RUINED COTTAGE - poempoempoem

Among the hills
peaked sunshine mounted on a globe
splits shafts of ray through the slow glades
in crevices dewy still from morning intimacy
a local time lapse only a speaker knows to notice
to move between
in slits above nature a loftier freedom can be spied
places a soul might soar to if embattled clouds
oppressed less, if splattered hillsides offered less fast-moving
cavities of twilight and exposure
later, the developers have turned digital, &
the spots of light which were your artifice will be rationalised away
now, limbs unveiled through moss & mulch
cleave at half glimpsed & inflecting & counterflecting displays
of shade and pattern, seemingly inwardly but distant,
the unconsumable eye, for the pleasure of the
self-contained and concocting parcel of a man
a hierarchy of peace arbitrates, midges offend
& dry hillsides spiked with broom, jewelled with
rockford husks & creases where crime collects make me cautious
I love to walk
but in travelling, there are too many signs of MAN to
fit me too. i saw a stream of rubbish in Peru pour from a town
into the toothed gullet of a pig
he slowly mounted up the steep ascent of indiscriminate & familiar
need, stealing with silent lapse to join the road
where in our van the water we doused the engine with to
cool seemed before my eyes yet another, & the vomit
i passed from rum & dust & transport, seemed yet another stream
On I passed
there's pleasure in remembrance, in collecting
the ownership that comes from being discrete
& experience, that folds in pasture
inappropriate first love, deeper joy, delusions
& it's a takeaway, for the living to live now
beyond me i take as an offence
Thus did I steal
from climate peace & solitude & in place install
deeper dregs of soul, hoping to gain from this a
literal fuck, a communion or a sign,
i think in terms of a fishing line grazing the lake floor
or cadging from stars
superstitious only of wording & self-conscious in
immortal emptiness & the walking of dogs
recanting screens i've looked on & all indecent looking
pacing hours through shadows moving between
struts on breeze blocks through windows where you
are looked on in the looking
through the fifteen windows i now see i see
fifteen windows
standing on a chair i see hills i will drive to
follow a speck swallow through a thoroughfare &
ask what chase i hope to gain from this
greeting & inarticulate harp


recently published in the Other Room Anthology 3, with thanks

Poetry Openned - new poem!

Hello Readers! Some of you were lucky enough to see me and Francis Crot providing anarchist situational site-specific poetry gold at the intersection of white corridor a and white corridor b at the excellent relaunch of the Openned poetry reading, 27th October, Corsica Studios Elephant and Castle. Justin Katko made a gruesome video of the same (all up in my grille he was, both flattering and slightly shy-making, even for a seasoned performer like me!) For those of you who FAILED to attend, here's a poem from which I read on the night. Of course it was a collaboration so many of these lines were missed, intercepted or radically re-worked, so even if you were there this will be highly illuminating. xxx

lEEDs radio 1xTRA

if you want to know where the party is follow the search lights
and if you want to know where Leeds is
follow the search lights
and if you want to be close to me, well, I can't relax
while next door's floodlights cast your erection's shadow
across the bed and up the wall like greenhouse gases
it's not me
it's the planet i'm thinking about
don't hate on me if i ask you to express yourself less
or express less of yourself, i have stuff on, to get through
before the night comes and i take my daily nytol
perhaps my period will be over by then
the slit gunk that cleaves my mystery from you like the beef from its Wellington
the choice to dress everything i feel in mucous membranes is intriguing
but ultimately distressing
during his twilight crumbfast Tim Westwood introduced me to a more radical urban experience than i
had in ten years living in Brixton
now i live on the two red lips on my inner thigh clearence
we live in a small house
are charged tuna for rent
stapling milk to bread and through the postal vote i say
we should save ink and spend Thursday finding flowers
according to my coordinates there is samphire in Fort William
scratching the shore like deep fat, the row that will never erupt,
the significant ideological shift that is occuring right now but which I just don't, like, feel in my guts,
we both accepted the pretext that he was the Crow while you bit his head off
make a bullet hole in my heart for next door's bass player to rest his plectrum
i know what happened to the bees they are buried on Lindisfarne
an ad hoc braille for honeymooners feet from the earth's core that says
hey, tread soflty for you tread on my
treadmill
women, beware women,
wear distressed denim and tight skirts
and riot for other people's pensions and avoid crash diets
live breath and die on candles, moonshine and white wine
give me a good dress allowance, tight lace and breathing space
let me upstage grime core djs and slip up on grammar school euphemisms
for people who aren't like, black white straight or gay
i'd have to say that my greatest poetic influences are Sister Nancy
the Presidents and the lines i steal from Jow Lindsay
like
baby, play those sexy tunes and get that birthday sex
like
baby, call the doctor, all my arms are legs
(hey, Mike, you think it's fucked up that today's anticapitalist twenty-something poets were
tweenagers when SClub7 were storming up the charts? Well, you were probably like 25 when McCauley Culkin got lost in New York,
how fucked up is that?)
backhandhing a bankerite across threadneedle street i note
a deleterous effect upon the crimson surfaces her dread steps expose
the incandescent finale to my protest the fleck of her eyelashes across the wax on
wax off taxpayer my flash mob rallied
it's not our domain they're mastering it's our friends they're slashing
it occured to me today that my aunt and that pervert in the cafe ARE the undeserving poor
gosh, i thought, that's sad but don't let them trap me in conversation
i am not dead while my bones are translating some of your vibrations
into a set text
your celebrated singularity invigorating the essayistic practice of great artists i know including chloe and bex
turn a new page, do the ps & qs, get righteous
open your neck and let me siphon two poisons for my thighs are glass rock
rob reed composed three hundred pages of moving poetry while travelling to norwich
he took the megabus via poland and now he's back in shoreditch
turn up bedtime at the corners
change the tampon, let it be
ask rob reed what he saw
by ipswich's golden mile
did the urbsurburbs break their banks
and weep barely forty minutes into their trial shift
some chance
cheryl cole has done all the crying
you'll ever need to do geordie girls
reed turns in his sarcophagus, why,
even now he is trailing in the polls

London Cross-Genre Festival!

