I came across Ian Waites’s Middlefield (Uniform Books) online somewhere, a six-page sampler. Quiet vignettes from a place I’d never heard of side-by side with quieter black-and-white photos of detail from the housing estate of the book’s title. I’m not often so overtly drawn to a single prompt, but I found myself writing a reply (“A Field Remains”, which then went on to be published in Shearsman 129 &130). As I often do, I found myself mimicking the tone of the prompt, the neutral loss of it, the place that was, and the person that was within its environment, which now isn’t.
Poetry is always talking, it’s always a reply to something else, or to multiple something elses. When I was 18, at university, I photocopied lots of photos of my school friends, and I went to the sites those photos were taken in and took new photos of the sites from the distance of having grown and left them. The flat alleys, the brown-green-grey scraps of urban nature, the rubble, the danger-of-death electricity boxes, the shit bridges over dirty streams. I then attached fishing wire to all those photocopies and new photos and photocopies of those new photos and typed garbled writing over the lot of them, on paper, on acetate, and I threw them at trees. That was before the calmness of writing.
I called that project Where We Used to Play, and it was clumsy, but already at that age I knew what obsessed me.
Middlefield felt like that project, and it spoke to whatever residue of that same desire to record the change of time upon the places that hold us as we develop remained inside me. These Steady Bulbs is my adult version of that university project at 18. It’s talking to someone a generation older than me, who may or not be listening, but it doesn’t matter. Books make us want to communicate, and maybe during the process we turn our heads and find it’s someone else who’s listening, rather than the person we expected. We find our homes in unpredicted corners, our conversations exist on the fringes, and new friends arise from wherever we happen to be. Middlefield caused this book, and trails can lead anywhere. Literature consists of many long threads of maybes, picked up here and there and worried into inexplicable and unique formations that dot the landscape like broken roads to be walked upon without context but with curiosity for years and years and years.
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Lydia Unsworth’s [photo credit: Liza Stockport] latest collection is Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Work can be found in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, Perverse, Shearsman, SPAM, and Tentacular. Her forthcoming collection, Arthropod, will be published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers in 2024. Her latest pamphlet, These Steady Bulbs is published by above/ground.