#Jazmine Linklater

[zarfpoetry]

you are invited to the launch of Toward Passion According, a new pamphlet of poems by Jazmine Linklater – with readings from Laura Elliott, Sally-Shakti Willow, and Jazmine Linklater! 

7pm, Sunday 18th February, at the Peckham Pelican, 92 Peckham Road, London

you can also find information about the event on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/201428337106581/

entry is free, and there will be a book & zine table. we hope to see you there!

ABOUT THE POETS

Sally-Shakti Willow researches and writes utopian poetics at the University of Westminster, where she is also a visiting lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing.  Her poems have been published by Adjacent Pineapple, Eyewear, The Projectionist’s Playground and Zarf.  The Unfinished Dream, a collaborative chapbook with visual artist Joe Evans, was published by Sad Press in 2016. Sally is the research assistant for The Contemporary Small Press project run by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and is on the judging panel for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for literary fiction from the small presses.  Follow her on Twitter: @Spaewitch.

Laura Elliott is a poet and library worker in London. She co-edits the poetry publishing experiment para·text with Angus Sinclair (@paratextual | paratext.co.uk). Her debut collection, lemon, egg, bread, was published by Test Centre in 2017.

Jazmine Linklater’s lives and writes in Manchester. Her first pamphlet, Toward Passion According is published by Zarf Editions, 2017 (you can buy it here), and a second, Découper, Coller, follows from Dock Road Press in 2018. She runs social media for T-junction International Poetry Festival and works part-time at Carcanet.

[spamzineglasgow]

In Response: Toward Passion According

Following an encounter with Jazmine Linklater’s pamphlet, Toward Passion According (Zarf Editions, 2017), Tawnya Renelle reaches out to Jazmine and what follows is a heartfelt, incisive exchange of thoughts around poetry and awe, movement in words, embarrassment, the body in writing, intimacy, reading and lyric theory. 

Dear Jazmine,

> I am reading your collection today as I sit in my pajamas on my couch. The rain is coming down and with my cup of coffee by my side I am snuggled up and ready to take in your words. I know you don’t know me, but you should know I often read in my pajamas. I am enraptured already with your collection after reading the quote that acts as an entrance to the poems. I feel I should explain to you what I am doing here before I go any further. And really what I am doing here comes from one of my favourite quotes about poetry by Jenny Boully, ‘Poetry is an instant, an instant in which transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs and all of one’s knowledge, experiences, memories, etc. are obliterated into awe.’

> You see I find so often that a review of a poetry collection attempts a summation of the poems and while I think that is important, for me, poetry is a moment captured. It is a moment when time stops, and lines take hold of the reader. So, I thought I would write you this letter as a living way of reacting and capturing each moment of awe as I read along. As a poet myself (who would love such a response from a reader) I thought I would share it with you. Apologies if it is presumptuous to assume you will enjoy this.

Her Stammer

> I have read the poem three times now and I am returning again and again to the lines ‘Beyond text~body~milk~blood beyond/(wo)man beyond contact beyond’ and it feels like a kind of returning to knowing, a kind of remembering of something I have always known. You ask me in the first line of the poem to ‘Remember you are elsewhere’ and I am in these lines elsewhere and beyond to a deep knowing and I feel caught by them and held there.

The world as (h)is

> I am falling in love with your use of / and () and I will admit that I have scanned the collection to see if it is used again and again and it is, I am filled with sheer delight and a kind of envy as well. I write words on the page and rarely play with the power of symbols to add to language, to deconstruct and to challenge language and to ‘enunciate sexed/un-(kn)own/ed.’ I like stopping a reader and slowing them down and your use of / and () truly does this and I am grateful for it. It makes me consider the words we use and what they can mean.

               Heroines Female heroines                reclaim the elsewhere

Before I continue, I feel I must both confess and tell you something. The confession is that my knowledge of mythology is limited, but I want to thank you for carrying me through Artemisia/Susana/Abra/Judith/Diana/Artemis with gentle care and a way that I felt despite my knowledge I understood the poem.