Experimental women writers (and their multi-gender audience) crowded the halls of Greenwich University yesterday, and indeed they will be crowding it now, as I write this on my new mauve tortoise shell covered laptop in the back of Aunt Lily's Bentley. We're racing toward Hampshire to begin this weekend's celebrations in honour of the virgin saint, Marcellina, and if it weren't for my prior commitments and raging (although somewhat lapsed) Catholicism, I would have been delighted to stay for the entirity of the festival, which goes on until the last female poet finishes her noodles in a Greenwich eatery on Friday night. If you're not similarly occupied or don't, god forbid, have to work, I strongly advise you to 'tfl' your route at once and go along in time for the lunchtime recess. A menagerie of delights await you, and I'm not just talking about the sandwiches.

If you were there yesterday, you might not have seen me, as I was crouching in the back row behind Justin Katko who, thank goodness, is so tall that he didn't notice me! You'll excuse my reticence, fellow wordwrights, but due to an unfortunate incident involving a bottle of Frangelico, my face and the floor, I am partially disfigured at the moment (Emmeline says it is merely a 'largish bruise along one side of my face', but I won't let my fans down by letting them see me not 'at my best').

Amongst the wholly enjoyable performances, I was delighted by Caroline Bergval, who seems to be able to unmake and remake language at will, like an illogical egg, opening up all of its little foibles to scrunity and exploring its political and sexual connotations, like a comprehensible Derrida. Marianne Morris' utopian love and disgust soared in a delightful Canadian lilt above electronic beats like the thinking (and then thinking and then smoking and then some more thinking) woman's George Pringle, and if it is possible to want to take out a rental on a Brooklyn appartment with someone purely based upon their solo performance of a multi-voice play after a nine hour transatlantic flight, then Corina Copp would be the woman to do it with. I would simply like to have a conversation passing her in the hall to the bathroom in the morning, She has some of the best sentences I have ever heard.

In other news, Mike Weller was there with the best shirt I have ever seen (apart from one I have seen on Jow Lindsay which depicted a fountain) and Luke Roberts managed to field the most ridiculous questions I have ever misheard from an audience with a level of humility and restaint rarely seen in today's distopian times (ps. yes men were allowed to speak at the conference, we're feminists, not monsters!)

I am only sorry that I have missed (because it is probably taking place now) or will miss performances by fellow lady poets Sophie Robinson, Francesca Lisette and Frances Kruk who are as feminist as it is possible to be without being, well, me. Emily Critchely is a genius (she is the conference's organiser, along with Carol Watts) and will be given the keys to a feminist poetry city in the heavens when we all finally reach it.

Perhaps I will dedicate this weekend's celebration of St. Marcellina to female poets everywhere. If I had not been given freedom of my pen, who knows, maybe I would have turned to the spiritual life instead. There is clearly a connection between female creativity and faith, if only because a religious life was one of the few escapes from the mind-deadening baby-farm of marriage in the middle ages and beyond and before. Even though I suffered the perils of a Catholic schoolhood (and the subsequent breakdowns) I would happily consign my body to Christ to avoid hideous ownership by a patriachal Lord, or even worse, a peasant. Although I would look the part, in the citadel of my mind, I would be writing poetry!

ninerrors Newcastle poetry-fest and sleepover!

Yesterday, on Radio 4, I was listening to one of the 'culture' features (I forget which, although I think I was stuffing Spanikopita at the time, so perhaps it was Front Row). The presenter happened to mention that a lot of very interesting art is being produced in Scotland at the moment, and being exhibited in Glasgow to be precise. This was in relation to the new Saatchi exhibition in London, Newspeak, which, by the way, was described as quite uninspiring. The reviewer mentioned our friends in the Hebrides in order to point out that very little of this art ever makes its way to London, and for this reason, very rarely becomes popular in the Saatchi sense of the word. He also pointed out that the situation might be remedied if art critics from the London-based media ever actually bothered to leave their concrete-soaked environs and make the trek up North (that is, discounting the annual month-long binge that is the Edinburgh festival, in which the entire population of Hampstead is transplanted person-by-person to the leafy urb-suburbs of Stockbridge, leaving poor North London to deteriorate into a less squelchy landscape from Drowned World.)

Now, this London-centricity struck me as decidedly unsporting - bloody-minded perhaps - and got me thinking that unless we children of the Capital extend an stuffed olive or two up North soonish, our Caledonian compatriots might just as well devolve off entirely (aka claim independence from the English oppressor) and take all their desirable socialist principles with them, leaving Bohemians like me stranded on a mere bit of an island inhabited entirely by Tories. Clearly, this will not do.

Thankfully, these reflections chime with the exciting news that I will soon be heading up North - not to Scotland sadly, but better near than ... never - to the bustling industrial city of Newcastle, which Melody tells me is a cross between a Jules Vernesque cityscape and Reading: FUN!

