An exchange of emails between Harry Man and Ella Chappell, two poets with a penchant for writing about particle physics, cosmology, time paradoxes and space flight.
To start us off on our discussion, I was very interested by this
remark made by CERN Director General Rolf Heuer made in reference to their
inaugural Artist in Residence programme, "Particle physics and the arts are
natural partners, both explore our place in the universe and both examine what
it is to be human." I think largely we do
explore research topics with the view to elevating the grand enterprise of the
expansion of human knowledge, but do we also have to have an element of
soul-searching, and in order to do so, do we have to be ignorant of fact?
**
Hey Harry,
As far as I can see, the compulsion for expansion of human
knowledge is the inherent consequence of soul-searching. As is argued in a book I read recently called ‘Truth
or Beauty’ by David Orrell, from the very
beginning of the study of natural sciences, as it grew out of the study of
philosophy, the idea of an indivisible item in nature – Democritus’ atom – has
been a prevailing and powerful aesthetic. Mary Midgely puts it very well in
her book ‘Science and
Poetry’ when she says that
science has, “an unbalanced fascination with the imagery of atomism – a notion
that the only way to understand anything is to break it into its ultimate
smallest parts and to conceive these as making up something comparable to a
machine.”
I think this want for finitude, purity and symmetry reflects a
basic human want for the knowable. If nature is knowable, I am knowable.
I recently watched an extract from a fantastic documentary about
Richard Feynman, ‘The Pleasure of Finding Things
Out’, in which Feynman was
talking about a discussion he had with his friend, an artist. The artist
criticised Feynman for, as a scientist, taking the awe and beauty out of a
flower by deconstructing it and making it into “a dull thing”. But Feynman
argued that the deeper facts about the flower; the processes on a molecular
level, the complicated actions of the cells, the evolutionary progressions that
went into influencing the attractive colour of the petals, served only to add
to the mystery, wonder and beauty of the flower.
I think any idea that science and art contradict each other
essentially only underestimates the absolute astoundingness of the universe. So
no, I don’t think we’re better off being ignorant of technical understanding.
Like Feynman, I encounter a great “pleasure in finding things
out”. But, not having a
mathematical mind, and not having a formal scientific education (at least since
yawningly timing ball-bearings as they rolled down a cardboard ramp and messing
around with Bunsen burners), it is true my attempt at grappling with physics is
conceptual at best. But the way my brain feels as it tries to expand out into
our galaxy, into a million galaxies, or shrink into a single atom, the way it
resists and bends spectacularly like light round a black hole, I find that
feeling inspiring without an explicit understanding of the numbers. What do you
think?
In the same documentary, Feynman is asked why magnets repel each
other and he has great difficulty with the phrasing of the question – ‘why’. He
says: ‘I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in
terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand
it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with.’ Does this suggest
that metaphor is, as you were saying, an inadequate device when it comes to
describing science? Or does this open up a challenge and a possibility for the
poet?
Hi Ella,
That's right, I think perhaps the two (the metaphysical – the soul searching, and the concrete, the fact) are immiscible only in so far as, and to borrow Ted Hughes’ phrase, they seem “like different stages of the same fever.”
Casting your line into the water and
remaining mesmerised and excited by your subject, (sometimes referred to as the
“poet’s trance”) often starts out as either a short
phrase, or a set of parameters that are really just play in
the truest sense, and this is accompanied equally by an insight.
When speaking to contemporary
mathematicians and scientists, and listening to interviews with those at CERN or the MIT
team responsible for the Apollo guidance computer in the 1960s and very early
70s, the
language is very similar – “insight” and “play” – very much so Feynman’s words
too - although the disciplines and applications are fundamentally different.
To expand a little on the kind of
“insight” I mean, when I talk about insight in the context of the poetic mode,
it is a kind of conjecture, a glimpse through the camouflage, the
horror-film’s sudden
loss of phone signal, or Eliot’s bird whom we are enticed to follow further into the rose garden of the
poem’s unfurling. It is more delicate than merely the narcoleptic pianist,
casting the a dissonant hotchpotch of notes with his head until the audience
rise in a murmuration of subdued panic as the realisation dawns that this is no
longer part of the concerto (although certainly the poet’s trance does
sometimes fail spectacularly like this even though it’s given fewer column inches than more successful, hyperkulturemic –
Romantic – attempts). The insight at the point of composition is a very
fast-moving and fragile sense of what will come to unify the poem in terms of
its tone or its lexicon. So insight in poetry is a very nebulous thing.