> The thing I wanted to tell you is that I see connection and serendipity everywhere, it is just the kind of person I am, and I wonder if you do too? This last week in Liverpool with a friend I got a new tattoo of deep significance, a reclaiming of myself, protection of myself, and an embracing in my strength and power as a woman. I am finding this poem echoing those emotions for me.

Bacchic Dance

> I read this poem and went forward to the notes and then returned to it again. I love seeing the many and varied influences of other poetry on your words. And after my second reading I sat for a while with these lines:

so all in name & lyric

                        so all & all unknown

                                                    like this          like this

                                                         & this & this

And I thought about the unknown and the multitudes of this and like this that I know and don’t know. I also studied the page, your words moving like dance across the page in motion and my eyes dancing along with them.

Ritual Dance

> I am reeling and spinning in this poem and it is the moment of the previous dance that has sent me into this state. And I am sitting now on my couch with lines that have moved me into the space of obliteration into awe with a collapsing of my knowledge and experiences. ‘we are plastic arts: viewer, sculptor, painter, piece/bridge gaps ‘tween worlds: even when they’re spelled’ and Imitate art advert/incite desire, embody ideal.’ I think about the body a lot, I write about the body all the time and these lines have left me with so much to think on, the dynamic body that moves and stays still.

> And now though I read the poem in between (‘Pyrrhic Dance’) I am in ‘Lyrical Dance’ and I think this is my favourite poem of the collection, though I can’t say for sure yet as I can see the last poem on the next page. But in order to tell you what lines left me sitting here on this couch moved and contemplative I would simply have to type out the entire poem. So I will say I adore the use of second person in a poem, the way it brings me in as a reader ‘I want you condensed’ and I am not the you that you write to, but I know a you so similar that this poem felt as though it came beating out of my own heart ‘body re-build measure my line’ and I want to thank you for giving me such a beautiful moment this morning.

Tryst

> Here I am at the end and my mind is blown (I wonder if this is very American of me to say) but your note says that the structure of this poem follows a film Cleo de 5 a 7 and I am learning French because I am going to Paris in January, so I have immediately added this to my watchlist. And then the poem is a response and reaction to moments in the film just as this is a review/response/letter/reaction to your poetry. I hadn’t known that at the end of my notes of reaction that you and I would crescendo in a kind of writing moment together ‘cut, like a poem’ in a moment by moment reaction. I am so happy and grateful for these words ‘A line in itself says nothing. But if you/use it to say something it says what you wish.’ So perfectly does it sum up what I hope I have done in this response.

> I will leave you here. I didn’t want to ask you questions about the poems, I simply wanted to live and (re)act and (re)spond to what you had written. And I hope that you saw

Response as review

Moments captured

Obliteration in  a line

                                                           Toward Passion According

                                                                         Yours Truly,                                                                                   Tawnya

~

 Dear Tawnya,

> When I received your email asking me to respond to your response to my poems I was full of excitement, feeling honoured that someone had engaged with my work and wanted to engage with me as a consequence—and then my trepidation set in—how much are these poems my own? I wondered. I began worrying at the edges of a half-remembered something: John Ashbery, in interview, trying to explain his relationship with time and how poems from back then, whenever, have slipped—are continually—slipping away from him, no longer belong to him, despite being reminded and asked of specifics.

> Now, I feel very removed from the (my?) work, as I read your response to the epigraph—I don’t have a copy of the pamphlet here, can’t remember the exact words of the quote—I can’t quite remember it. But I am taken by the Jenny Boully quote you cite—not a name I know, but a feeling I recognise—I like the quote very much. I think I agree.

> I’m pleased that one of your motivations was to capture your own response, moment by moment, as you read—I instinctively approached your letter in the same way; didn’t want to begin reading until I was ready to write in response.