The occasion is the launch of a poetry collection to mark ten years since the passing of Newky poet Barry MacSweeney, who also wrote a collection called Odes. The title of the new collection, complied by poetry wizard Linus Slug, is no coincidence, although following in MacSweeney's wake has proved tough (I myself am a contributor) due to the complex historical inheritance of the ode form, as well as MacSweeney's own unique interpretations. Some questions raised include what is an antistrophe? What would Sappho have done? Was Elizabeth I altogether fair to Spencer? To find the answer to these questions, you're just going to have to purchase the beautiful book aren't you?

There's a facebook group which contains a beautiful album of photos charting the books' creation, as well as ample information on Slug's ninerrors blog. Oh, and the reading takes place in Morton Tower in Newcastle on Sunday 27th June. Why not come and drink wine with us afterwards? They tell me its grim up North, but with a Megabus heading staight for Pimlico booked for 8am on Monday, who cares?

Posie in public - reading success in Cambridgeshire!

I'm utterly refreshed having returned victorious from a visit to the playground of my late teenage mind, the University of Cambridge. As well as having enjoyed a nostalgic Dolmades Kebab at Gardi's (still standing! still counter-hegemonic!) and a vigorous cycle to Grantchester on a be-basketed bicycle, I had the utmost pleasure in giving a poetry reading to some keen young students who reminded me all too much of myself as a siren of truth circa 2001. The temptation to ink the JCR was quickly dismissed in favour of late talks into the night, over endless bowls of noodles & impossibly weak spliff, concerning Aeschylus, the Utopian potential of renga and the lyrical verse of Kool Keith. I've been so sad since I got back to N1 having left Cambridge's gentle shores that I've returned with a frenzy to the drama I began there as a second year - Put That Woman Down!: the life and times of Meredith Lynchfield, Cambridge Suffragette and Assassin, in three Acts. Emmeline is heartbroken - I promised to take her on a kitty voyage to Eel Pie Island yesterday to throw an effigy of King Charles VII into the Thames to commemorate the capture of Joan of Arc at the Siege of Compiegne, but I told her she'd have to wait until the 30th to commemorate her burning (I thought we'd torch the French Embassy). Needs must when creativity calls.

Here's a nice picture of me in front of a display created by clever techy Mike W-H to accompany a reading from my chapbook, tristanundisolde (Arthur [C]hilling Press (at the moment at least!)) It communicates how I feel better than I ever could do myself in words.




Helpful imp Joe Luna over at All Over the Grid / Fallopianyoutube had this to say about my collaboration that night with shouty-man poet and mere part-time patriarch Jow Lindsay:


"Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night (21st May) assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental "we" through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic "we" of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that "we are the poets laureate" in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is "assumed", that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive."

Instructive, n'est pas?
xxx

Tristanundisolde! Chapette book of the YEAR

LOOK!

Isn't it lovely? And it's MINE, by ME! Hooray! Many thanks to the chivalrous, man-about-town, Mr. Harry Godwin Esq. of The Arthur Shilling Press for taking a chance on a gal like me. I truly am the happiest gal in town. Pink fizz for all.

Details can be found at The Arthur Shilling Press website - obviously my books have sold out all at once, flying off the shelves like the proverbial 'hot cake', considered to be a cross between a scone and a pain au chocolat, but live in hope, readers who may have missed out. Fingers crossed for a pdf, or get in touch with Hal or I for a sneaky e-look.

Once again I am published!

From Pots to Pot and then back to Pots Again

From Pots to Pot and then back to Pots Again, my third historical endeavour after Persephone: The Musings of a Woman in Perpetual Despair, which won the Britney Spears prize for Creative Writing, and of course my seminal debut, The Suffragettes- Why?, is soon due for publication and I am so excited! Just as I was suffering under the burden of my annualistic offering being delayed I suddenly pulled myself together and said:

"Posie wake up! You need to finish that three thousand page historical pamphlet charting the feminist movement from the the ancient civilization of Ur through to the present day using the medium of pots!"

Of course publishers, labouring under that putred beast we call commercialism, weren't interested in the manuscript, but luckily I have enough money to print 700 copies just for me and my close friends. It's really rather facinating and I have sent an extract to the sublime Knockback magazine.
People often say to me, “Women and Pots? Wow. How could you take on such a grand endeavour?"
Well I tell you now, it wasn’t easy. Being a lady Feminist really does take its toll. Not only do I have to take the occasional call from my bank manager informing me that my notoriously large trust fund has once again trebled in size, but I am often forced to sit around the house all day doing absolutely nothing except trying on all my dresses and then not going out in them, before once again settling down to save womankind using nothing but a a bottle of Martini Rosso and an overactive imagination.

So look out for my latest work and if you would like a free copy just email me! Toodles! xx

Women: inherently irrational?

Halt, lady readers, don't book your hostels in Cambridge just yet, as the Valentines launch has been postponed. This time, it's not because I tried to kill myself, but due to publishing technicalities. I'm not bitter, but I do wish I had a bloody boyfriend. Oh the world of a lady writer! Speaking of Lady Writers, in 1925, Scottish Lady writer Willa Muir penned Women, An Enquiry, in which she frustratingly linked the Freudian unconscious with the female gender, and the rational, decisive consciousness with, you guessed it, men. Now, far be it from me to support gender essentialism: I've met plenty of Transfolk and I tell you, it's definitely not as simple as all that. Some mornings I don't feel anything like putting on a bra, and my formidable skills at Scrabble alert me to the fact that frequently I am able to be perfectly rational and on top of things, unlike poor Willa Muir who thought that women were given an important 'creative outlet' in motherhood to match all the fun inventions and science the boys got to do. Silly bitch. The irrational, spontaneous and emotional outbursts of the unconscious/women could, Muir claimed, be channelled creatively and supply society with valuable growth, vitality and humanism, something which starchy men, trapped in their mechanical functionalism, were unable to supply for themselves (for some reason).