To “play” as a poet is less nebulous;
play is often play in a very literal sense (pun intended) – I once input text
from Pride and Prejudice into a conversation between customer
service chatbots online to create a pantoum. Ozymandias was born from a similar poetry
exercise between Horace Smith and Shelley and contemporary examples can be found in
abundance in online writing forums and journals such as Like Starlings. When we
play with ideas in a poem, we are experiencing a very great freedom – one which
is either private as a dream, or something we wish to share, either way it is
an agitation, an excitement of some kind, the lifting in the gut you get from
fast, fresh air when leaping into the ocean. It should be said that this isn't as
Romantic as might be inferred – they are symptoms of neurological events rather
than Divine wind.
In practice, of the poems that I write,
the ones that are most often asked about at readings and remembered are those
that have been derived from a matrix of strict rules. When writing about Scott
Carpenter’s Aurora 7 mission which was the second manned mission in orbit
conducted by NASA in 1962, designed to conduct atmospheric tests, I waded
through 300 pages of mission logs and press releases to isolate pieces of
information that intersected along the axiom of least distanced language and as
you say the Carl Sagan-esque “astoundingness of nature” (lovely phrase). It was
also grounded in a rucksack-destroying reading list of space programme research
and the reason, experiment and result of the flight. Once I’d set myself these
rules, I set more restrictions which were to craft the poem into quatrains and
to create QR codes that linked through to archived photographs of the flight,
allowing smartphone-equipped readers to look out of the capsule’s porthole over the Earth as they read the
poem.
Even in moments where a tenable grasp of
the language or where fact is less apparent, the context at least, is instant.
The reading speed is slowed, allowing the scientific observations and emotional
units to come to rest gently in the white page surrounding the poem. In a poem,
the imagination adores a vacuum.
This is true too of the metaphor, where
the semantics and calculation and specialist knowledge are too hard to convey
within a short space, then the metaphor becomes a kind of shorthand, a mnemonic
technique to engage the senses and consign the essential principles to memory. Dr Jocelyn Bell Burnell (a hero of mine) in a discussion on In Our Time
(24/11/2005) about the graviton describes the curvature of space-time as
being “like a rubber sheet” and the snooker ball of the Earth on
the rubber sheet is pushing down on it and bending space-time and the analogy
is very immediate. We might not have read Einstein’s 1905 article on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies which landed him in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica in 1911, and outlined the nature of space-time in the context of
scientific learning or practical experiment or the interpretation of collected
data, because as literature professionals, we tend to stick to our subject:
poetry. Far more likely is that we’re familiar with its cultural cameos from The
Big Bang Theory to the likes of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Burnt
Norton or Glyn Maxwell’s book, ‘Time’s Fool’, or in popular culture, films
such as Primer and that I expect you probably tackle
the subject in more detail your new book. In either discipline (literary or
scientific) it would be facetious to imagine the circumstances under which we
might be playing a round of snooker on the rubbery surface of space-time,
because outside of episodes of Red Dwarf, we’re almost universally unlikely to
have had experience of such a game. Nevertheless the general principle is
clear, and the result – that this curvature
warps light, and gravity around us - is easier to consider in those terms.
Perhaps there is a simpler analogy or metaphor out there, which is down to
us to synthesise.
In the sense that the general principle is more important to grasp
than the atomized understanding, the proof becomes more of a footnote. It is
problematic not least because such ventures often result in an awkward reductio ad
absurdam such as Schrodinger’s Cat. The cat is both alive and dead – another
implausible situation. Schrodinger’s cat is less of a metaphor
(analogy really) and more of an allegory about the marriage between
the classical world and the subatomic world, the
Euclidian geometry of the dimensions we can observe with the naked eye, and the
unobservable world we have to echolocate through high powered electron
microscopes, particle accelerators, radio telescopes, or the probabilistic
truth based on observed principles. For a lot of particle physics, it is the
mathematics that suggests what ought to be investigated next through
experiment. The theory can then be proven via strict methodology and peer
review. Science is the business of aiming for the truth, even if ultimately the
desired truth is never found, but something else is discovered along the way.
