Transductions

Anymore Anything Anywhere is an excellent literary magazine from Edinburgh. It is edited by Colin Herd and Reuben Sutton and they have just reached issue number 4. The new issue (winter 2010-11) features an excellent range of words from Francis Crot, nick-e melville, Justin Katko, Posie Rider, Jacq Kelly, Iain Morrison, jim ferguson, Tony Leuzzi, Michael Farrell, Richard Barrett, J L Williams, S J Fowler, RODNEY RELAX, Rosa van Hensbergen, Pete McConville, Richie McCaffery and Greg Thomas, and I’m totally thrilled and honoured that three of my own poems have been slotted in amongst such a fascinating mix of writers. Rather than wax endlessly about why you should buy the new copy (and previous issues) of Anything Anymore Anywhere (which I could and which you should), I asked Colin Herd a few questions about the magazine.

When and why did AAA begin?

Thanks for this Thomas! The magazine was set up in the final year of my undergraduate degree, so four years ago now. We’ve put out four issues so far, though three have been in the last two years. The first issue was basically a selection of work by my writer and artist friends, stuffed into a brown envelope, with a big black-marker X on the front cover. In one sense I think I set it up purely and simply as a tool to connect with writers whose work I admire. I also felt a gap in the U.K. scene (though I think it’s probably been better filled by other journals since than it has by a-a-a) for a magazine that would put out exciting and formally challenging poetry, that would publish bold and experimental stuff alongside more lyric or narrative stuff. I don’t feel that division (between formally innovative work and conventional work or whatever) very strongly in my reading habits or the kinds of poetry I enjoy and I don’t think an exclusive or divisive attitude does much good, nor do I have any literary agenda per se, so I wanted the magazine to be as varied as possible, presenting interesting work of all stripes (and spots, and stars). I am also keen to include fiction in every issue, because I read a lot of fiction and in some ways fiction informs my own poetry as much as poetry does.

Were there any other literary journals from the past or present that were of inspiration during the inception of AAA?

That’s such an interesting question, and I hadn’t really thought about it before now. I’m a bit of a collecting-nut for old poetry magazines. I’m not sure which ones influenced “aaa” but here’s a list of some of my favourites: the endlessly inventive and experimental Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, which Ian Hamilton Finlay edited and which explored concrete poetry, visual poetry and minimalist poetry in its gloriously eccentric and whimsically ascetic pages. This, which Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten edited in the 70s and which has these amazing cover-drawings by Grenier’s young at the time daughter Amy. One of the things I love about the print poetry journal as a form, and a principal reason why I collect old ones, is that they contain forgotten poets, unheard-of figures who maybe only published a few poems then moved on to other things. Looking back through This 1 this evening, I’m struck particularly by the work of two poets I don’t know anything about: Marcia Lawther and Laura Knecht. Here’s a bit of Knecht’s poem:

the field
throws itself
yellow into the air
and is this season’s
yellow panic

And I can’t find a mention of her in any other publication- such a sweet kind of frustration! Another favourite of mine is the stupendously-titled “ZZZZ”, edited by Kenward Elmslie. I’m not sure how many issues there were, but the one I have from 1975 is full to bursting with fabulous things like comic letters from Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara, prose extracts from “What’s for Dinner?” by James Schuyler, and great poems by Tony Towle, Harry Matthews, Laura Chester, Ray Johnson, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Kathleen Fraser, John Koethe, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pat Nolan, Clark Coolidge, Nikos Stangos and Thomas Meyer. What a line-up(!), plus, the cover’s by Joe Brainard and there’s additional doodles by Ray Johnson. It’s really a great magazine. Soup edited by Steve Abbott and Little Caesar by Dennis Cooper are two other legendary journals that totally deserve that status. I’m still working out a-a-a’s form, and I hope I’m sort of allowing it to develop and change, hopefully influenced in one way or another by these fantastic journals. I imagine myself still putting out (sporadic, invariably delayed issues) in my 80s- I hope so.