Generally, I disapprove, but when it comes to publishing schedules, perhaps Muir was right about women's inherent inability to meet deadlines. Now, one publication which definitely did get off the ground successful was Issue 2 of the Cambridge Literary Review which launched last night in (you'll win a pair of my knickers if you guess it successfully ...) yes that's right, Cambridge! I was trapped in familial pow-wows last night with Aunt Lily over what to do with vast chunks of the family 'fund' which were invested somewhere truly ghastly which might not exist anymore (further proof of our gendered inability to cope with masculine rational constructions, I'll thank you Helene Cixous). The outcome of this was that I missed the launch, which promised to be a good one, with readings from tender Valkyrie Marianne Morris and Tony Robinson from Time Team! I was very glad to have a poem I composed in honour of fleur du mal, Tom Chivers included, and to be able to represent the gritty London scene in the formidable, ivory cloisters of Cambridge, like a female Jude the Obscure, although of course I still use my cantab.net address occasionally.

Do please check it out. Finally, many apologies to those who turned out to see me at the Edinburgh Student Fringe Festival's feminist poetry event, Shout Out! on the 18th Jan, where I had intended to read. After walking around an intimidating student union, full of 'young people' and scores of the sort of idiotic girls who are produced like Sea Monkeys every time a new 'mega-trend' takes off, this time wearing fake fur jackets and palpable Topshop irono-novelty brogues, I chanced upon a sign which made me realise the reading had in fact taken place the day before. Proof, if proof is necessary in your gendered framework of fixed texts and unambiguous language, that women are subject to what Julia Kristeva calls feminine time, which is circular, reproductive, and eternal, in contrast to masculinity's linear, teleological time and its association with culturally valued 'progress'. I contend that if the poetry reading had been feminist, it would still be going on now.

Finis

(or is it? another feminist question)

A Year off the Ward: a Posie Rider work in progress...

The mind is a complex organ, and try as they might, clinical psychiatrists have yet to concoct the correct combination of suppressants, stimulants, narcotics and anti-hallucinogenics to remedy its many, many disturbances. Sound like you? Then you're just like me, and will love my new book!

A Year off the Ward, soon to be published with WPR Books, charts a year in which I attempted not to get sectioned under the Mental Health Act, or because I was stalking someone. My loyal readers will be glad to know my valiant attempts to stay ostensibly sane are finally being bundled into a collectible tome, and they will have been with me throughout the journey via my blog, a garbage heap of the mind like no other. Anyone remember September 2008-August 2009? Let me jog your memory in my book!

And, if you happen to be in Cambridge on the 14th February, you can come along to the launch. It's at Heffers! More details to be announced as I'm currently in frenzied chats with my publishers to ensure the book is in tip top condition, and that I make sure its in proper sentences before I commit it to PDF.

Find below a sneak preview to wet your dripping appetite! It follows the first few weeks of January 2009, when I tried to overcome my mental disturbances by improving my body image through strategic anorexia, and learnt some important lessons about feminism on the way.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January

“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind

shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, seeks

only to adorn its prison.”

Mary Wollstonecraft

I returned to N1 full of Christmas cheer. A fortnight in Aunt Lily's cottage had reminded me of a kind of happiness I had forgotten long ago, weighed down by the perils of modernity and psychosis. I dread sentimentalising the domestic, but there is something so comforting about spending one's days on brisk Hampshire walks and one's evenings roasting Ladurée mincemeat macaroons over an open fire while Aunt Lily microwaves yet another Marks and Spencer Turkey Crown with extra stuffing. Hitherto, I had thought of kitchens as essentially vulgar things which are best buried in the depths of a copious town house and populated with willing staff able to whisk up a chickpea bake and send it flying up a dumb-waiter at the ring of a midnight bell.

Now, however, I found myself craving the aesthetic qualities of the Arga as much as I once yearned for the Georgia O'Keefe printed screen that currently shields the entrance to my modest cuisine from prying eyes. A great change had come upon me. I went online and started a twelve month subscription to Country Living. I packed away my more outrageous (and blood splattered) wall decoration in favour of distressed pine and vintage cross-stitch baby primers from Islington antiques market. I bought holly and mistletoe and put them in a blue chipped enamel watering can and soaked my white Habitat sofa in tea to make it looked antique, like I did as a child in a school project on the Magna Carta and, most troublingly, I started baking.

It all started with Christmas Gingerbread Partridges, a kind of crisp cookie made with a hand-crafted copper cookie cutter and decorated with delicate icing designs. It was another one of Aunt Lily's great ideas, like taking mescaline at my parent's funeral. The partridges were intended to be tree or package ornaments, or decorative gifts for friends I'd missed over the holiday period. Having no friends as such (except Lara, who's a bit too grown up for that sort of thing, and Melody, who's afraid of pigeons, which are a bit like partridges) and no tree, as I had no burly boyfriend to bring it in, and am not a post-feminist after all, I found myself at a loss as to what to do with all the things. They were so, so hard (like rocks), so I didn't dare attempt to eat them. At first. Soon I had discovered that, if soaked in tea, coffee or any hot liquid, they eventually softened to an edible consistency. At 5.0g of fat per partridge, and with little to do between New Year and Pancake Day, it wasn't long before I'd transferred my mental turmoil to my thighs and, whilst trying to run away from the ward with a basket full of gender-normativity under my cook's arm, I had in fact booked myself a ticket straight back to the ward aboard a special convoy vehicle like the ones they use to transfer the obese around airports.