CERN is the place where the precise
overlap between the classical world and the subatomic is being revealed. I think you express that in your poem “Black
Hole” very deftly by having the two languages of song lyrics that are
hypermetric, interspersed with explanations about the nature of black holes and
referring to Stephen Hawking's famous equation that seems to suggest that
matter is becoming lost from
the known universe permanently through black holes (apparently in violation
of the second law of thermodynamics – that energy and matter are transformed,
rather than lost).
"I write cheques / is there information loss? Is there information
loss?"
Lavinia Greenlaw, who is a former
Science Museum poet in residence, talks about this problem between the
scientific metaphor and the poet’s role within it in an interview with the New
Scientist, here. Both the classical world and the
subatomic, are talking at cross-purposes on the same subject which is something
that as poets we ought to be sensitive to.
Hopefully the poem will then provide
discoveries with an entry point into our vernacular, our language and broader
cultural understanding.
I was wondering which poets you take as
your touchstones, and so serve as influences or are hidden gems? And it would
be great to know perhaps some of your favourite scientific analogies?
Harry
**
Hi
Harry,
Yes,
‘like different stages of the same fever’ is a fantastic way to put it.
It’s
very interesting what you are saying about insight and play. Your poetry is
filled with a spirit of playfulness; I absolutely love your Pride
and Prejudice / chatbot poem,
and your poem ‘Earth’ which combines the familiar structure and language of
social media with geological and prehistoric facts about the Earth.
Insight
can provoke play and play can also provoke insight. I often find when I learn
about a new scientific concept through research and reading that I have the
impulse to experiment with it, to push the limits of its possibilities. In
poems like Quantum and In This Double
Split Experiment I Am In All Places At Once I take quantum principles and apply them to the everyday, a
nonsensical practice in scientific reality, but a playful comment on how
concepts such as an electron existing in all places at once can be both
counter-intuitive and a familiar experience of the human mind where, for a
double take, the back of every stranger’s head belongs to your
ex. If you’re interested in quantum psychology, I’d recommend Roger
Penrose’s book ‘Shadow
of the Mind’ in which he argues that
artificial intelligence in computers is impossible through classical Turing
computing alone, and a new computing that allows quantum processes must be
created in order to achieve AI. Much of the book concerns Penrose’s
controversial theory that uninterrupted quantum activity is possible in the
cytoskeleton of neurons in the brain, and Penrose suggests that this may be the
source of consciousness. It’s an incredible read and, though now a bit outdated,
it demonstrates an ambitious attempt to draw new connections between different
sources of knowledge and different ways of thinking, opening up new areas of
research.
Mathematical
patterns in nature have been of particular interest to me lately. My poem The Golden takes as its subjects various features of nature whose
organisation can be explained through mathematics – the movement of starlings,
the shape of a shell, bubbles, trees. But the main experimental impulse behind
the composition of this poem was to use the Fibonacci sequence of numbers as a
guide for syllable count per line. It is interesting to see to what extent this
‘magical formula’ built into almost any naturally-occurring shape or
characteristic can or cannot improve the metre, sound and aesthetic of words.
To how many degrees our language has been removed from the object it describes.
I know you have also dabbled with the Fibonacci sequence in poetry and would
love to hear more about that.
On reading your science poems, one
simile that really stuck with me was the description of the spacecraft from
‘The First American in Space’: “The view from inside a marshmallow / in a camp
fire, all blue and hot”. This image epitomises the ‘playful’ in that
it is whimsical whilst encapsulating the shape, colours, and heat of both
objects. It effortlessly captures the cosmological macro world unfolding into
the personal, anecdotal micro realm, unfolding into the atomic, this seemingly
vertiginous, boundless fall which follows the question ‘why
is there something rather than nothing?’ Much
like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, which harnesses the power of fractals (a
small part of it looks the same as the whole), something deep within us can’t
believe that pi’s infinite sequence of numbers can simply be arbitrary.
This leads me to your question about
scientific analogies. It could be argued that subatomic particles themselves
are an analogy. The realist might suggest that findings at CERN represent real
physical snooker ball-type objects smashing each other apart and crashing into
detectors. But many instrumental theorists view particles as simply a
convenient fiction. What may seem to be an electron is, in reality, an
excitation in the quantum electromagnetic field. The great mystery of
wave/particle duality finds its solution here. I guess this fits neatly with
what you were saying about CERN – here is where we will find exactly
at what point our Euclidian language can no longer articulate subatomic
activity.
