From a letter to Peter Manson, nearly a year ago. You can get Self-Avoiding Space-Filling Curve (Just Not) here.
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I finally had the chance to sit with the sheaf of poems you sent me before Christmas, and wanted to send you a quick note to say how much I love them. They are tender and beautiful and funny by turns; the first two are a kind of incredible overture, notes of which the rest (so far) pick up on and dive down into in different ways. The sequence completely unfolds in its sequencing, too, so there’s never a dull moment. Indeed, the moments when ‘Peter’ emerges can be shockingly emotional; the moment when ‘spontaneous vaginal delivery Manson’ emerged left me rolling in the aisles (honestly I don’t think I‘ve laughed that hard since the last Stewart Lee gig I went to). Shades of Lee, too, in the lines parodically exaggerating the poet’s sense of self and oeuvre. The pop icons interleaved here seem deliberately beyond their respective sell-by dates, so that the references promise nothing so much as a pop idiom of fleeting lyric feeling (as in Riley?), but something more keenly cynical than that. The parodies/inversions of O’Hara and Wordsworth do something similar — the détournements are hardly even that, more like belligerent refusals or petulant reversals, a more fitting kind of acknowledgement/inheritance for our age of infantilism. And all shot through, yes, with the becoming human of one life among its mothers and fathers, glimpses of this throughout, without much sentimentality but with a knowingness too brutal for Freud.
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