......... to be continued!

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'A Virgin's Tale' after Bridget Bardot

Bridget Bardot, French existentialist sex kitten, has just turned 75. Retrospectives of this formidable blonde's life have caused me to reflect on, well, my own life. Like Bardot, I was at my prime in my youth. Before I discovered barbiturates, before booze, long before I discovered men, my first love was writing. I was a prolific writer even before my earliest memories, when Aunt Lily tells me I would scrawl nonsensical letters up the walls of the family house, convinced that I was a new prophet after having been given a Good News Bible by a well-meaning Popish cousin. Christianity would not hold my formidable imagination in thrall for long.

I finished my first opera Thebes, A Virgin’s Tale: Parts 1-9 by aged eight, then began to experiment with higher artistic forms including drama, mime and philosophic dialogues. One of my most precocious works from this period with which you may be familiar, Persephone: Pythagorean Musings of a Woman in Perpetual Despair, won Little Miss Brain Award, Hampshire in 1993 - past winners include Philippa Gregory, Marie Curie and Diana,Princess of Wales.

Having exhausted the genre of Socratic Discourse at the ripe old age of twelve I turned my talents to poetry, fiction and historical writing. You may be familiar the historical biography Eleanor of Aquitane: A Life in Haiku and my later work The Tears of the Wood Nymph which won the Marianne Keyes prize for Creative Writing. And now let me treat you to Greek Tragedy I composed on a holiday to the Lake District aged 11 in the style of Handel's Aces and Galatea.


Thebes: A Virgin’s Tale

ACT 1 Scene 1

The Temple of Apollo, Thebes. A CHORUS of Humming Birds stand centre right.

Chorus: The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

A Virgin steps down from the Temple of Apollo in Thebes. She is followed by a host of wild animals, including finches, mice and rabbits. She holds a basket of wild oats which she begins to symbolically sprinkle on the ground.

The Virgin: Hail! I hear a new morn dawn in Thebes
What can it mean? What can it be?

The Rabbit: This is a new context.

The Finch: I feel like I’ve been pecked.

The Mouse: Oh an Oedipal effect.

Chorus: The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

The Virgin: Philomena I am called and my tragic tale applaud
For now I share with thee how cruel the world can be!
I was born alone

Chorus: Alone Alone Alone!

The Virgin: The mother was a whore

Chorus: Whore Whore Whore!

The Virgin: To the temple I did come.

Chorus: Attention!

The Army of Zeus enters stage left. Step forward ZEUS disguised as an attractive athlete.

Zeus: I have come to Thebes to find a Vir-------gin!

Chorus: Hap Hap Happy!

Zeus: What’s this?
A little girl to pillage.
Best looking in the village!

Chorus: Run Run Philomena!

Zeus: To make her mine
Will be no crime
Cause she’s so fine!

Chorus: Rape Rape and Death!

Virgin: Nay I shall not relent
My will cannot be bent
Although a maid of humble offing
I shall not be pushed into boffing!

Chorus: Apollo Apollo save her save her

Virgin: I am scared as Laius
When screwed up and cursed us
Poor me like Antigone
To an underground home shall flee

Chorus: Zeus Zeus is in your house!

Virgin: Ay me so I see
But he shall not steal my chastity!

VIRGIN Exits.

Zeus: To pluck her virgin’s tooth
I’ll have to use a hoof
Disguised as a fine horse
My plan shall surely take its course.

ZEUS and THE ARMY OF ZEUS Exit.

Chorus: Yes we’ll make a killing for there’s no chance of Zeus wining!

The Rabbit: Poor Philomena!

Chorus: Zeus will surely woo her!

The Finch: She’d love to ride a pony!

The Chorus: And Zeus is just a phoney!

The Mouse: Nay she cannot fail!

The Chorus: For it is called a Virgin’s Tale, a Virgin’s Tale!
Oh Oh Oh it is!
The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

A Year in The Mind of Posie

Well readers, those of you who have worshipped at the temple of Posie since those heady days of mid-2008 (is it just you Lara, or are there others too?) will remember that it is nearly a year ago that I was released from hospital after an unfortunate self-harm episode with a Bic disposable razor (in hot summer pink). The past year as been full of trials and tribulations: failed relationships (yes, Anna and I aren't speaking, it turns out the orchid wasn't mine) psychotic episodes, restraining orders and endless literary rejections (Harper Collins, I'm talking to you). I've also gained 5 pounds in the last two days, which I didn't even know was possible.

BUT on a positive note, this is one year in which I haven't been sectioned! Hurrah! To celebrate this fabulous achievement, I'm planning on writing a book, entitled 'One Year Off The Ward', or something else, not yet decided. I was inspired by this BBC article on Annualism an exciting new form of publishing which sees self-obsessed bibbles (usually journalists) confessing that they did one particular thing for a year which, in publishing circles, is tantamount to saying: I'll provide the text, you sell 50,000 copies and we'll let the public provide the critique. In shorthand - this is some money making nonsense here!

Some examples include Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands where an oaf pretended he didn't always have his shirts fitted in kooky West London boutiques, or Hephzibah Anderson's pointless Chastened: No More Sex in the City, where she manages the extraordinary feat of not getting laid for a year. There's even specialist titles like A Year Without 'Made in China', in which one woman recounts her rollercoaster experience of looking at labels in shops and not buying certain things like funny little plastic gonks and Kikoman Soy Sauce.