The “bee in a cathedral” analogy
is another that immediately springs to mind. This is used to explain the
proportions of an atom – that if an atom were the size of a
cathedral, the nucleus would be about the size of a bee. This strikes me as
more of an effective analogy than most because it is exactly clear what each
component of the analogy is supposed to represent – the walls of the
cathedral are the extent of the areas where the electrons will be, the bee is
the size of the nucleus. I was lucky enough to have Lavinia Greenlaw as my
supervisor whilst I was writing my poetry dissertation and something she often
expressed was the importance of analogies and metaphors in poetry to be
absolutely precise. Each component of the metaphor must be measured against the
others, to rigorously test its sense. This is what makes writing
them so difficult. And when it comes to science, it’s all in the details.
But I think Heidi Williamson (who was
also poet in residence at the Science Museum) achieves a beautiful analogy in
the first poem ‘Slide Rule’ of her incredible collection ‘Electric
Shadow’:
“The universe is running
away with itself
Like a child on a red bike
on Christmas Day.
Somewhere the wrapping is
still being opened.
The present gives itself
again and again.”
She links the cosmological
to the personal and, in the same way a child has the impulse to move forward,
not with destination in mind, but simply for the impulse of moving, as does the
universe.
Poets that I feel have a big influence on me currently include
Lavinia Greenlaw, Paul Farley, e e cummings, Michael Ondaatje, Elizabeth Bishop
and Tim Lilburn (I like to think of Lilburn as a hidden gem, since you ask, and
urge you to get hold of a copy of ‘Desire
Never Leaves’.) But Jorie Graham’s
poetry, particularly ‘PLACE’, has probably had the biggest impact on me in my most
recent reading, hers is the kind of writing that’s made me realise what can
really be done with language. I read the poem ‘Mother
and Child (The Road At The Edge Of The Field)’ on a day in mid October on the metro in Manchester and I
remember exactly where the train was, between Trafford Bar and Cornbrook, when
I finished the poem and had the overwhelming sensation, (in the horror movie
version of this story my phone just lost signal) a jolt that brought me out of
the quotidian and onto an Earth that I intellectually acknowledge but rarely
feel a part of.
Jorie Graham is often called a nature
poet as much of her poetry is located in the natural world and PLACE in
particular is concerned with the destruction and devastation that humanity is
currently wreaking on the planet. You mentioned that you wondered if poets
should have a certain responsibility to spread awareness of scientific
discovery and catastrophe and I believe that Graham would argue they should.
Graham’s writing is deeply scientific – she depicts not only the
processes that exist deep in every natural form but also their shimmering
fragility. These are not poems of generality about the sublime in nature, but
specific and precisely informed. Her original use of line length, often very
long lines followed by three or four very short lines, and mastery of a
compulsive, prolonged syntax tenderly set up image to image like an organic
flow which is being pressed against, tested by human intellect and ownership:
“..and I talk to myself, I make
words that follow from other
words, they push from be-
hind – into the hedge like
the
hedge
but not of it-no-not
ever-slippery
against it where it
never knows they are pressing”
Some
subjects seem too massive to comprehend, literally – the universe, (or even too
miniscule – imaging a bee in a cathedral may help us perhaps get somewhere near
to understanding atomic proportions, but can any human accurately imagine the
tininess of the Planck
length?) and also sometimes too
removed from our lives. One of these things is the genuine threat of global
warming. Graham’s words, where many other mediums have failed before, made me
feel both rooted in a world tipping dizzyingly on the edge, and urgently
arrested.
Who
are your favourite poets / your influences?
Ella
Hi Ella,
Whenever I read your emails I get very excited and immediately
think, "Of course! We should talk about x" and then I vanish off into
a hinterland of old books and drafts. I would love to get back to you about
Penrose - I read the prequel to that book which is ‘The Emperor's New Mind’ -
in which he proposes that time runs backwards in the brain, but I think we
probably ought to leave that for when we next see one another!