> However, I must be honest now: you respond to my poems, and I cannot write instantaneously—I have to read, heart beating—feeling embarrassed and nervous——

> I’m really struck by—because in all honesty it makes me feel a little uneasy—your phrase ‘as a woman’. In hindsight, I think that my own relationship with ‘woman’, or maybe my relationship with myself ‘as a woman’, at the time of writing this pamphlet was much more settled than it currently is—which I don’t think is to say that it was settled, even then. At the start of your letter you mention the epigraph from Luce Irigaray, and what I think is most interesting about the book that it comes from (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzche) is that—it feels, to me at least—or felt, at the time—I may be/have been really wrong—that in this text she is trying to undo, or rethink and make some reparations for, the infamous essentialism of her earlier work. Like she’s asking for forgiveness maybe, though I’d have to return to the text to point out where and how I think she’s doing that. Being ‘woman’ is so torn—historically such a marginalised position, but nonetheless still constructed of such artifice, whether wielded for empowerment or subjugation. Denise Riley’s Am I That Name? really helped me to locate my instincts in something like feeling (‘it is called feeling but is its real name thought?’ is a line of hers I often think) somewhere like ‘knowledge’? I often wish I’d read that book sooner.

> I’m relieved that you jumped forward to the notes section and saw that some of my lines are quotes! When I’m writing I always feel like, if there’s a thought I’ve been circling around, or something I’ve been trying to formulate for ages and it’s just not coming out right, if I come across my exact feeling in someone else’s poem then that serendipity should be honoured, and so I do often quote and credit other poets. So, I suppose I do often see connections, in response to your question. I think the art I love the most is the art that sends my mind spinning off in a million different referential directions all at once.

> Your response to ‘Lyrical Dance’ is so interesting to me, because I have actually been thinking of it lately. Studying for my literature MA, I’ve been reading lyric theory. I suppose I’ve been thinking about the poem because, my first thought, when I started reading this stuff, was—oh no, what have I done! I’ve written something ridiculous because I didn’t know anything about lyric. But the more I read and the more I learn, I think, actually, feelingly, I got it (something?), even then, from the poetry, not the theory—and so I am learning (even if retrospectively) to trust my instincts, and so your response to this poem, especially, comes at the perfect time. I am so pleased it speaks to you in the way you describe. It’s so strange to think of the generalised-specific reader-‘you’ actually being someone—being you!

> Thank you for engaging with me in this way, and bringing my poems back to me differently. Can I quote you? ‘I am so happy and grateful for these words’. I hope you find my response to your response heartening, as I have found yours.

Yours truly,

Jazmine

~

Toward Passion According is out now and available to purchase via Zarf Editions.

~

Text: Tawnya Renelle and Jazmine Linklater

Image: Zarf Editions

Published: 12/1/20

[amykingpoet]

EXCERPT from Introduction:

Some may ask: Why poetry? Why respond in a kind of language where meaning is not always transparent, when the subject matter of sexual abuse might rather invite language that states categorically the terms of the experience, that does not allow for misinterpretation or ambiguity? Shouldn’t this be language that gets straight to the point rather than travelling slant, arriving wonky or misshapen? But, we ask, whose point would that language be arriving at? If it wasn’t women who shaped the vocabulary and syntax we widely recognize as legible, then following these forms could, for some, feel like another act of docility.

–Emily Critchley and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, 2018

One of my poems:

MISSISSIPPI

Last night at a Love’s truck stop, a man told me he would like to slice me up, boil and eat my liver and rape me after, I’m pretty sure, in that order. With his eyes he spoke those words, and if you don’t believe me (“How could you know for sure?”) then you’ve never been a woman, or else. The rain and the cows don’t care. The corn doesn’t ask or doubt. And there’s a southern sadness buried in everything I pass down this dark road driving tonight.

