small birds press

handmade poetry

poetry ribbons & gifts

Discover wearable poetry with the Clootie Collars charm ribbons or delve into the world of the Taro as Deer deck.

handmade pamphlets

Including letterpress printing, such as Type Flight, cyanotype swatches, sewn books and layered tracing paper pamphlets.

Shop pamphlets

My making table and poetry ingredients today as I make stuff for the #smallbirdspress Small Press Takeover at Senate House on Tuesday (25 November).

1. Black table with an aloe plant top left, green cutting mat, scattered with cards, paper scraps, tags, a tape measure, and for some reason a sachet of silica gel and some yellow rawl plugs.

2. Two piles of cream and pale lilac hole-punched tags for my new ‘cuteswarm: volume 1’ edition on a cutting mat. (Tuesday will be their first outing!)

3. Open folio with A3 printed sheets laid out with the zigzag broadside ‘The Mesh of Metaphor’ and outer poster cover of ‘Canine Or’ printed with a vector trace of B. burgdorferi culture in blue, green, brown circles and wiggly lines. These are for the second edition of eight.

4. A tangle of used pink, blue, orange ribbons destined for the ‘cuteswarm’.

5. Folded covers of ‘Canine Or’ stacked on a wooden desk.

See link in bio for Eventbrite and #smallbirdspress.

My third and final series of thank-yous following the Living Library pop-up exhibition @landmarkartscentre on 9 November.

The exhibition began with a display of pamphlets, cards, zines, boxed collections by a range of poets, printmakers, artists, small presses, collaborations to show the breadth of what a poetry ‘book’ and an ‘eco poem’ can be. Watch out for the video documenting the day coming soon for a fuller list of thanks and credits.

It also featured works by students past and present from the MA Poetic Practice and MA Poetry routes of @rhulcreativewriting.

A film screening included Wound by @susiecampbellwrites and Hen Campbell, Oceanic Bodies by @verity_rowsell, Fragments from an Interspecies Opera by Redell Olsen with Opera North, Welcome to the Lichen Resistance by Rachel Marsh @semplepress, Conversations with the Ocean by Maddy Pope and Varya Ivanova, A Moment of Writhing by @nelsoncamilla, Bee War by @heyastranaut and Body by Francis de Lima.

1. A still from Oceanic Bodies with vertical lines of paint marks in blue, green, grey. A paintbrush horizontal at the bottom of the screen, making white strokes from left to right.

2. From the opening display, a table with many pamphlets, including a concertina by Chris Meade from @blownrosemakes at the back, letterpress dummies by @r.l.drake to the right.

3. From Breath:e St(utter)ance by @rachel_artsmith. A rectangular light box with tracing paper layers of text, dots, punctuation marks, sketched lines, a lilac sheet.

4. Crocheted poetic spider web with words and phrases by Leia Butler @leiabellez.

5. Poster on book history by Katie McGettigan @rhulenglish and for the exhibition designed by @brihughespoet (showing some of mine and @marbledmayhem’s poem deer) on easels.

Second in a series of thank-yous following the Living Library pop-up exhibition @landmarkartscentre on 9 November. This featured installations created by poets artists, small presses. Amazing and thought-provoking works from @nelsoncamilla, Redell Olsen, @susiecampbellwrites, @heyastranaut, @oopressgregthomas, Rachel Marsh @semplepress, @_helena_hunter, @brihughespoet.

Other close-ups here show work by PhDs and graduates of Royal Holloway’s Poetic Practice MA.

1. Astra Papachristodoulou’s Banners for Justice, a series of three hangings in brown, blue and geometric fabric with appliqué text displayed at the back of the monochrome tiled stage of the arts centre in front of columns and arches. Two concertina books on a central table by @hannahmayharding and Alice Heart @ghostp4rty.

2. A thick classic paperback by John Locke is cut into the middle with a ‘gorge’. Blue strings with phrases attached stream from it. The remaining title says: An Essay on Human__ing. By Isabelle Masters @izzy_stop.making.things.

3. A concertina booklet on a wooden table with colourful vintage map close-ups, hand-drawn with arrows and text in white, and flaps that open to reveal poems: Delineations by @danisalvadori.

4. Four card-borne ‘tracings’ and ‘threads’ on a panel: wild cherry studies in ink, thread, cherry stone by @nelsoncamilla.