You’ve also put on some events and readings to celebrate the magazine – have you got anymore planned or coming up soon?

Thanks for asking about these Thomas. They have been really fun events, two so far, the first in December and the second in January. The idea behind the events was to have visiting writers read alongside Edinburgh-based or roughly Edinburgh-based poets. The first event was scheduled to feature Tom Raworth reading with visual/found poet nick-e melville, Joseph Walton and Posie Rider. Unfortunately it was at the height of the bad weather and Raworth couldn’t make it, but on the plus side, the Cambridge-based writer Justin Katko was up in Edinburgh and he stepped in. The second event featured a host of Edinburgh-based writers (too many perhaps… a bit of over-zealous programming on my part) reading alongside the wonderful poet Andrea Brady. I do hope to reignite the series soon, possibly moving to a new venue. Details will be posted on the website and the blog: http://www.anythinganymoreanywhere.co.uk & http://anything-anymore-anywhere.blogspot.com

And for extra information about Colin’s stunning new book too ok click here.

I tell people that my boyfriend killed himself because it makes me feel unimpeachable. I tell them that he was horrifically depressed – the sort of depressed that people really just can’t understand. The really complicated depressed.

I also tell people that he was dyslexic. I tell people that in his last months, he’d constantly be asking me how to spell certain words, or he’d ask me about various pieces of punctuation – how certain sentences were supposed to work – without ever revealing what sentences he was working on. I tell people that I was inadvertently helping him write his suicide note. I tell people that on the day I found him hanging from a homemade noose with a knot that reminded me of plaited bread rolls that you might see in upmarket bakeries – the Biro scrawled note taped to the front of his t-shirt felt more like a conversation with myself than a farewell from him.

When I get that far I tend to stop talking so freely. I rarely go as far as to discuss the actual content of my boyfriend’s suicide note. I drop hints about it, or make vague comments about it, but don’t go any deeper than that. I’ll say enough as to make sure that whoever I’m talking to is left with the impression that whatever was contained in the suicide letter must have been really heavy – and not just because of the obvious. It’s hard to explain, but I find myself at pains to express to people that the suicide note wasn’t just a usual example of its genre: sad, tragic, whatever; I want people to know that as well as all that stuff, it was profound.

It feels important to only give people so much. I want them to be left with questions that I will purposely never answer. That way – I’ll never just feel like an outline that people can see straight through, that hasn’t been coloured in. I think it’s probably like the emotional equivalent of being media savvy. I want people that I meet to be left with the impression that I’m just one of those really emotionally dense and complicated people that no one will ever really fully understand because, well I don’t know, probably because the very basics of the matter are: I’m not.
I don’t want to be blamed for anything.

I have all of these ideals. I tell people that my boyfriend and I met at a Xiu Xiu concert. Jamie Stewart was onstage in tears screaming this really amazing song about some dark sexually abusive relationship. I tell people that my boyfriend and I just started kissing. Just like that. We were standing next to each other, and had noticed each other a couple of times. There was some sensual psychic telepathy shit in the air, I tell them, and we just clicked without even talking. If anyone ever tells me that it reminds them of the promo video that Sonic Youth made for that song Dirty Boots then I’ll scowl and make an effort to look like I’m pretending not to be hurt – it makes people apologize for making things sound trivial, even though I actually think that it makes the whole thing seem a lot more romantic and unique and above and outside the every day.

When the next song started – this track called I Luv The Valley OH! – we looked at each other and tried to say to one another “this is my favourite song”. We ended up kissing again, this time so hard that our teeth crashed together and I bit the inside of my mouth. I got his spit all inside my cheeks and the faint stubble on his chin irritated my own sweaty face in this completely mind blowing way.

