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Article 'Kernel Stone'. Long Poem Magazine, 10

The artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sister Christina wrote a poem ‘Goblin Market’, that is situated firmly in the long poem canon. This was the starting place for my poem ‘Kernel Stone.’ Rossetti’s text, celebrated for its frantic Bacchanalianism, seems to suggest language’s eroticism, its physicality. For example, “streaked her neck which quaked like curd” is not only suggestive in its reference to a ‘streaked’ and sexualized body, but also presents an acrobatic tension between sibilants (‘s’) and voiceless velars (‘k’). This is a poem to be mouthed.

‘Goblin Market’s phonemic patterning is the element herein isolated and developed via a ‘writing-through’ process. Put simply, my method was to rip Rossetti’s text into pieces place it in a bag, shake it and then ‘copy consciously’ as the Dada poet Tristan Tzara might once have done—except with every intention of disrupting the visual and aural wholeness of the word. From this process, a formalist sketch of the work was composed, its bare sounds as material to be elaborated, neologisms to be found.

This process is also a form of redaction in its removal of grammatical endings, prepositions, and articles from the original; the superfluous. As such, the sections of ‘Kernel Stone’ which directly quote Rossetti are visually redacted.

It is remarkable that the process of ripping by chance not only preserved, but emphasised these anaphoric repetitions, and so I have preserved them in my poem.

In choosing this particular iconic text as ‘found material’, I hope to ask the questions: what is a contemporary long poem and what possibilities await its future?