Humbly and realistically, this is "a collection of misses and mistakes", an attempt to record, reconfigure and remake the world around us before it disappears for good or becomes impossible to find. Even as the author tries to escape himself, time is one step ahead and somebody else has already re-used the secondhand words he has borrowed. Although "there is no way to catch those / brief moments spent blinking in the sun", Rupert Loydell – in league with the ghost of John Ashbery – does at least try.
In a recent, unpublished dialogue with Harvey Hix, Loydell writes: "My writing is very much a resistance to traditional ideas of authorship, particularly the lone genius relying on inspiration, but also about deconstructing texts (not just literary ones) to understand what they might be saying and how I can or might understand them. At times that may result in satire or comment, polemic or resistance, whatever the result I hope it regenerates the often dead language around us and shows the way language can be moulded, shaped, changed and (ab)used in creative ways."
Loydell grew up in London but has lived in South West England for several decades now. He currently teaches creative writing at Falmouth University, edits Stride magazine which he founded in 1982, paints small abstracts, and is a contributing editor to International Times. He has two previous solo Red Ceilings titles available, as well as a collaborative work, and other paperbacks such as his recent The Age of Destruction and Lies are available from Shearsman. He has co-authored and edited many other books, and also writes about post-punk music, pedagogy, poetry and film for academic journals and books. He is a widely published poet whose most recent poetry books are Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and A Confusion of Marys (Shearsman, 2020). He has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS, written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), New Writing, Revenant, The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and contributed to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His paintings were first shown in Northern Young Contemporaries 1985, and since then he has had solo exhibitions in the UK, USA and Russia, and art in numerous group shows.
In a recent, unpublished dialogue with Harvey Hix, Loydell writes: "My writing is very much a resistance to traditional ideas of authorship, particularly the lone genius relying on inspiration, but also about deconstructing texts (not just literary ones) to understand what they might be saying and how I can or might understand them. At times that may result in satire or comment, polemic or resistance, whatever the result I hope it regenerates the often dead language around us and shows the way language can be moulded, shaped, changed and (ab)used in creative ways."
Loydell grew up in London but has lived in South West England for several decades now. He currently teaches creative writing at Falmouth University, edits Stride magazine which he founded in 1982, paints small abstracts, and is a contributing editor to International Times. He has two previous solo Red Ceilings titles available, as well as a collaborative work, and other paperbacks such as his recent The Age of Destruction and Lies are available from Shearsman. He has co-authored and edited many other books, and also writes about post-punk music, pedagogy, poetry and film for academic journals and books. He is a widely published poet whose most recent poetry books are Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and A Confusion of Marys (Shearsman, 2020). He has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS, written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), New Writing, Revenant, The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and contributed to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His paintings were first shown in Northern Young Contemporaries 1985, and since then he has had solo exhibitions in the UK, USA and Russia, and art in numerous group shows.
Other recent work by Loydell includes:
- two poems up at Stride as part of a number of Cocaine Hippo poems by various authors: click here and here;
- 4 poems up at Squawk Back;
- a prose poem and 2 art works up at Futch;
- 3 prose texts at The Fortnightly Review;
- 3 poems at M58; and
- a 4 poem sequence in the new print edition of Shearsman, who also published his book The Age of Destruction and Lies.
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T-Bone Burnett - Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk.
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