–Amy King

CONTRIBUTORS:

KAT ADDIS

SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR

RACHAEL ALLEN

NUAR ALSADIR

RAE ARMANTROUT

MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

ZOË BRIGLEY THOMPSON

ELIZABETH-JANE BURNETT

MAIRÉAD BYRNE

J.R. CARPENTER

SOPHIE COLLINS

JENNIFER COOKE

EMILY CRITCHLEY

ALISON CROGGON

AMY CUTLER

JEAN DAY

CARRIE ETTER

AMY EVANS

MEGAN FERNANDES

KAI FIERLE-HEDRICK

HEATHER FULLER

ISABEL GALLEYMORE

SUSANA GARDNER

SUSAN GEVIRTZ

ELIZABETH GUTHRIE

SARAH HAYDEN

SUSAN HOWE

JACQUELINE KARI

AMY KING

DEIRDRE KOVAC

LOUISE LANDES LEVI

AGNES LEHOCZKY

JAZMINE LINKLATER

FRANCESCA LISETTE

SO MAYER

CAROL MIRAKOVE

KATHRYN MOCKLER

MARIANNE MORRIS

ERÍN MOURE

CHARLOTTE NEWMAN

SANDEEP PARMAR

FRANCES PRESLEY

JÈSSICA PUJOL DURAN

SINA QUEYRAS

NAT RAHA

NISHA RAMAYYA

JOAN RETALLACK

CHRISTIE ANN REYNOLDS

SUSAN M. SCHULTZ

CONNIE SCOZZARO

SOPHIE SEITA

ZOË SKOULDING

ROSIE ŠNAJDR

VERITY SPOTT

REBECCA TAMÁS

ELIZABETH TREADWELL

CATHERINE WAGNER

ROSMARIE WALDROP

SAMANTHA WALTON

CAROL WATTS

EMILIA WEBER

ELIZABETH WILLIS

SARA WINTZ

ELISABETH WORKMAN

[zarfpoetry]

announcing the new pamphlet from Zarf Editions! 

Toward Passion According by Jazmine Linklater

get it here for £3 – or grab a three-pamphlet bundle for £7.50! 

[zarfpoetry]

twitter moment about the reading we just had in Leeds!

[zarfpoetry]

Our next reading! 7pm on Wednesday 12th April at Wharf Chambers, Wharf Street, Leeds.

Please note we are downstairs this time – level access at the rear and accessible toilets through the bar.

The following trio of amazing, inimitable, unmissable poets will read: Gloria Dawson, Jazmine Linklater, and Nat Raha. Find out more about them below! 

We will also have a book table, so come and visit, circulate and peruse... We can’t wait!!

~~~

Gloria Dawson writes poetry, essays, and work for performance, and is recently published in Zarf, Datableed and The Literateur. Her work has been shown at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and anthologised in Remembering Oluwale (Valley Press, 2016). She lives in and interferes with Leeds. http://cargocollective.com/gloriadawson

Jazmine Linklater is a poet based up north, currently studying towards her MA at Salford. Work can be found in: Datableed; The Literateur; Paratext; Zarf. Work is forthcoming in Epizootics!

Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry includes two collections: countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010); and numerous pamphlets including ‘£/€xtinctions’ (Sociopathetic Distro, 2017), '[of sirens / body & faultlines]' (Veer Books, 2015), and 'mute exterior intimate' (Oystercatcher Press, 2013). She's performed and published her work internationally. She is undertaking a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. Nat’s essay titled ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism’ is due for publication in the South Atlantic Quarterly this spring, and she has recently started working with Scottish PEN on the Many Voices project.

[zarfpoetry]

new issue out now!

ZARF 7 is here!

a special PROSE POETRY issue, with a huge range of brilliant contributions from:

susie campbell

paul green

dominic hale

mike saunders

david spittle

gloria dawson

anwer ghani

julia rose lewis

katy hastie

jazmine linklater

& nisha ramayya

plus:

ellen dillon reviews mike saunders

katy lewis hood reviews sarah crewe

and robin purves reviews tom betteridge

get it now at zarfpoetry.tumblr.com ! or wherever fine ZARFs are sold...