5. Close-up of Isabelle Masters’ string streams over printed poems on paper, with patterns of light and shadow.

Full documentary video coming soon!

First in a series of thank-yous to the incredible poets, artists, writers, small presses and others who put their creativity, labour and love into contributing to the Living Library pop-up exhibition @landmarkartscentre on Sunday 9 November.

The event was part of @beinghumanfest, a UK-wide celebration of the Humanities, co-curated with and featuring members of the Poetics Research Centre and English department at Royal Holloway, including Professor Redell Olsen and Dr Katie McGettigan. With many thanks to HARI, the Humanities and Arts Research Institute, for funding, to the Landmark staff and volunteers, and all who attended on the day. And a special thank-you to partner-in-organisation @brihughespoet.

First up, the performances.

1. Isabelle Masters @izzy_stop.making.things reading from An Essay Concerning Humaning, a thick carved paperback with strings of hanging word phrases, in front of pale grey display panels with two hung geography lesson-style posters, one showing rectangles of colour, the other close-up map sections, by @danisalvadori.

2. Camilla Nelson @nelsoncamilla opens up new ways of thinking and seeing relationships with the more-than-human in her talk on an Experimental Ecology of Line.

3. Redell Olsen holds up and reads from Fossil Oil: a book of hours, a hand-printed bookwork bound in swathes of black and gold fabric that hang from it like a sash.

4. @ep.jenkins.poetry reading from a tracing-paper pamphlet, which opens in folds that cascade down.

5. @jenniehowitt clips painted and sewn black and yellow poetry patches to her clothes for HAB’tat.

Images also show other contributor displays and the tall church-like columns and stained glass of the centre.

Readings and talks I didn’t manage to photograph were Francis de Lima @francisborealis Bodied Call, @danisalvadori Geological Lucky Dip, @brihughespoet ‘echopoetry’ mini workshop, @susiecampbellwrites on ‘Hodening’.

More to come!

Earlier this evening I was on the train with a big suitcase of poetry, in preparation for the Living Library pop-up exhibition and events tomorrow at Landmark Arts Centre, Teddington (11am to 5pm).

It’s a pleasure to be able to show some of my favourite pamphlets and pieces in our introductory display, which is aimed at sharing small press, pamphlet and object poetry – in particular poetry that is eco-related through its subject, methods and/or materials – with a wider audience.

1. Wasteland by @roberts_print and this too is a glistening, a collaborative work by Pratyusha @pairedaeza, Jessica J. Lee @jessicajlee, Alycia Pirmohamed @alyciap_ and Nina Mingya Powles @ninamingya, published by @bittermelonpoem. The title of Wasteland shows from beneath the torn edge of the dusty green cover printed with flower spikes and leaves. A fern and a leaf in negative on a magenta-printed cyanotype on this too is a glistening.

2. Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive by Karenjit Sandhu @k_ren_sandhu, published by @guillemotpress. The grey box of archive elements, the title foiled in pink. A gold-coloured Visitors Book. A brown volume of Archivist’s Notes. A map of the archive. Postcards spread out at the bottom. One shows a handwritten note saying: ‘I hold the body. Here it is inside this box.’

3. Asemic writing in Handbook 03 Re/Percussion by Chris Meade, from @blownrosemakes. A concertina book with images on each page: an arrangement of coloured rubber bands in lines; twig fragments horizontally; red line drawing of a person looking like they are smiling, seated, typing, maybe writing; blutack worm-shapes arranged like a note; Chris Meades drawing/writing in the sand.

5. Path to the Sea – open at its centre showing the binding thread – and Place of Thorns – brown cover with a delicate illustration of a thorned flowering plant – from Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark’s Moschatel Press.

6. Close-up of the collaged peep-show tunnel book Blockley Bird Opera by May Dearlove. A watercoloured bird spreads its wings above a sculpted tunnel cave in brick and green, with collaged words.

On my way to ‘Material Poetics’ conference at Senate House with @rhulcreativewriting @technedtp and Poetics Research Centre. Taking some of my insect poems with me for people to handle and read.

Images:

1. Tiny insect (and other invertebrate) poem scrolls tied with colourful embroidery thread nestled among gathered autumn leaves.

2. Conference poster - keynotes Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jeanne Heuving, Cole Swenson.

3. Three ‘enframed’ poem series printed as small concertinas and pinned into a wooden glass-fronted display case. Looking a bit like collected butterflies, with the paper wings outspread. On my mantelpiece with glass kitten ornaments.

