Holding Pattern, by Alex Marsh

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This chapbook is a continuation of Two in the Wave (Distance No Object). Following on from the walk notes of the city and the everyday distortions from that experience. An attempt to further capture that paranoid hanging feel in the 'holding pattern' and try to make sense of the submersions, keeping these little happenings and cuttings and folding them back into the poem.

My partner was diagnosed with cancer last year and a lot of the poems are trying to come to terms with the harshness of that all. The brutality of chemo and the sudden shakiness of the lives we might lose. There is a definite bitterness and anger at where we're going, alongside the blinking bedazzlement of ‘the new’. How everything carries on regardless, how capital reinvents itself, prioritises itself as something always needing to be saved. What becomes obscured, how life in London but the city in general is constantly being layered over and how we’re never protected, so when we find shelter we have to hold it.

In thinking about all this, I looked at John Ashberry and Bernadette Mayer's ideas around the short poem. Life along certain lines and processes, new modes of living through the jumping off point.

Underpinning all my work, I always turn to Peter Manson for this quote:  “My work is for complexity, for sensory and semantic overload, for humour, maybe particularly the slapstick humour of linguistic mishap, for demonstrating the personal and even emotional continuity that underlies all the mess and blurt and dislocation —not a deodorised avant-garde, but a writing that emerges from the crises and particularities of one body and as many minds as will fit in it. It is against the poem as a small, luminous narrative vignette, against decorative simile and metaphor, against boredom.”

Alex Marsh is a poet from London, his previous books include Silo Bliss (SPAM Press), Ten Red Mornings (Death of Workers) and Two in the Wave (Distance No Object). He also co-runs OUT ELSE and co-edits LUDD GANG a bi-monthly magazine set up to support the Poets' Hardship Fund.