Poetry Book Society

Poetry is all about the processes of reading and writing. The poem is not some static emblem but a dynamic system which pulses and wriggles. It is never closed.

Of course, some poems pulsate and wriggle more than others. They force vocabulary from disparate discourses into the same pen, juxtapose contradictory tones and undermine expectations. Some readers respond enthusiastically when these kinds of challenges are cranked up. Some readers get very irritated and have to go for a lie down in a darkened room.

I like pulsating, wriggly work and I'm interested in the many different ways it gets to be generated.
So I was fascinated to hear about Sophie Mayer's procedures whilst composing Kiss Off, a sequence of poems which wriggles more than most.

It was interesting to hear, for example, that some of the work had been composed on Facebook. These preliminary notes elicited almost immediate feedback from like-minded friends which affected the evolving text. A far cry from the isolated individual staring through the window, hoping inspiration will arrive before cramp sets in.

Sophie was, and still is, deeply involved in the worlds of academic essays and film journalism. When she started the first Kiss Off poem, in 2008, she was writing about two films (Sally Potter's Orlando, and Lucia Puenza's XXY) which explored issues of gender. She says that at a certain point she ‘wanted a more immediate, passionate way to respond to what the film made me feel, emotionally and erotically'. This impulse was also related to an affinity with ‘gender-playful experimental poetry I'd encountered in North America - and which I started to re-encounter after discovering Sophie Robinson's and Emily Critchley's work in the U.K.'

What really made the sequence take off, however, was reading Lucy Bolton's ‘Film and Female Consciousness' - a reminder, Sophie Mayer says, of ‘how fun, sexy and important feminist theory had been to me when I first encountered it, how playful it was with language, and how rich the simple idea of two women talking to each other about something other than men (a rarity in mainstream cinema!) could be.'

Time for a taste of the sequence itself:

XO First Round

KO to your kisser, sister
lips meeting red leather
you better / go down
this is the kiss-
off blister (this
bliss this bliss too much
lip in all shades and flavours
chocolate ice cherry
pie berry burst fruit of the forest frost fairy
high / gloss
makes lips
stick / screw courage
to the speckled mirror
(they call me the kiss-mister
fogging up your silvered
your hornrims with my hot
breath in a blotted
lipprint lined
in pink no
mess no miss
no make
up in school yes
miss marked
my work with red-
inked kisses small
strawberries of errancy
truancy (run away
with me like a sadie
benning video like
a browneyed girl in the ring
and breaking free
of the wooden o
wouldn't
oh
sign here for your
absence xo


This is a beautifully orchestrated, bravura performance for mind and voice. Or, perhaps, minds and voices. For, as we have seen, the writing reaches out through friends, texts and influences to the jostling realities of the contemporary world. As well as the influences and concerns already mentioned, the Acknowledgements section of Sophie Mayer's pamphlet mentions Luce Irigaray, David Attenborough, Wikipedia and Joan Roughgarden. Oh, and it also names the friends who contributed to the project by responding to those very first tentative notes on Facebook.


Peter Hughes' poetry publications include Paul Klee's Diary, Blueroads, Nistanimera, The Summer of Agios Dimitrios and The Pistol Tree Poems. Nathan Thompson writes of it as ‘flickering, intense, innovative and utterly mesmerising'.

Peter also runs Oystercatcher Press, based on the Norfolk coast, which has published more than 40 poetry pamphlets over the last three years.