4. Programme with my panel - at 10.15 today.

5. Orange poster for Small Press Takeover this evening with the keynotes reading.

Re-gathering myself after a really enjoyable and also intense-as-usual @smallpublishers fair. So many fizzing conversations and connections. Thank you to all who came and had a Taro as Deer reading, or came and talked about my work or yours.

Images:

1. Publications that came back with me, on a wooden table, including Isabelle Masters’ @izzy_stop.making.things boxed poetic game Distancing Act of Play, @susiecampbellwrites Wastelands, @elzbietawojcikleese @intergraphiabooks pamphlet, Leia Butler’s Spider_web_feelings stickers, Spell of Hare by May Dearlove and a couple of zines (co-)made by @stretchtarot.

2. Red and yellow cherry leaves on the grass.

3. I had a craving for cinnamon swirls. Here they are in the tin, all curled up, with the rolling pin and the metal rule I also used for trimming the taro cards. (Very handy for measuring out the bun lengths.)

4. Blurry view through sun-burst glass into the garden.

5. The cooked buns on a metal cooling rack and baking paper, with trailed zigzags of icing.

6. Inside Izzy Masters’ poem-box, with its series of pamphlets, the top one reading ‘Page Turn Metaphor’, and the Rule Book on the table.

7. A veined and crazed red and gold apple, pecked or munched into, and home to small creatures.

8. @brihughespoet Echopoem. I couldn't resist its miniature ink bottle, the weight of a pipistrelle bat, nestled on black tissue in a kraft matchbox, with red explanatory slip/poem.

9. View over cherry branches, with pink-orange-yellow leaves, blue sky with contrails and cirrus, trees near and far.

10. Six of the Poetics Research Centre table team at the end of Saturday.

Today I printed and hand cut 78 cards – well, 79 including the title card. Then spent almost as long dragging out all the possibilities for packaging them.

Come to the Green Room @smallpublishers Fair, Conway Hall tomorrow, Sat 25th October, between 2pm and 2.45pm for a preview and your own three-card reading from the poems.

I’ll be putting them on the #smallbirdspress website soon. Cards inkjet-printed on Daler-Rowney thick cartridge paper. Packed with re-used brown craft shreddings and sari silk offcut ribbon from a previous project. Book butterflies included. I have yet to fully decide on the box colour (grey? kraft?). And there will be a title plate on the front.

It took me ages to make a full first edition of Canine Or / The Mesh of Metaphor, and a long time again to start publicising it. This A5 tracing paper pamphlet with folded poster cover will be @smallpublishers this weekend, Fri 24th and Sat 25th November, on the Poetics Research Centre table. Only four copies. Any left will then go on the smallbirdspress.co.uk website. And if there aren't any left ... I'll be making a second edition, so email me on smallbirdspress@gmail.com for more info.

The paper of the poster cover, which has a broadside version of the poem on the other side, is almost ‘extinct’, as the Zerkall paper mill closed during Covid. For the 2nd ed. I'll be using 100gsm Smooth instead of the Rough – it prints up similarly, but with a little more softness.

I'll be at the fair on Saturday, doing ‘readings’ from my new full 78-card Taro as Deer deck from 2pm in the Green Room.

Two of my ‘insect Interventions’ poems have found a home in the summer issue of @aswirlzine. Here, I am looking for a home for the zine among some of the insect and invertebrate favoured places my garden. I began the daily journal that forms the basis of these poems back in September 2024, but the dock bugs are now out again on the raspberries – and I am still Shifting them so I can eat the berries myself. Poem text below – though the alignment may have gone awry.

Stalked Photographed
Googled european hornet only
on ivy stopped and let Me
Look once I Knew its name

or I Think probably
Shifted from shield bugs or
a raspberry dock bugs
that brown
I wanted more matt
to eat longer-bodied
Nudged a gaggle
from a blackberry

This is what I brought home from a really enjoyable @paper_ink_print festival a couple of weeks ago. Lovely to read with so many fantastic poets, see new work, find new people, and do so much talking about poetry.

