It has been a while since I’ve uploaded anything to the ‘Words‘ page on liminoids.com. I am not sure why this is other than the fish just not biting. Not that I’ve really been fishing as far as I am aware. What tends to happen with poetry writing is not so much that I go looking for words, it is rather that they come looking for me. At least, that is how it seems with the poem ‘Gif’. Something snags and refuses to be dislodged. Because of this thing – an idea, feeling, disposition, whatever – making demands on my attention I am inexorably drawn in. Some sort of resolution then becomes necessary. As I started to work through whatever it was the image of a gif called on me to address it became apparent that it was a structure of feeling instilled by the nightmare that is the Brexit ‘process’ (if that doesn’t over-dignify what is otherwise better described as a horrowshow) that was slowly beginning to reveal itself. I don’t think the poem exclusively speaks to this, but the overwhelming feeling of ‘stuckness’ that seems to hang in the air is very much in tune with a national mood that is encapsulated by whatever it is that ‘Brexit’ has come to signify. It is not really a liminal condition as such because there is no obvious sense of an in-between state that is being traversed and negotiated. It seems more like a stutter, a tourettes-like spasm of time stuck on repeat.
The poem ‘Gif’ can be read here.
