Material Matters

How many stories can you create from the work of Canan Tolon? Could you invent a biography for any of the materials she uses: rust, mould, coffee grounds, grass? Your subject, story, angle, and form are up to you. To borrow a phrase from Zbigniew Herbert, let’s go build a world “not from atoms/but from remnants”.

SIMON POMERY is a poet and musician based in London. His poems have been published in places including the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Edinburgh Review, P.N. Review, and Poetry London. The Stream (tall-lighthouse, 2010) was published to acclaim by the TLS and the late Seamus Heaney, who wrote “This augurs well for the Pomery life and literature”. A new pamphlet of work, Defence Against a Knife Attack, is due in 2014 from Myrtle Press, whose pamphlet series is inspired by the Ariel Poems published by Faber and Gwyer in the 1930s and will be illustrated with two etchings: frontispiece and cover illustration. The etchings will be hand-pressed, the pamphlets hand-bound, printed on laid paper, in small numbered editions. Simon is the 2013 Poet-in-Residence at MultiMadeira Festival. His ‘Blood Music E.P.’ was released in June 2013 on Diagonal Records, on transparent red vinyl in gold screen-printed PVC sleeve.

Image credit: Simon Pomery