1. Here’s the haul and festival programme.

2. Cuteness, (anti-)Wordsworth – and a set of good wishes cards from @caroline_fearn_print

3. Stickers and ‘animals wearing smaller versions of themselves as hats’ from @sillydogsbrunchclub

3. Isabelle Masters’ @izzy_stop.making.things sharp and wonderful geolocation poem ‘Ode: Imitations of Romanticism from a Digital Earth’

4. A version of my ‘Canine Or / The Mesh of Metaphor’ broadside as a poster on the reverse of the Paper Ink Print programme. (It's not often you get to see your work printed at A2 size)

Special thanks to @brihughespoet for organising, all the @rhulcreativewriting students and alumni who helped with the Poetics Research Centre table and shared their work, and Abigail @landmarkartscentre

This past week I've been making up the first copies of my new #smallbirdspress pamphlet Canine Or / The Mesh of Metaphor. They’ll be on sale @paper_ink_print festival in Teddington from 4pm this afternoon.

You can also see a rendition of the broadside version as an A2 poster on the back of the festival programme!

I will be reading from Canine Or, and doing a Taro as Deer live card reading, at 11am tomorrow, Saturday. Link to details including the impressive list of other poets in bio.

Big thank you to @brihughespoet for organising and all at Poetics Research Centre.

Some of the ‘insect Interventions- and other selected invertebrates’ poems that I’m taking for their first ever outing to @talkingtree_staines for Poetry in Solidarity with the Planet, with students, staff, alumni of Poetic Practice and PhDs @royalholloway @rhulcreativewriting as part of THRIVE Festival. With @brihughespoet @nathaniellkingg @verity_rowsell Redell Olsen Will Montgomery and other fantastic poets, writers, performers.

Staines High Street, 6-8pm today Weds 11 June. Free event - please book via link in bio.

What might happen if the poems escape the collection?

And so the production line of making a new edition begins. With me standing at the printer, poised ready to catch the pages as they come out so as to avoid ink smudges (only two pages had to be reprinted). Canine Or / The Mesh of Metaphor. Hoping to have eight copies for a first edition – bar mishaps – ready for the Poetics Research Centre table at the @paper_ink_print festival 2025, @landmarkartscentre, Teddington, Fri 13 to Sun 15 June. Link in bio.

It’s four years since I made the ‘Clootie Ribbons [Rhodes edition]’, but I’ve just had an article about its ecopoetic practice as a way of marking losses during the sixth mass extinction published in Cultural Geographies. It’s part of a collection on Making Amidst Extinction guest edited by Eline Tabak and Milo Newman.

I had started out thinking about typed texts, ribbons, curating poetic fragments and ways to mark the losses of deer – through culling, RTAs, disease, habitat loss. So it was interesting and valuable to think about the work and the potential of ecopoetry in relation to place and the ongoing losses of individuals, groups, ecologies, species.

With thanks also to Astra Papachristodoulou @heyastranaut for the commission and photos from Rhodes (1 and 2), and Ethan Wilson for the image of me tying ribbons.

Link to article via bio.

Late April: and I spent more time than usual in the garden and in London, including at the Free Verse poetry book fair. Found two new-to-me publishers to get excited about: @ossa.prints and @blownrosemakes. Had many great conversations – and picked up @iriscolomb’s collection Nothing Intensifies from the wonderful @pamenarpress.

Images:
- FV haul
- entrance to Free Verse at St Columba’s
- cherry blossom in my garden
- from Blowfly by Jane Hartshorn @ossa.prints
- from Re/Percussion – the Handbook of asemic work by Chris Meade @blownrosemakes
- leafy Cadogan Square
- from Iris Colomb’s Nothing Intensifies
- blown tulip

For #worldcolourday and #worldpoetryday, here is a playful rendition of a selection of ‘colours’ from my poem ‘Sharpham in Early Summer: A set of colour cards’. This was my first poetry outing, my first performance, and what set me on the path to my MA and then PhD.

They were written at Sharpham House, Devon, during a supportive, at first nerve-wracking, and then transformative workshop with Alice Oswald and Peter Oswald in June 2014.

These poems have never been published – until this small collection! The cards here are the actual ones I made for the workshop reading. Others in the series included:

Kissing Gate
Tide
Purple Path
Maurice’s Study Green
Volcano Brown
Evening Ilex
Swallow Silver
Ceramic Washbasin Yellow
Strangled Wild Rose
Raven Gossip

PS I know that I have cut off some of the wording on Stinging Nettle – I was going to re-photograph, but it seemed appropriate, given that poem’s focus on inattention.

