (‘nicotine’, 1), (‘pagodas’, 1), (‘piece’, 1), (‘pouring’, 1), (‘prawn’, 1), (‘puffed’, 1), (‘pungent’, 1), (‘pupils’, 1), (‘scribbles’, 1), (‘Shanghai’, 1), (‘shattered’, 1), (‘sizzling’, 1), (‘skins’, 1), (‘smashing’, 1), (‘smoke’, 1), (‘soul’, 1), (‘stained’, 1), (‘suck’, 1), (‘tail’, 1), (‘teeth’, 1), (‘tongues’, 1), (‘volumes’, 1), (‘want’, 1), (‘whispers’, 1), (‘wideness’, 1), (‘windstorm’, 1), (‘Xiamen’, 1)]
In[4]:
print_stopwords(love_poem)
Out[4]:
[(‘I’, 6), (‘of’, 5), (‘it’, 2), (‘our’, 3), (‘your’, 3), (‘a’, 2), (‘an’, 1), (‘between’, 1), (‘by’, 1), (‘can’t’, 1), (‘could’, 1), (‘down’, 1), (‘had’, 1), (‘if’, 1), (‘on’, 1), (‘only’, 1), (‘that’, 1), (‘the’, 5), (‘to’, 2), (‘with’, 1), (‘you’, 1)]
Anthony Wilson
Some More Strategies for the End of the Age A mast head
lost shoes
crowds numbering many
who are prisoners
(did I say
some snow some ice
some rain
plans for an ark
the last lantern
a buy one get one free sticker
some beads
(semi-precious)
a man trying to remember
something
banker?
)
a torso, uniformed
buses which ran late
breath on the outside
of a window
poster
of a child drinking Bovril
-torn pages-
there was much mud
another plinth
Contributor Notes & Bios
Georgie Brooke
https://georgiebrooke.com/, https://instagram.com/geos_realm
Georgie Brooke (They/Them) is a queer, non-binary multidisciplinary artist with a special interest in poetry, community arts, and poems sculpted in metal installations as a method to explore identity, self growth and corporality.
Note on ‘One day I’ll stop giving a fuck’:
“The poem was made in response to the pressures I feel as a queer non-binary person to make myself as palatable as possible. I held so much fear around being disliked for my identity. I began to explore ways of breaking away from this fear by writing versions of my identity as an ‘evil supervillian’ character. Which became my attempt to charter badness within myself, as well as the evil that is constantly being shaped and reshaped around us.”
Liz Kendall
Liz Kendall’s co-authored illustrated hardback Meet Us and Eat Us: Food plants from around the world celebrates biodiversity in poetry, prose, and fine art photography. Poetry publications include Candlestick Press and The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Come to theedgeofthewoods.uk.
Note on ‘Non-biodegradable black poo bags’:
“I love dogs, but am baffled and infuriated by owners who leave black plastic bags full of poo all over the Surrey countryside. Hedges, fences, and gateposts are all targets for plastic-wrapped scat attacks. It’s revolting and insane. Incur my wrath and you’ll be punished in verse. I was in a haiku mood.”
Mary Mulholland
Mary Mulholland’s poems are recently published in Under the Radar, Abridged, And Other Poems, and forthcoming in Magma, and Stand. She is frequently mentioned in competitions. Former psychotherapist with a Newcastle MA in Poetry, she runs the platform Red Door Poets. Twitter/Instagram: @marymulhol
Note on ‘it came out of nowhere’:
“I’m particularly interested in what goes on at a deeper level in relationships, and how family rifts can wrench apart a hitherto close family. I’d also been reading Kei Miller’s A Light Song of Light, and perhaps that led to exploring the etymology of key ‘rift’ words. That’s how I think the poem came about, though there’s always a magical element as to how a poem actually arrives.”
Ernesto Sarezale
Ernesto Sarezale is the pen name of a Basque published poet based in London. Active in the performance poetry scene, his work includes queer micro-fiction, multimedia acts, and film (e.g. video poetry and documentaries on the LGBTQ+ spoken word scene).
Note on ‘LOVE POEM IN A ‘BAG OF WORDS’’:
“The piece deconstructs a love poem by (metaphorically) using an AI model, namely, an NLP method known as ‘Bag of Words’ (used for ‘sentiment analysis’), which typically converts a text into a set of features based on the number of times each word appears in the piece, without considering the order or structure of the words. If you reorder the words appropriately, you will get the meaning of the poem.”
Anthony Wilson
https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/
Anthony Wilson is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Wind and the Rain (Blue Diode, 2023). Anthony is also the editor of the anthology Lifesaving Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015). He lives in Plymouth.
Note on ‘Some More Strategies for the End of the Age’:
“I have been tinkering with this poem for several years. It started as a kind of list poem but, influenced by Dean Young’s account of meeting the sculptor Charles Spurrier in The Art of Recklessness, especially his description of Spurrier’s studio as a ‘bombed cathedral’, I decided to take an axe to it. This is the result.”
See you for next week’s issue, with poems by Jeffery Sugarman, Ian Harker, Paul Stephenson, Lucy Tunstall and Ryan Ormonde.
Find us on socials