We ended up back at my place – this flat that I used live in that I got evicted from after my boyfriend died and I had a nervous breakdown (which explains to people why I’m back living with my parents). I always had this fantasy of two people meeting and going back home to fuck, but not actually having sex: I always used to imagine them standing at opposite ends of a room, both masturbating and looking at the other – so it was more like their minds were ass fucking rather than the roles that their bodies usually called predictable ownership on. I tell people that that’s what happened the night of the Xiu Xiu concert when my boyfriend and I first got back to my place. But after we came at exactly the same moment we ended up fucking anyway. We were overpowered. It felt like a choice made for us that we didn’t have any sway over.

The fucking was really heavy. It was the sort of sex where secrets are shared between two people. When it was over we both knew so much about each other.

There are certain things that make me feel these weird emotions that I can’t describe; like how I feel driving into a city at night. If people don’t understand what I mean by that then that’s fine. It just means that they’re a different type of person to me. Driving into a city at night, the smell of burning, boys in grey t-shirts, the sound of skateboards, putting my hand at the base of someone’s back.

Talking about my dead boyfriend legitimises a lot of stuff for me. I’m able to talk about things that if I was just being honest and relating things to myself I’d never ever even get near. I talk about the time that we both ended up meeting this seventeen year old BMX rider outside some lame punk gig, how we both took him home and fucked him for the first time. He was stoned and high as a chimp in a tree but he was into it and spent the whole next day with us, looking at coffee table books of nude boys that looked just like him, before he headed off and we never saw him again properly except a couple of times in the local record shop where we’d swap these knowing grins and think about how sore our respective dicks felt for next few days after our threesome.

When I tell people about that kind of thing I feel like it denotes a certain freedom and power that I’ve been associated with that most people don’t get to actually experience. I want people to know that I’ve been places they’ve never been and they’ll never go. Sometimes because I’ve told so many lies I even start to believe this stuff myself.

Last night I tried to make a list of all the things that are making me feel like I should kill myself. This morning I’m looking at them and they’re making me feel pathetic. I try to think about the things that my fictional boyfriend would have been driven into desperation by. With me it’s mainly boredom. That doesn’t feel enough. With him – I don’t know – how could I even begin to get my head around that stuff?

I tell people that he’d buy me novels by transgressive authors that were referenced by avant garde bands that we both liked. In reality I know that I’d put them on the shelf and never get past the first four pages.

If I’m ever high on MDMA then I feel compelled to tell strangers that I’ve just met about the best drug experience I ever had – four pills and four tabs of acid that my ex lover and I split between us. We just did it in our front room, listened to albums that meant a lot to us, and talked in this out of focus but pinpoint emotional way that felt like – fuck I don’t know – acupuncture of the fucking soul or something. Over fourteen hours we further cemented this bond that neither of us had ever got within touching distance of before in our whole lives.

The night that my boyfriend killed himself gets changed around quite a bit. I was late back through no fault of my own. If I’d been back just an hour earlier then I might have been able to save him. The implication is pretty heartbreaking – I’ve seen tears form in people’s eyes before on them hearing that. Sometimes I tag on that I’d forgotten to take my phone out with me – when I checked it later there were thirteen missed calls all from him. Sometimes we had an argument over something that I never disclose to people, probably for fear of accidentally cross wiring or mi-stitching the intricate weave of sympathy that I’ve been threading for so long. At the end of the argument my boyfriend disappeared into another room and I fell asleep in tears, exhausted. I awoke to silence. There are a few other variations that I’m bored of falsely remembering. Sometimes I have dreams made out of these ‘memories’.

I look at screwed up balls of aborted suicide notes that fill the waste paper bin in the corner of my room. If only I can get somewhere near the note that I mythologize so much to people who are forced out of good will to believe me; but I give up. It’s like trying to imagine a colour that I’ve never seen before.

I open up my laptop and look at pictures of boys that I’ve stolen from Myspace pages and Vampirefreak profiles and a load of boy blogs that I keep bookmarked for when I’m feeling horny or lonely or both. My lover’s face always looks different.

It’s getting late. There’s only so much you can do in a day to make yourself feel part of it.