And it's not just my year of fraught sanity which I'm planning on turning into a compelling narrative: it turns out there are lots of things I've done for a year now which could be newsworthy. Being a feminist and living in North London are obvious places to start, but what about my year of celibacy? Ok, that'll have to be next year (Anne's bra is still folded meaningfully in the fridge next to the milk) but the way things are going that'll be no-problem-o. I've also downed the booze content in the last year, only been to Hampshire 3 times and not assaulted anyone! (apart from Martin's son Jake, which I don't think counts because he's a minor???)

These changes, I can tell you, are MASSIVE in my life. Who wouldn't want to read about them? Hampshire Exhile or Ex-Hamp: My Life out of the Shire, are working titles at the moment. Also, it was just over a year ago I had the trust fund settled ... perhaps call for a Tom Hodgkinson-esq biopic in the nature of How To Be Idle, where I recount my day to day experience of doing absolutely nothing except for watering my window box a little before it died (due to neglect) and trying on all my dresses, but not going out in them, safely buffeted by the wealth of my aunties.

Ps. if anyone has any stories to share for inclusion in prospective My Year Failing to Get an Arts Council Grant (because I live in London and didn't fill the form in properly) please email me!

Flaneusette technique

I've been reading a lot about psychogeography and, inspired by what I read in Peter Ackroyd about Islington's interesting past (did you know it used to be a diary farm? Fabulous!). So for the last couple of days I've been wandering the city in a PCP addled stupor (can't get opium, must make do) and keeping this journal of my voyages. More to follow!

Day one

I'm walking around feeling nothing. I trip and everyone helps me up. There's nothing to see here, I've learnt nothing. The city isn't melancholy today. I'm confronted with a chugger I recognise, we went to college together, we arrange to have coffee later. No one minds me today. The air is circulating up these aisles, I'm a heartbeat, I'm welcomed. I'm keeping the city alive, in its loop. Everything is in order, it's just as I remember. Everyone has been in these places before, they're filed, I want to make a sketch. Everything is forthcoming, the light touches everything, the grid is illuminated. When the clocks chime I chime with them and then we get to our knees and share as one this remarkable sensation of absolute purpose, absolute belonging, a composite beast who's extremities more in syncopation, we've eliminated the selfish gene and like a slime mould slug we relinquish precedence to those of us designated as a head and they direct us. We've given ourselves over to the city, each other, its past, we're hugging the kerbs familiar with each speck of grit we're pressed up against its canyons and our fat is rolling into them, what fat we have. There's a city in our minds as pure as stone that even we can't alter, it connects purely to itself, unapologetically presents, and we walk its streets as real as any others and the light touches it everywhere and it's everywhere and is like anything, palpable and recognisable in its stability. Each speck of grit belongs and all surfaces are touching. I didn't grow up in the city and find this all refreshing, it's a solid and I like to jostle with all its atoms there are no A roads here, there are no wet fields along the A40. I like its dead voices, they outnumber the living, they remind me of aunties. I like the flows and the ley lines and the impressions of heat left by strangers for whom I have an infinite regard. Someone has just followed me forty paces to return a sheet of paper that I dropped on purpose. They weren't even being sarcastic. I tell them it's a note and when they read it they find it's an incredibly personal letter directed to them, offering sensitive advice about some issues they're dealing with in their life at the moment. They say it's been an incredible help. They ask me to go to bed with them so I do.

Day two

The next day I am out walking the streets trying to collect things I find, I'll make a scrapbook. But tomorrow there'll be a parade, some nationalist thing, followed by speeches and music, so the streets have been decorated and swept, they've even moved on the homeless and the children who sometimes ask you for pens or try to sell you cigarettes. I'd brought an extra muffin to give to one of them but now I eat it myself. I consider leaving a record to somehow sully the streets. It would mean anyone coming along after me would be more successful in finding ephmera, but I don't have anything. All I have is a crumb of muffin which I drop and see fall into one of the big tarmac canyons which yesterday I think I might have been vigorously licking, where there now isn't anything not even those tiny rounded bits of broken glass. But before I leave I see an impossibly swollen ant appear and carry the crumb off. I follow him with my eyes for a while but he's going in the opposite direction so I leave.


to be continued....

L=A=N=G=U=I=S=H

There aren't enough spiked words to satisfy you
or unlikely couplings
Double fuck of double entrende there
is no tongue in the piano
When I try to excrete vacuole tempests I am only trying to please you
My faith is not on fire now
Punch the baby in my stomach into a phrase for you
There is no dictionary for dissonance
Virgin generator of spiteful prose
No formula for discordance
I am trying to stick a pin in a page for you
I am burning my damp folds to retrieve a language for you
Gestalt bullshit djinn wreck never happened
The only thing in my hand makes unfortunate sense
Is a well of black sand entirely unpoetical
The fridge has no answers I am composing
Millenarian prose from last week's crossword answers
(half of which I got wrong anyway)

It goes purse eppicecass spear romeo orcs
esau spear eliot, sabre pistol opart styx
intuition chaucerian, menecrates inge
from which you can judge that I read
a very pretentious magazine

I wrote a poem about a fucking river (for Tom Chivers)

(my new poem)

woman on the pebbles will kill or be killed

asphalt river hear ye

though I have sat where torrents recall no slush

I am drawn by your ceramic explosions

your waves snapped underneath and smoothed over

with clothes laid in respect.

there are beads of patience in this fell river

not where ants carry ants, but where between bites

enamelled flesh can be tapped

to purge freezing oils

where the cuff lavender is brought alive to claw to earth

where we are buried to stay cool and grow white hands

to reach and tuber

and come to fruition and bask without a song.

so be drowned or drown over exposed leaves shaking

restless lover, who’s keeping their feet wet

carved sweat

& toes resplendent knife upwards through satin

to coil imprints around the upright stones

& mark an embrace before evaporation

I am repeating on you.

this body is a factory,

this room, a weaker shade of tea.

molluscs have been sun dried and clasp to the billowing wood

margined by choke

unchinked and unshafted

flecking tremulous

& I had rather root without

than soot in synthetic barbered grass

and smiles of parcelled glue

when there are births of teased and tortured glimpse

to be tweezed or cuticled from the corpse of morn.

