An afternoon of absurd surreal poetry at Peste (P3 Annihiliation)
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Manchester’s live literature scene has been awash with amazing visiting poets this spring and for this free afternoon of absurd surreal poetry, we are agog to see Vik Shirley, Stephen Emmerson and Marcus Silcock corralled by Tom Jenks and reading in a place packed with brilliant books.
In order to serve you an accurate definition, we referred to our sophisticated colleagues at Mercurius magazine, a surging source of contemporary surrealist art, poetry and fiction, and where Vik and Marcus head up the Surreal-Absurd section. See them in their green visors tapping away at giant typewriters and tossing scrunched-up carbon copies at an overflowing wastepaper basket. Mercurius invented the term “surreal-absurd” to: “distinguish 21st-century surrealists from their 20th-century counterparts, though there is much overlapping and continuity. One notable characteristic of the surreal-absurd is a taste for minimalism and prose-poetry, for spinning weird yet resonant yarns in a paragraph or so of poetic prose.” Aha!
So, today’s readers, in alphabetical order…
Stephen Emmerson is a writer and artist. He has published many card decks, poetic visuals, vials and other poetry objects. Examples include Timglaset-published A Box of Ideas, which contains 58 cards, each with an idea for a poetry collection, ranging from the humorous to the conceptually elaborate. “The perfect accompaniment for poets who have run out of ideas, each card both an idea and a poem in itself”, says the blurb. Books include A Piece, Poetry Wholes and Family Portraits, all of which are published by Manchester’s If P Then Q and Dungeness, “an action poem written for four performers” published by Guillemot Press. Other works include Invisible Poems (ZimZalla), WHO? (The Literary Pocket Book) and Telegraphic Transcriptions (Stranger Press / Dept Press).
Most recently, Broken Sleep Books published Big Song last summer and you may have caught Stephen reading from this at Peter Barlow’s Cigarette not so long ago. American poet CAConrad (who you can catch on 24 March at Open Eye Gallery in his first-ever reading in Liverpool) called it “addictive” and said: “The hypnosis of poetry radiates in our imagination with Stephen Emmerson’s brilliant Big Song.” Peter Jaeger said: “Stephen Emerson’s Big Song speeds by at over one hundred sentences per infinite moment. Big Song burns through any notion of conventional Life Writing to present language as the charred shadow of memoir.”
Tom Jenks’ most recent books are The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions), Melamine (The Red Ceilings Press), Rhubarb (Beir Bua Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a collaborative pangrammatic novel with Catherine Vidler, comprising 26 chapters of 26 sentences, each sentence including every letter of the alphabet. In addition to writing poetry, prose and conceptual projects, he is a text artist, producing creative, computer-generated visualisations of literary texts. He is the editor of zimzalla, a small press specialising in literary objects.
This weekend is, in fact, a Vik Shirley double bill, as you’ll find her on the bill not only of this event at Peste (other names sometimes apply) but also at the one-off music-meets-words Sleeve Notes spectacle the day before at the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and educator from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock), One by One (No Press), Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), Strangers Wave (zimZalla), Cassette Poems (above/ground press) and Some Deer, just out with Broken Sleep Books. Her first collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door, was published by HVTN Press in 2021 and her next full-length collection, Nervous Tic, is due for publication in autumn 2025 with Sublunary Editions. Vik’s work has appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma, Gutter and Drea
She’s a regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, whose SJ Fowler describes her work as “darkly funny, wry, vivid”. She is a Poetry School Tutor (teaching on themes including the surreal narrative, absurdism and the grotesque). She co-edits Firmament online and Surreal-Absurd at Mercurius. Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham – her supervisor Luke Kennard said: “Vik Shirley locates the comic and the absurd in the bleakest of contexts.”
Irish writer Marcus Silcock (who also writes under the moniker Marcus Slease) teaches English literature and creative writing at a high school in Barcelona. His poetry has been translated into Slovak, Turkish, Polish and Danish and has been has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Blackbox Manifold, The Moth, Toad Suck Review, New World Writing, The Lincoln Review, Tin House, POETRY, bath magg, Tupelo Quarterly, and in the Best British Poetry series. His limited-edition poetry books have been collected at The National Poetry Library (London), and his poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. Recent books include novel in prose poems Never Mind the Beasts (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and surrealist book of prose poems The Green Monk (Boiler House Press). His latest book of surreal-absurd prose poems, Dream Dust, has just been published by Broken Sleep Books.