This is my pamphlet Canine Or / The Mesh of Metaphor, which I'm hoping to take to the @paper_ink_print festival in June @landmarkartscentre.

I first started this project back in 2020 and now have just a few decisions to make (I'd love to try a riso rather than inkjet cover, for example). The poem is an ever-expanding and entangled metaphor strand – a kind of ‘metaphor fractal’ if you like. The text appears twice – once printed on to tracing paper interleaved with hand-tracings from the image of a culture of Borrelia bergdorferi (the Lyme disease bacterium, chosen for its association with ‘deer ticks’); the second time as a broadside on the back of a poster version of a vector trace of B. bergdorferi.

I originally made the piece during my PhD @royalholloway @rhulenglish – which focused on deer in poetry, among other things.

#deer #poetry #metaphor #Lymedisease #entangled

From my ‘Tender Kittens’ project, which is a response to images produced by @graphicthoughtfacility with Lexica Aperture AI image generator and exhibited in the ‘Cute’ exhibition @somersethouse.

The poems I wrote were then fed back into Lexica, with fascinating and sometimes disturbing results (you can see some of the options it gave me to choose from with the carousel horse and costumed model).

The first five poems are published as a set of cards through my smallbirdspress.co.uk. I've now completed a full draft of the other 12 poem texts and am investigating options for publishers/sending them out into the world. I haven't yet put these new ones into Lexica – who knows what it will make of them...

#cute #kittens #ai #poetry #experimentalpoetry #artexhibition

Some Autumn.

1. My essay ‘Tender Hooks: The value of cuteness to ecopoetry’ in The Poetry Review. Big thank you to Wayne Holloway-Smith and all those who brought poets to my attention and/or are featured, inc. @calebparkinpoet @igalleymore @brihughespoet @luke.a.thompson @heyastranaut @househomepoetics

2. A deer on a plate – at the Holburne Museum, Bath, while visiting excellent Goya/Rego exhibition (great juxtapositions with the ‘airbrushed’ portraiture of the permanent collection).

3. This autumn I have been recording my ‘insect interventions’ and learned this is not a shield bug but a dock bug.

4. I did not know what to do with my old exercise books and my mother's diaries (not keep; not landfill), so I am sending them back to the earth. #composting

5. Illicit photo in the Rare Books Room at the British Library, of a detail from PJF Turpin’s conceptual plant diagram visualising Goëthe’s Urpflanze, for an essay/chapter on ‘monstrous plants’.

6. I am also looking at the cuteness (or not) of insects through macro photography. Here from ‘Why We Photograph Animals’, ed. Huw Lewis-Jones.

7. As autumn is pushed later and later, not quite the last rose in the garden.

Next Tuesday 24 Sept I am running a ‘Mindful Arts’ workshop for adult carers, this time at @orleanshousegallery in Twickenham.

Participants are first guided on a mindful walk in the woodland and grounds, ‘tuning in to your senses and the nature around us. You will then use art and creative writing techniques to chart your own experiences and what you find and share your ‘map’ of the gardens. You will leave with a selection of new ways to connect with your local green spaces.’

Bookings and more info via TicketSource (link in bio).

The images here show my own mindful roaming in a recreation ground in Bath, and the maps that I made. This spring and summer, roaming and writing helped me to revive and recuperate.

A HUGE 🥰 thank you to all of our poets/artists in Words from the Wild. Here are some behind-the-scenes photos when it was being installed on Monday. With thanks to Naomi, Peggy and Anya, the Culture team @royalholloway, and to Paradigm, the installers, and Greg Beards-Jones, the designer.

1. Redell Olsen, from Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants

2. Opening text with Astra Papachristodoulou's @heyastranaut Bee Swarm sculpture

3. My Deer Collars collage series

4. Hanging Kate Siklosi's @ksiklosi images from Leavings, next to Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell’s fungus prints from Poetry of Unknown Words

5. Liz K Miller’s @liz_k_miller Forest Listening with the edge of my Clootie Ribbons on the left

6. Hannah Harding's we who collect

7. Kate Siklosi's prints up close and Astra’s Decayed behind

8. Briony Hughes’s @bristaceyhughes Sea Grammar with J. R. Carpenter's The Pleasure of the Coast behind

Open 10am to 6pm in the Davison Building at Royal Holloway, Egham, Surrey until 24 March.