I worked on a handful of Fibonacci poems that share the number
of words per line with the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on)
looking at how popcorn explodes in a microwave. For those that aren’t familiar
with the Fibonacci sequence, the numbers are found by starting with 1 and 1,
then 2 as above and then adding the two preceding numbers, so 2 and 1 becomes
3, 3 and 2 becomes 5 and so on. The relationship to the Golden Ratio is where
you divide one number in the sequence by the number that precedes it. The
higher up in the sequence you go, the more accurate the Golden Ratio number
which eventually becomes 1.618033 and stretches on into infinity. This ratio of
1:1.618 is the number that governs the symmetry in the division of cells, to
the number of clockwise to anti-clockwise seeds on the face of a sunflower, to
the proportions of a good photograph or portrait painting. For that reason it
was called the Divine Proportion by the Ancient Greeks. More information is
available on it here.
So, I'm very jealous of you having had Lavinia Greenlaw as a
tutor, and it's certainly her name that seems to be most associated with poetry
that addresses science most directly, although, as you say, Heidi Williamson's poetry, too, is startling and I’ve recently bought a copy of
‘Electric Shadow’ and have been unable to go anywhere – it seems – without it.
I haven't read Jorie Graham or Tim Lilburn, but I look forward to getting stuck in.
Speaking of influences, right now I'm reading more poems than
poets specifically (thinking of Edwin Morgan's The
First Men on Mercury and Alice Oswald's
A
Sleepwalk on the Severn - which returns
again and again to the Moon, its silences and its passivity to light and the
goings-on of Earth). Heidi Williamson's 'Cosmonaut' and Lavinia Greenlaw's 'For the First Dog in Space' touch thematically on the appalling level of risk involved in the
early days of space travel. One story that always stays with me is that of the
re-entry of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Following the failure of one of
the Soyuz's ion engines, Komarov spends five hours attempting to orientate his
craft for a manual re-entry. Believing that his death is a foregone conclusion,
his wife is summoned to the Baikonur control room. Via a crackly video link
that keeps shorting out because of the lack of power to the cabin, they discuss
how they will bring the news to the children and the two finally say their
goodbyes to one another.
With brilliant piloting skill and against all odds, Komarov is
able to manoeuvre - by hand - the Soyuz 1 capsule through piercing exospheric
sunlight into the correct orientation for re-entry. Then there is radio
silence. Ionised air blasts the surrounding metal of the capsule and the pink,
green and orange aurora of 10,000 degree heat is clearly visible just three
feet away from his face. In the control room all that is audible is a
long, ominous, static drawl. The control room calls and calls and calls
"Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. Rubin, this is Zarya, how
do you hear me? Over. This is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over ...."
There is no response.
After five long minutes, the signal comes through to the ground
that Soyuz 1 has successfully re-entered the atmosphere and is 60km outside
Orsk, near the Kazakhstan border. However, this is not where the story ends.
High up in the atmosphere, Komarov has pulled a switch to deploy the drag
parachute to slow his descent. Without the drag parachute he would be
travelling so fast that his main capsule parachute would sheer off. The drag
chute spools, juttering out behind him and inflates successfully. He is still
travelling at formidable speed, so much so that it takes him five seconds to
drop 10,000ft. He pulls the lever to deploy the drogue parachute. This drogue
chute is designed to act as a primary air brake, and will allow the
capsule to slow to non-lethal speed. It fails. Again, all is not lost as
the reserve chute inflates for a few seconds, however it quickly becomes
tangled with the drag chute. The capsule accelerates, hurtling uncontrollably
toward the ground, ultimately, tragically sending him careening to his death. So
when writing about the flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, I
think of how likely it was that he could have met his end at any second and
that is still something that makes my stomach flinch.
To close our conversation down a little (I’m sorry), and to pull
together some of the threads we've been pursuing. I think we do enter into a
kind of pact the minute we use scientific terminology and negotiating between
what to tell and what to leave to the imagination. In a lot of ways it
does come close to the phrase I used at the beginning to kick off our
discussion — that particle physics and the arts are natural partners in
expressing "what it means to be human". I love your poem In This Double
Split Experiment I Am in All Places At Once and that thought that "subatomic particles themselves are
an analogy". In your poem I think we have to keep the idea in mind that
either the speaker or the words as objects or the meaning of those words are in
superposition with one another. In a very literal sense, they are, the black
words on the white page, and certain words appear twice “green”, “upwards” and
then this phrase which seems to speak both to the literal idea and to the
microscopic and subatomic, “vineyards on the train”. Then there’s this other idea
which springs from that, that the poem exists in the creative mind of the
reader and now here, in this email which is as disconcerting as it is
beautiful.
