Romance in the age of Tinder (Daily Telegraph)

An article in the Torygraph profiling amongst other books, The Emma Press's  Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse and featuring my poem  A well-tempered keyboard.

Belonging... at Manchester Museum

Today I've visited Manchester Museum to write a poem with the help of Dmitri, filmed by Mollie. I used a methodology that Claire Collinson shared from her work at Kettle's Yard.

Dmitri and I had previously discussed both the themes - Migration and Water - at quite some length, so I took the notes from those discussions and came up with two lists of 10 words.

Water: Pollution, Transport, Flood, Power, Sewage, Life, Clouds, Pond, Boundary, Thawing.

Migration: House, Money, Community, Belonging, Banishment, Symbols, Home, Smuggling, Settling, Survival.

I picked one randomly as a starting point - Belonging and then we went on a tour of several galleries, through archaeology, ancient worlds, the Manchester Gallery, natural history and up to the vivarium. As we went I looked for objects which related to the theme and to the object before, creating a chain of words on post it notes. Mollie filmed me at each other objections, chatting about my choice.

We took the post-its back and Mollie filmed Dmitri and I discussing them and then I went off for coffee and bruschetta and to make a first draft. Mollie then filmed me reading it (from many different directions!).

It'll be a little while before Mollie has the film finished - and I still need to work on my draft. But here it is for now.

Belonging

We all came from somewhere and now we are not there - 

we have journeyed across the miles, the centuries

and over the strange lands of our own lives. 

We brought nothing more than our names, our faces - 

the death mask, the label. We gathered our few things

round and fastened them to us with buckles 

we craftedfrom iron or gold. We pinned ourselves 

to the world around us by our naming of it. 

We carried a few coins, it seemed  we owned 

them until they left our hands for the hands of others. 

We remembered ourselves in our stories

in the wolves and forests of our origins. 

We found ourselves in others, we shared

our names with them, and our faces.

We were gathered and we were dispersed, 

collected and cast out. Like tea or cotton

we belonged not to the land, the trader, the user, 

but to ourselves. Like a dodo, tree-frog, moth

we belonged to a place and the place changed. 

We made ourselves in things, in the guard

for a sword, in paper, in coin. We watered crops

and collected butterflies. We heard ourselves

in bird song and caged birds to hold them to us. 

We became the coin, the buckle, the dagger. 

We longed for sanctuary. Sometimes we built it

for small pulsing amphibians in tanks. We are trying

somehow to hold the world together with small buckles

and bandages as we bind our dispersing bodies

with cloth. We buried our coins and our dead

to keep them close. We named the place. 

But we are always leaving, like exhibits

in packaging crates, cases lying empty, waiting

for work to do done - until it seems that where

was never the thing at all. 

Review - Under the Radar

Delighted to read this wonderful review by Alison Brackenbury in Under the Radar

Meet the Insects - Rose Aphid

Rose Aphid Wikipedia Creative Commmon Karl 432

For a long time I've been both fascinated and repulsed by parthenogenesis - the process by which a female insect (or plant, or maybe even a reptile, amphibian or fish) creates offspring on her own, without any input from a male. The young are formed from an unfertilised egg which somehow is triggered to divide. In humans it's fertilisation, the fusing of the egg and sperm which triggers the cell divisions that eventually form a child. When Dolly the sheep was made the nucleus from an udder cell was placed inside the an egg cell so that had the nucleus removed. This cell was triggered to divide by an electric shock. Mary Shelley wasn't so far off with Frankenstein and galvanism.

Partly it's Frankenstein that haunts us. "Curiosity killed the cat" a student said to me in our Frankenscience Project.  But with parthenogenesis it's more. The thought of all those identical insects horrifies me - perhaps because like most human beings I prize, perhaps even over-invest in my individuality. Identical twins don't horrify me, perhaps because human experience never allows anyone to stay the same for long.

It's also the fear of the plague, the fear of reproduction out of control. It's the dread of every other American Senator apparently - the fear of women's sexuality and fertility out of control.

But I don't think that's my deep down horror (thankfully). I think it's all these generations of females each indistinguishable from the mother, the grandmother, the great grandmother. Freud, or maybe Lacan would have a field day.

Meet the Insects - Assassin Bug

Stenolemus bituberus dhobern Flickr. from Physics.org

It's unlikely many of my readers will meet this one - unless my readership is much more international than I realise - as it's an Australian species. You can see some British species of assassin bugs here 

But it's this one that caught my attention after a piece of research was posted on the BBC website detailing the way it lured it's play. One of the researchers Dr Anne Wignall explains. 

"However, reliance on vibratory cues and predictable responses leaves web-building spiders vulnerable to predators that aggressively mimic prey stimuli to gain control over their behaviour," they wrote.

"If you imagine an insect such as a fly when first hits the web, it'll generate a huge intial vibration, and then it will begin struggling violently, buzzing its wings," explained Dr Wignall.

"During these first vibrations, the risk of the prey escaping from the web is largest, and so spiders will tend to move in quickly on prey producing these sorts of vibrations in the web.

"But, as time goes on, an insect may get more tired, and the vibrations it produces will be much smaller. The spider can take more time approaching these insects as it's less likely to escape from the web," she told BBC News.

"These are the sorts of vibrations assassin bugs are mimicking, and it makes sense as a spider is very dangerous prey for a bug. If the spider approaches too fast, the risk to the assassin bug is much higher." 

I can't add much to that - although if you're not too squeamish (and I've noticed that not many people's squeamishness extends to creatures without warm blood, fur and feathers), you can watch Stenolemus bituberus in action here. 

Insect Sonnets

Insect Sonnets

Over the last two and a half years I've written 20 sonnets inspired by insects.

Just recently I sent a couple to Dr Dmitri Logunov at Manchester Museum and he asked me to contribute to his blog - here.

One of them, Gerris Lacustris inspired by the Common Pond Skater also won second place in the Cheshire Literature Prize. I'll not publish it here as they are publishing it in their anthology. If you'd like to see it let me know.

Another two are in a forthcoming edition of Manhattan Review. Again if you'd like to see them let me know.

Hx