Midwinter Letter — Tenement Press

Rehearsal / 20. Maria Sledmere

MIDWINTER LETTER / MIDSUMMER SONG

A CODA

_{My dream word was a draught, better than port or ale, it streams

through my veins like love and life, I tear myself from my dream and

sleep, knowing as I do, perfectly well, that they are highly dangerous

to my young life. Up, up! Open your eyes! These are your limbs, your

legs here in the snow! Pull yourself together, and up!

(Thomas Mann, 1999: 496)}

︎

A deluge of pure expenditure:

nitrogen, snow and angel sweat

measure of wingspan

wouldn’t feel so out of place

in a vast cometarium,

telluria and lunaria

two genders of celestial device

ahead of their time, demonstrating

the tail end calamity.

You write superlative letters

to hide in the icebox, I live alone

in the dead mall of my epoch.

Lucent, condensed, echo-bodied

polishing tachycardia

porcelain vox, like everything in our shyness

orbiting syllables at tensile scale

needs a sugar fix of pitch-shift.

Nightcore accelerates the narcissi, listening

deep in soil of the selfsame

song was over too soon. Her data mosh

coaxing the dead from their cosy toxicity.

Petulant, premature spring

shatters the concrete.

Been thinking a lot about silver lately.

The meteor was all the more beautiful for being here

having us held, sporadic, gifted.

I made a digital nest for it.

……….. Kirsty says, ‘sad is a word to overuse.’

It was a popstar invented temperature.

Pears tasted chemical. I wish you could

untrust biography, gaia crying

tech failure, to be sure

the past is a flight material of

every time it rains

my body of work

goes into tremolo

meadowing

more and more

paralanguage

touching the shortest

day of the year

I feel nothing

tipped to a certain stress

there is so much left to score.

I give it to you, to whom I was given.

Reflective mist.

Time is no longer in our hands.

Working attention’s harvest device

lavender encrypted,

flat-warming polyrhythms

of all slumber premiere

imperfect progression like

god only knows

it rains.

Wish I could bond repair my comrades.

We have been spiralling a long, sad time

with the animacy of slow burning crystals, popped

ears of nebulous ringing,

improvised addressee.

I can’t go on to feel nothing.

Lyn says there is no avant-garde of love.

The twilight of what comes to pass

epistolary hotspot

could do without having to do something.

But who came first?

Someone on the radio claims

the future is unknown territory.

And just like that, you’re gone.

Jet-lagged on winter solstice,

I wasn’t bodied to sew myself up in the sleep-

stitch all-night cognitive slipway.

I spent it sobbing,

orange gorged,

surgical.

Chapped lip

dressed myself in sweet kinship

time within time to kill time

on a permo

I loved lying there, terrified

the song wasn’t mine

to care or caress.

……….. If a dream comes

put a civil leaf in your mouth.

Call it little cataclysm.

I see cultivars of unrequired beauty

watching you sleep. You slept

coalesced in damage.

We should sleep for each other.

I doctored all thought for want of word

stimulant, cinderfull, envois tendering

the hurt and listening, candy-

flipping rain.

An error nerve jumps in our fernery.

And you are so sure!

Moodboarding our kiss goodbye at the bridge

catch breath

it doesn’t have to be recent, uploaded

gently at geological tempo

and every rainbow belongs to my dead friend.

I love the opalesced circuitry

we glossed with pauses.

Pencil-scented, depressed,

I felt myself feeling inside what a shout was

watching them swerve on the road.

If we can’t hover

canopy, all beyond

euphoria, cloud cover

still parenthesis to humane

condition, falling

long enough to freeze infinity

by the way we gush light

I can’t deceive you.

Crestfallen morphology.

We haven’t learned how to live again.

No one’s gonna hurt you.

They deleted the length

and breadth of their messages.

A superstar using emetine

to throw up all the time

melted her heart muscle.

We still haven’t learned to live.

……….. Evolutionary glitch of wasting

yourself for some other person.

Not crying to supplement kissing

I was born in the year of In Utero

so it seems, Cass says

the thing about this loss

is it brings up the childhood trauma

of how unresolved you are.

There’s all this mud

clustering screentime

and lockdown Castorp’d all of us

to pale, snow-blown nostalgia,

sickly to look at the sky’s

lackadaisical tesseract

disappearing in a foamy poetry.

When I come off these pills it will be winter

again, if it ends; if we still haven’t learned

to live. No one

baby will hurt you.

Who will they become or return to?

Taking the willow’s temperature.

Tears on my iPhone, turned on silent

gasoline lullaby

nourished a possibility

that none of this was told

altogether the trees

showy with goldenness

starting to experience emotions again.