Bath Spa station with the pigeons roosting up in the roof, on my way to @smallpublishers. Plus a few things I’m bringing in my box of stock - The Taro as Deer (2nd ed.), r/aww deer, Dear/Deer, plus I also have a few each of Cut-out Bambi and Deer Leg/How to Fold a Deer.

I am making a small number of copies of the linen Clootie Ribbons featured on the #smallpublishersfair2023 website - come and ask at the Poetics Research Centre table. #supportsmallpublishers

Deer/Dear is a collaboration with Cat Chong @marbledmayhem that was commissioned by @bristaceyhughes for the Runnymede International Literary Festival 2023. Cat created an incredible and moving receipt poem from a selection of my works, and I made a set of ‘7 chimera poems’ by folding together two of their works printed on origami paper poem-deers.

I'll be bringing some copies to @smallpublishersfair this weekend. Also available on the smallbirdspress.co.uk website if you won't be around Conway Hall.

#supportsmallpublishers

Getting ready for @smallpublishers this Fri/Sat, I have been binding my 64-page translation of lines from the deer-hunt scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. r/aww deer gives each line of the poem its own spread. The ‘antler poems’ in the centres of each section deconstruct my translation process... And the covers look pretty. (That's a French link stitch, if you are interested in those things.) Details on smallbirdspress.co.uk.

I will be bringing a few copies for sale with me at the weekend.

#supportsmallpublishers

Results from day 1 of screen printing @spikeprintstudio with Chitra Merchant. Such a fantastic introduction. Final image is from Bath station this morning - thinking of using this for colour inspiration on day 2.

Hampton Court, Crystal Palace, the Olympic pool, smell of chlorine, walking on the Thames path… These past few days have been taking me back to my childhood and teens.

For a while I used to go training at Crystal Palace pool one evening a week. Driven by my dad and other parents, a group of us from Kingston Ladies would trawl up and down the lanes. What I remember most is the height of the pool sides - dragging yourself out when exhausted to turn around and dive back in for another length within a stop-clock time.

I don’t remember the mega fauna statues from then - only the car park.

But now, swimming, deer, visual poetry, plants, the river, the parks have all become entangled.

Excited and delighted to be launching my pamphlet A Summoning Spell for Lost Deer with @osmosispress this evening @winning_gallery, 46 Bridge Road, East Molesey - over the bridge from @hamptoncourtpalace.

Huge thanks to @susiecampbellwrites and @k_ren_sandhu who will be reading with me from 7pm (refreshments from 6.30). Also the fantastic @marbledmayhem - all three have stepped in (due to illness) to make for what I hope will be a wonderful evening - I always love hearing from these poets. 💚💚💚

Thanks and love to @bristaceyhughes and @heyastranaut who are my co-exhibitors and organisers of our Textual Porosity group show xx

Love these photos that @heyastranaut and I took of each other with some of our works @winning_gallery in our exhibition with @bristaceyhughes.

We are open till 6pm today and then every day 10-6 until next Sunday 11 June. We have met so many interesting and interested people around Hampton Court village, made connections, found new art and artists. Inspiring for us to be here 💚🦌🐝🌊💚

Come on in! A few little peeks inside our Textual Porosity exhibition @winning_gallery, open daily 10-6 until 11 June.

Spent yesterday putting for all up with @heyastranaut @bristaceyhughes and friends and family.

It’s a lovely sunny day at Hampton Court and we are just over the bridge by all the cafes. 💚🦌🌸🐝🌊💚

A few of the things I’ve been making this week in preparation for Textual Porosity @winning_gallery with @heyastranaut and @bristaceyhughes. Nearly there for opening on Tuesday and launch event Fri 2 June!

1. Herd - series of deers folded from pages of the FT and Sunday Times (they now stand up, thanks to bonding with lining paper!). 2. Some of the cut-out deers from Cut-out Bambi for a special order. 3. Box and shredded tissue swaddling for Deer / Dear, my collaboration with @marbledmayhem. 4. Making Cut-out Bambi as a series of file cards for display. 5. Ironed ribbons for typing Clootie Collars.

And that’s not all! Lots more will be on show at the gallery and in the @poem.atlas catalogue.

Textual Porosity is the exciting group show I am part of, along with the wonderful visual poets @heyastranaut and @bristaceyhughes. Come along 30 May to 11 June to the lovely @winning_gallery near Hampton Court, Surrey to see the poem-deers and many other works up close. (And you should see the gorgeous catalogue that Astra is designing! 😍) See linktree in bio for more details. 🌿 🐝 🌊 🦌

Trying some larger paper deers for a special event coming soon. Turns out the pink pages of the FT don’t properly support deerkind.