I will not dive unless I know the pebbles are not rasped

nor fill a cup with oil

or clothe a gasp in brick

or seek respite in lists and chat

or segway to a revolution, while

my love has gone amongst the flids

to fashion me a yearning -

he was half buried

in tarmac when we met

to make himself chaste.

with his lute fricking he charms scimitars!

he is a silver fish in the backwash!

& how am I to explain

this beetle on my breast?

go easy on the glory hole

cracked forest!

its arc is in tatters

boats full of stones

are held and sunk by knotted necks, green swans

nappies round catkins

the soft rabbit’s fingers of the weeping willow shorn at the wrist

shredded by pikies

spike dog shit three times thus.

this creased and sweated life we live beneath pages, in surfaces

we air condition panic and

would rather waste ink than miss a chance to bite.

(this volume is dirty)

skirts can only rustle now

peel winter off in cracks,

& wrinkling hours, jellied, impoverished

spoilt milk and spilt sleep.

better the life in the bubble of privilege, between pages,

basking fingers in slipped through sun

in the crease in the wall from the half cut window.

better the cack femme manages fate

than banal judges grid us to oblivion.

Poesie Rider - is there no end to my transatlantic stardom??

Great news fans! I'm hitting the bright lights of Buffalo tomorrow for the final leg of my sell out poetry tour of the Americas. Those of you based stateside should seriously check me out!

Back in Blighty soon for Martini Rosso.

xx

American Lady Poets

As the internet brings me news of the Daily Male's sexist musings from across the pond, so I can bring to you the wonders of America via the internet (except, of course to my many American readers, who of course have all that sort of thing on tap, or from a 'keg', which I suppose has a tap? Will check).

Anyway, check out this great book from American Poets Project, which accumulates poems from the WOMEN's MOVEMENT like a tampon accumulates sweet earthmother blood. Read this poem from the collection, edited by honor moore (cool use of no-caps!)

Spot the conceit! I REALLY like this poem, but don't you think, equally she could, like, NOT wear the dress? And personally, I don't run unless I'm being chased. Maybe that's the point of the poem? I mean, she's obviously not out jogging or she'd tell the MAN (aka reader) to wear tracksuit bottoms and comfy shoes. Oh dear! Exegesis crisis!

An Answer to a Man’s Question,
“What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”
by Susan Griffin

Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a
dress store.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic,
around
your hips, and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary
napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin
underneath,
and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down
Telegraph Avenue.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-
back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run

Rock on!

Poesie Rider in the New World!

Look! I'm on tour in North America being a poet! Fuck you Steve! I've gone to a land where they can appreciate me, as a woman, for who I am - a woman! More news and photos soon darlings! xxx

The door of poetry is Openned (sic) - for MEN!

Hail, readers. As you well know, I am a writer, and like to dabble, dawdle and dip my brush in an intimidating range of media (plays, novels, histories, polemics, masques etc). As if that wasn't enough, I'm also an able poet, having wowed the world with my psychoanalytic thriller Gulf Scream, Labial Elegiac and the recent Aphorisms for my ex, which extends over many more hundreds of pages than I dared to publish to my blog (for legal reasons, I've been told: apparently some of my honest admissions in that work, for example the details of how I hacked Martin's internet banking and stopped the child support payments to his ex wife, could actually be used as evidence against me. Whoops! Has no one ever heard of artistic licence??).

Anyway, last night I had the good humour to attend a poetry reading in the 'Xing the Line' series (pronounced Zing the Line I think, poets eh!). I went along primarily to schmooze, I mean why else would I go, and met some very attractive Beta males who had lots of interesting things to tell me about themselves. All was going well until, two glasses of Rose down, I encountered literary sexism of the kind that hasn't been encountered since William Wordsworth nicked all of Dorothy's best lines. I was told at point blank range by the curator and tsar of a prominent poetry reading series, who shall remain nameless (you know who you are, Steve) that I, a lady writer, was unsuitable to make an appearance at his 'night'. I was informed, however, that if I wanted to pass my poems to a MAN to read, or make a short video of myself reading them in a bikini with a soft core Bashment backing track, I would be allowed to participate, but otherwise, no!

Once more the mesmeric ivory bower of the literary establishment was Clossed for women. The fact that other ladies have been admitted to these readings is merely further proof that sexism is rife in the world of poetry: does everyone remember Working Girl? That film, apart from being solid gold entertainment, taught us that it's not only men who polish and buff the glass ceiling - women can be raging, careerist chauvinists intent on keeping other women down as well. Like little Tess was abused by the Ivy League show off bitch, Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), so little Posie has been cast to the wayside by the sorts of trustafarians who can take a year out to complete a 'Poetry MA' merely in order to meet a few people who they could meet anyway by merely attending a poetry reading and offering around a few cigarettes and looking 'needy and interesting'. In my early twenties I had no time for such things and, until Aunt Lilies' estate was wound up, had to labour and toil hard in Miss Selfridges as a personal shopper merely to afford a panino at the Nero's across the road in my lunch hour. Any poems I found time to write were scrawled on the back of a receipt for shoes, and my first novella, Me, Tim and My Quim (now a major motion picture) was written entirely on an All Bar One wine and nibbles menu. It's experience like that that makes a great writer, like Hemingway, not arsing around and paying good money to be deemed a 'qualified writer' by an academic institution. (I should say as an aside that I am now enrolled in Birkbeck's Summer Course in Female Memoir Writing, but what of that?)