Like when we climb into the red-

threaded spiderweb

of another plague year

and we activate the starlight

stimulus package

in thermotaxis.

Hair is my only

form of ipseity.

Here a leaf fell rage, flux

compassion, there

a pastoral gratitude

the grief flower

poised within sexual premise.

Waterfalls held up with Alice bands.

We could just die to not answer the question

wetsweet nightingale vapid singing the morning

I’d rather hold you.

Cold in the world.

The internet is over

heaven and earth, the risk

is that you won’t die after all

fluorescing goodbye

I love our big talks in

telephonic commoning.

If the mind, of contrapuntal synapse

had known its grammar as a

test site for crisis,

ten thousand panicking hours.

Your voice is every colour.

Aura clots.

All the blood

rushed to my head at sunset.

Needing a fever to keep warm

in the never-ending winter

silver laces my Raynaud’s gloves

and I am sucking the glycerine

antifreeze

while lights keep flashing

in this push

we slack also to ice

and strangeness found

in your t-cells

all that remains.

Precarity

of cryosphere

bites from impossible

summary policy.

It is unequivocally

related loss,

archive narcosis

glacier

retreat to grace.

Acidification

of primal impulse

drives the young

hibernal bus.

Give us

a silver loop.

Lover Earth,

what is reading?

Deepfake lyrical replies

an aching machinery of dreaming

the supplicant hologram of our livelihood

in soft asynchrony

I hope the future was fine

as your hand in marginalia

slants towards stardust.

……….. Could I have this language for life

coveted in other dimensions,

each immeasurable

taking my alien hormone

opioid of amazing shimmer

straight from a coupon parallel universe

still falling to remember before,

like I know how it is

flowing from blossom

show of unblossom

a poison sponge,

one for the equinox:

we should’ve done this sooner.

MMXXIV

^{FOR MIDSUMMER SONG, SEE HERE}

^{Maria Sledmere’s Midsummer Song / Hypercritique—an autopoietic almanack of disambiguated ideas, a pale fire of a poem—is a spiralling work of scholarship that, oriented around the axis of this single ‘song,’ argues a curling grammatology of nocturnal time via a murmuring appendix of essays. Turning the term ‘anthropocene’ over a colloquial riverbed of intimations—retuning its resonances and compulsions to a lexicon of existence and survival—Sledmere invites us to consider our response (and our ongoing being) amidst an ever-widening gulf of social and environmental crises. To examine the song as sung, to refract the act of singing, here we’ve a citational web of resilient ideas. A book that examines the startled creativity of our present, the immersion of our moment, and the muddiness of our outlook: ever on the make and wide-awake for new forms of (and forums for) active engagement.

Sledmere’s Song begins with a suite of verses for June 21st, 2021—a searching, lyric architecture for the Summer Solstice—a paean to the possibility of meadowing a dreamscape on the horizontal brink of our warmest season. This poetry then hyperlinks its way away from the conclusive camber of the broken line to pose a reticulated, exploratory conception of our reading and writing the transitive labour of the daily: a mode of critical positioning and being that Sledmere terms hypercritique.

Spilling outward from this single poem, through an array of elaborative footnotes we’ve a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ guidebook to our epochal moment of convergent calamities. Slumbering, spectral units, subjectivity, syncope, and survival. Under the filial wing of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Sledmere deconstructs instrumental, solutionist thought modes across theory, culture and society. Her trace materials are glitter and dust, cinders and syllables; this is a book that rubs sand together to make glass of its sentences and considers the fragility of a window’s slant and angle on the seasonal arc and drift of perspectival time.

A book on the need for song as midsummer inches its way toward an axiomatic autumn, Sledmere’s work scrutinises contemporary modes of critical inquiry: of the writing for, the arguing towards, and the reading backwards to contemplate, instead, the shimmer time of the present tense.

ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE

How does one write speak or dream in the face of climate change,

extinction threats and intensifying resource depletion? Midsummer Song

offers a lyrical, intense and lamentful dream for an increasingly fragile future.

Beautifully composed and plaintively expressed, this poetic essay also hints

at an ethics for a precarious future.

Claire Colebrook

*

The footage accompanying Sledmere’s reading of ‘Midwinter Letter’
was shot in Northern California, August 2024, by

Andrew Kenower and Maria Sledmere.

*

Maria Sledmere is an artist, editor, educator and writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of over twenty creative publications, including Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), Cocoa and Nothing (with Colin Herd, SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Sledmere lectures in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, is managing editor of SPAM Press and teaches writing workshops for Beyond Form and the87press.}

_{︎︎︎ Back to Rehearsal}