Final image is for scale. This one is around 55cm high. I’m trying to reach 90cm!

#deer #origami #anticapitalistdeer #paper

Some images and thank-yous from my trip to London earlier this week. Lovely to see Robert Hampson and @bristaceyhughes for lunch (thank you Robert!) and talk about #RFest2024.

Discussing/looking at books, poetry, artist's books, #poeticsresearchcentre at the wonderful @bookartbookshop (can't believe it was my first visit) and @nationalpoetrylibrary. Many thanks to Chiara and Will for your interest in my work and for being so welcoming.

Images:
1. From ‘The Camden Hoard’ – a project that has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it, and now I have seen the exhibition and have the book! Curated by @nataliazagorskathomas
2. Stevie Smith's collars in the ‘Poets in Vogue’ exhibition
3. My pamphlet Deer Leg/How to Fold a Deer – now available in the Bookartbookshop and NPL
4. Yellowjackets poster – with antlers
5. SCRUB Management Handbook No.1 Mere (Singing Apple Press, editor @nelsoncamilla) – now also in Bookartbookshop and NPL
6. My own hoard from @bookartbookshop
7. Mirror binding of Cut-out Bambi
8. ‘Iron curtain’ from ‘The Camden Hoard’

I can make typed poetry again! My 1947 Imperial needs more expertise than I have to repair it, so I have invested in a professionally checked 1962 Olivetti Lettera 22.

It’s a design classic – and portable. So it will be accompanying me to a very special event at the end of May. Exciting announcement coming shortly!

#poetry #typewriter #olivetti #lettera #typewriterpoetry #experimentalpoetry #ribbon #poetrycommunity

It's the final poem from my 22-card series The Taro as Deer: Major Arcana for this #ataroaday series. XXI. the world.

Thank you to everyone who has been checking in. More images and info on my Small Birds Press website: linktree in bio.

the Passenger took a leaf

aligning it with a fragment of rice paper taped to the typewriter platen striking the keys with tip-tap strokes making dents through green into white placing leaf-written letters into words

words into lines and lines into a poem that the Passenger would take into the woods attaching it to a tree so that Doe would come and eat the poem and make it a part of them

#poetry #deer #leaf #typewriter #typewriterpoetry #experimentalpoetry #tarot #poetrycommunity

#ataroaday XX. judgement.

Doe and the Passenger
took off their skins
and swam together
in the lido

#poetry #tarot #experimentalpoetry #vispo #deer #halftone #poetrycommunity

I have been meaning to share extracts from the gorgeous ‘DEER rain’ scroll by Cat Chong @marbledmayhem ever since the @paper_ink_print festival where Cat first showed it to me.

The piece is collaged from a selection of poems I have composed (and snippets of a song lyric – see below) and was part of a collaboration commissioned by @bristaceyhughes for the Runnymede Literary Festival organised by Robert Hampson. My part of our collaboration is the origami paper poem-deers, through which I ‘folded’ ‘7 chimera poems for cat chong’, combining two of their texts.

One of the pieces Cat re-cast lines from is ‘A Summoning Spell for Lost Deer’. This is itself a collage poem, so I have included among the images here the list of names of poets and translators whose phrases are the roots and raw material of that poem.

The other work Cat has drawn from is the Bauhaus song lyric for ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, which was a formative influence in my teens! (I would have been a goth, I guess, but could never quite master the make-up.)

#poetry #deer #rain #bauhaus #scroll #poetrycommunity #collaboration #rfest #smallpublishers

The final three cards of #ataroaday begin with XIX. the sun.

an exploding
point of intense
unlookability

#poetry #tarot #deer #experimentalpoetry #vispo #poetrycommunity #halftone

It hasn't quite been #ataroaday recently, with the Runnymede Literary Festival and @paper_ink_print – but here is XVIII. the moon for today.

midnight on the train / tracks

plants seen from / underside

the Passenger / and Doe
circle / each other

which is / real ?