Anyway, having been turned away so cruelly, there was nothing for me to do but consume further Rose, vom a little on my skirt, then come home and plot my revenge. This post, set to lay waste to the blogosphere, is merely the beginning. I have skills, for example internet banking fraud, and I have rage on my side. I've also just had a contraceptive implant (which stops your period for three years girls!) so, like Lady Macbeth, I will cry unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty!

Step one, an protest poem! I feel just like Brecht! Enjoy!!

Openning the cowl

I am self published!

Hark lute! Thumb me an envious tune

and autopsy reveal

the various instances

of the demise of the crowd song.

Openning the cowl

I am self kettled!

Authoritatively pilfering

lyrical nonchalance from

complacent bloggers all set

on their own aggrandisement.

Openning the cowl

I am self-harming!

Just to see if I can write.

Trade marking utterances best left be

or taken out used worn destroyed

passed out again

through the thigh of a pig.

Pour into moulds the

filling of the Arctic Roll tube

as capillary excess waste

laden tissue damage

but let’s turn this about

and call it dessert!

This is like me!

Aphorisms for my ex - hot new poem in the Poesie Rider series!

Aphorisms for M.H.

Do you realise that I
am making the sound
of writing so that I can
look over your shoulder?

I am the cleft in the cold
recesses of your flesh. I
am like a flesh-jar.

Can you see me when you
Are looking the other way?
I am out the window.

Do you know that I read
your emails when you are
asleep? I think they are
dull.

You never introduced me to
your mother but I don’t think
she would have liked me.

I am working my fingers
into your scattered lines, I am
keeping myself busy now.

Today I called your house so
you would answer and so I
could check that you were in.
I hung up, like a serial killer.

I am prickled all over at the
thought of the moths in the blanket.

I am treating your smile like
an upturned dog. Restful.
Deceased.

I am the leaves settling on your
limbs and becoming damp.

I am the thrusting of green
shoots through soil. I am pacific.

I am waiting 40 seconds
between each ring now.

I am looking at pictures of your
ex wife once or twice a day now.
I think I am in love with her.

I cloy morosely. I cool myself
with spittle.

I cherish your admin. I retrieve
your deleted cookies.

I am elevating the ordinary
to an art form out of contempt.

I am devilling your eggs
(like a woman)

There is a peach famine and
I am employing sanctions.

You asked me how I was
doing and what I was up to.
I hate you, please die now.

Poesie Rider - depression poem!

Sorry for the slack posting, I've been so busy recently post-break up. I'm trying out a new 'medication' and it's not sitting well with the booze - down to two glasses a day, but it's still too much! But rather than spending the cold hours looking at my nice new curtains, I've decided to sublimate my angst writing poetry. Like all poetry that issues from transient sadness, I think you'll agree, it's pretty damn affected.


Titles://Untold by Posie Rider

Piles of the unsullied window pane

Gasp at the eternal.

Leave a mug and its contents to turn

Heat up the offering

Reheat, offer again.

Distance is the point to point

Measurement betwixt the turning

O’ my head t’wards and y’rs

away. A kiss is not a contract

But I am repentant

So no tea for me, even?

Heretic adverse

Dopes of all your canting

Heroes and false

Piles of the inheritance

Duly at her lap

(Why compare us, you can’t

We’re not the same.

Did you hear that? Idiot woman

I know what she means though

Does she?)

I love the bed, the panes

I kissed the church

Bones of the inheritance

Wait by the shutters

Clear the panes

Nevermind

How can I not hear you

I’d rather not

Bones of the inheritance

A hope that dwells in

Letters on the mat

Where two names knot

No longer occupiers

Horror of that

Shutters for remembrance

Cold hands at breakfast

And saying something, how?

By touch?

Hardly, switch off on Tuesdays

Turn out the lights

Shutters on backwards

And where is this ‘Martin’?

How is anyone supposed to feel

If not told precisely.

Like this

Do me a favour

Who is this woman?

What is this, texting?

Be safe with me, I’ve done this before

How long? My goodness

What am I doing?

Saying something, always

Breakfast on Tuesdays

My god this is boring.

Leave me only with a sharp lock

If you must

And leave the shutters on backwards

For the opening

I’ll be doing plenty of that

Brush strokes on the fringe

Idiot woman, all a condolence

Suitcase on railings

Curtains in wrappings

This one, beyond comparison

Better than that

Worst is on Thursdays

Better I damage him

Breast strokes and tanning

Talking at plastic

Reader, I married him

Batter the manikin

Wainscoting canyons

And pleasure the gasman.

Like on Sundays

I kissed the church

Footsteps on the fringe

He ran, I can’t fear his grimaces

Holy water by the door

Canting at soup kitchens

Wedgwood and backstabbing

Listen, why can’t you?

Walking with children

I heart little envelopes

Look at this happening

Becoming less childish

Almighty, sanitary

Yeah listen, I’m talking

Less to be reckoned with

Like breakfasts on Sundays

Zero, very good.