I think it also implies something poignant about the nature of
poetry more generally, that there are - to borrow another phrase – “many worlds”
in which a poem might exist. Going back to what you were saying about Penrose,
Penrose in the ‘Emperor’s New Mind’, proposes that quantum events occur in the
microtubules in the brain. Thoughts are processed in one universe and then
return to our own. It is a wild theory, but if, for a moment, we entertain the
thought, despite how preposterous – in a way, the idea - that he is right, then
perhaps what we read on the page acts as a gateway from one universe into
another. Certainly in terms of our own experiences, memories and creativity,
nothing could be truer.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my emails,
and sorry that I didn't manage to answer more of your questions, I hope that we
can pick up on this in future conversations and keep the dialogue going.
Signing off,
Harry
**
Hi Harry,
Thank you! It’s been
fascinating. I feel the same way. The subject is massive and growing. I feel
we’ve only scratched the surface. I don’t think we could be in a more exciting
period in terms of scientific discovery – on the brink of viable extensive
space travel, quantum computing, the search for potential life-sustaining
exoplanets, and harnessing the power to mimic the first moments of the universe.
This is an opinion formed completely from my own naive and egotistical
conjecture, but I reckon we’ll see the next Newtonian/Einsteinian-level
paradigm change within our lifetimes. And it’s inevitable with such shifts, in
concepts, language, and perspective, that this has a huge impact on art.
The thin balance of precise human calculations on the
remorseless powerful flux of nature is palpable. It’s an incredible and awful
story. I saw a satellite in the sky the other night and imagined it was the
ISS. Whenever I see images of it, the space station seems so vulnerable with
its long spindly solar arrays, the threat of impact from space junk seems so
constant. I’m sure you must have seen Chris Hadfield’s cover of
David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’
which he filmed in the space station just before he left. It struck me as so
poignant that the words that Bowie wrote in the 60s could be sung in real-life
anti-gravity, against the backdrop of the glowing planet: ‘Planet Earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do’. Though the original song narrative reaches a
disastrous end, the imagery is simple and moving, as though to say – there we
all are, that’s all there is to it – is enough. I felt as though the human imagination
was so potent as to reach out with words and experience the inexperienced and
the unknown.
The many individual readings of a single poem, interpretations,
personal preoccupations and associations all contribute to the ‘many worlds’ of
a poem. Those physicists who believe in the multiverse theory as a truth in
reality believe that everything that can happen does happen. Which means that
one has done everything it is possible to do, everything that doesn’t break the
laws of physics. This implicates that every poem that could feasibly be
written, is written. Another wild theory that weirdly, rather than making me
feel inconsequential, makes me feel curious about the exact circumstances and
conditions in which I live that lead me to place certain words in certain
orders. How strange that I can write something that is inherent to a
multiverse.
Keep me updated with your readings, poems and musings!
And best wishes,
Ella
Harry Man was born in 1982, his poetry has appeared in New Welsh Review, Well Versed, Elbow Room, Poems in the Waiting Room, Poems in Which, and Eyewear's Poetry Focus among other places. He works as a Digital Editor in South London. His first pamphet 'Lift' is forthcoming from Tall Lighthouse.
Ella Chappell was born in south Manchester in 1990 and went on to study the BA and MA degrees in Creative Writing at UEA. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in UEA: 17 Poets, The Lighthouse, Elbow Room, Ink Sweat & Tears, a handful of stones, Badrobot Poetry, Et Cetera and #NewWriting. Her recent projects include 'Null World', a filmpoem created in collaboration with filmmakers, which will premiere at the national filmpoem festival in Dunbar this August. Ella posts a new poem every day here.
***
Harry Man was born in 1982, his poetry has appeared in New Welsh Review, Well Versed, Elbow Room, Poems in the Waiting Room, Poems in Which, and Eyewear's Poetry Focus among other places. He works as a Digital Editor in South London. His first pamphet 'Lift' is forthcoming from Tall Lighthouse.
Ella Chappell was born in south Manchester in 1990 and went on to study the BA and MA degrees in Creative Writing at UEA. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in UEA: 17 Poets, The Lighthouse, Elbow Room, Ink Sweat & Tears, a handful of stones, Badrobot Poetry, Et Cetera and #NewWriting. Her recent projects include 'Null World', a filmpoem created in collaboration with filmmakers, which will premiere at the national filmpoem festival in Dunbar this August. Ella posts a new poem every day here.
This is fantastic!
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