The #poeticsresearchcentre table with #corruptedpoetry at @paper_ink_print in the @landmarkartscentre

Some of my works including #cutoutbambi #taroasdeer #SCRUB #deerleg from #smallbirdspress and Singing Apple Press plus @bristaceyhughes @osmosispress @hashimotocaro @k_ren_sandhu @guillemotpress #crestedtitcollective @marbledmayhem @ep.jenkins.poetry @jdhowse #robinboothroyd with #pertinentactions anthology co-edited by Robert Hampson and #livingwithotherpeople in background (sorry if I have missed anyone!)

All on our table through Sunday with readings in the Bell Room from 1.30pm

#ataroaday XVII. the star. For today's online Runnymede Literary Festival #RFest readings.

Not too late to book on Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/runnymede-literary-festival-2023-tickets-570643418827

Doe stepped
out of the ocean
out of the ground
out of the sky

#poetry #poetryreadings #star #deer #ocean #poetrycommunity #poeticsresearch

In between setting up @landmarkartscentre @paper_ink_print I managed to get a walk in Bushy Park. (Scroll for real deers among the bracken.)

Thanks to @bristaceyhughes @marbledmayhem @heyastranaut @danisalvadori @omyhangu @moripaperstudio

#ataroaday XVI. the tower. Oh no! Not really the poem card I would have wanted, sitting on the coach to London for @paper_ink_print! (Or maybe it was predicting the rail strike.)

the Passenger observed

as their carriage
spiralled
and
shattered

Doe tiptoed
among
the broken

#poetry #deer #passenger #printfair #smallpublishers #railstrike

I've been making some more copies of the two-part pamphlet Deer Leg/How to Fold a Deer – which is a limited edition of 16. See link to #smallbirdspress in bio.

Both pamphlets can be folded and unfolded in many different ways. It's up to you.

This latest batch will be coming with me to @paper_ink_print @landmarkartscentre for the #poeticsresearchcentre table on Friday.

#poetry #deer #paper #maggieosullivan #fold #zerkall #spreadsheet

#ataroaday XV. the devil.

Doe watched
theirself on YouTube
counting the likes

#poetry #tarot #deer #halftone #poetrycommunity

#ataroaday. XIV. temperance.

Doe holds
fire and flood
balancing
them on one hoof

#poetry #deer #taro #poetictarot #experimentalpoetry #poetrycommunity #halftone

Busy today making a couple of copies of #cutoutbambi to bring to @paper_ink_print. They are fiddly and time-intensive little pamphlets to put together, so are usually only available made-to-order via my #smallbirdspress shop (smallbirdspress.co.uk).

Each fawn, doe, stag is cut out by hand with a 15A scalpel. Which means I have ended up with a growing collection of cut-out deers. I have kept every one (except for a few lost) since I began making prototypes. One day I'll decide what to do with them.

From Friday 17 to Sunday 19 March, the pamphlets will be on table 20 with the #poeticsresearchcentre and #corruptedpoetry @landmarkartscentre @landmarkartfairs in Teddington.

#deer #poetry #bambi #disney #experimentalpoetry #artistbook #mirror #silhouette #erasure

#atraroaday XIII. death. I wrote this poem writing about the medieval deer hunt for my PhD and thinking about the war in Ukraine and climate emergency.

Doe was fleeing
dogs
swords
arrows
rifles
fallout
fires
knives
floodwaters
wolves
beaters
snares
SUVs
HGVs
bovine tuberculosis
ballistic missiles

Revisiting some past projects that I'll be bringing to @paper_ink_print next weekend. This is the artist’s book version of #SCRUB Management Handbook No.1 Mere. (I only have one left, but there are more available via @nelsoncamilla.)

Each bookwork consists of a 16-page pamphlet and unique cyanotype print made in and with the ‘overgrown’ plants of the Singing Apple Press garden, a list of the species I could spot (and name!) and seeds gathered there. Held by a letterpress-printed ‘belly band’.

It was my first residency, my first published pamphlet, and I loved doing the whole project.

See link in bio for #smallbirdspress.

#poetry #scrub #plants #singingapplepress #letterpress #cyanoptype #experimentalpoetry #experimentalphotography #poetrycommunity

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more about the press

Small Birds Press publishes works by Caroline Harris and collaborations with other poets (and AI). It regularly appears at book fairs, including the Small Publishers Fair at Conway Hall, London. For queries, or to commission work, please email smallbirdspress@gmail.com.

‘Thinking through text, texture, and (often) textile, Small Birds Press offers a radical and crucial intervention into how we negotiate the materials of the book and the material of language itself.’

BRIONY HUGHES

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