12 / camellia, hollyhock, tarragon
A bit about villanelles, a bit about slipperiness, a bit about The Passion. (And, like, some pretty hefty footnotes, dude.) đŞđâ¨
Hello! July has well and truly arrived, and, with it, the second half of the year.
June was full of running around, as anticipated. Before we jump into the bouquet proper, here are a few cool things coming up:
No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP) is out today! The 14th! I have a poem in it, alongside some absolute greats, and if youâre in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, itâs launching at Meow at 6pm this eve!!! đđž
samesame but differentâs postponed live events have been officially rescheduled! Mark your calendars for
the Poetry Speakeasy on Tuesday, 16 August (TÄmaki Makaurau)
Our Own Devices: Queer Zine-Making Workshop on Saturday, 17 September (TÄmaki Makaurau)
Fresh Scripts: Play-Reading, also on Saturday, 17 September (TÄmaki Makaurau)
samesame but different: Te Whanganui-a-Tara Edition on Friday, 23 September (in, you guessed it, Te Whanganui-a-Tara)
Weâve got some really great writers and artists involved in these rescheduled events, so Iâm looking forward to seeing everything come together. Iâm also looking forward to getting down to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and to experiencing a series of revelations about the heights of people Iâve known for ages but have never been in a room with. More info on samesame to come in due course, though. Watch! these! spaces!
When I wrote above that June was full of running around, I couldnât help thinking of Wendy Copeâs âSummer Villanelleâ. In particular, three lines: âThe movie in my mind is blueâ / As June runs into warm July / I think of little else but you.â
Of course, it is remarkably unwarm in my neck of the woods: the wind is screaming around the corner as I write this, and the skies are the blanked-out, off-white colour indicative of an intermission in torrent. But! you can understand why these words would spring to mind. As pieces, disassembled, these three lines are hitting a lot of key Tate Fountain⢠ingredients.1 Delicious! I want to bathe in them!
The poem as a whole is less of a Tate Fountain checklist and more reminiscent, if I had to make a comparison, of Kate Sharma in Bridgerton 2.07âtoward the end of the episode, standing in front of her mirror, flashing back to the events of the preceding hours. If thatâs what youâre looking for in a poem, Wendyâs got you with âSummer Villanelleâ. (The speakerâs aforementioned âblue movieâ fantasy mightâve already clued you into that.)
The crossover of passion and summer villanelles brings to mind, perhaps quite glaringly, Jeanette Wintersonâs The Passion. (I can hear you now: âTate, you used the word âpassionâ twice in that sentence. Could you not have thought of a different earlier word?â And yeah, dude, I probably couldâve, but the passionâs where the connection sits. There, and the central character, Villanelle.)
Iâm making a habit of connecting Cope and Winterson,2 which I think may have more to do with my own limited frame of reference than it does anything else. The links are born of linguistic choicesâprecarious, coincidental, a threadbare rope of a bridgeâand sustained by plain enjoyment. But donât you love a puzzle! A web! A conspiracy board!
I read The Passion in my Honours year at university. We were in the uniform first of our varying number of lockdowns. Zoom was a fresh occurrence, and I was studying remotely rather than teaching. (My three semesters as a graduate teaching assistant would all include an element, and often a majority, of Zoom tutorials.) The Passion was part of a course on Modernism and the Contemporary, which had me kind of scared-giddy each week. It was a cornucopia ofâand forâtexts of all kinds.
Camp as a theory was following me around; I remember I finished the degree and tweeted about having spent the year with Sontag (and Shakespeare).3 I gave a presentation, as part of this particular course, on Todd Haynesâs Velvet Goldmine (1998), which I went on to introduce to my then-flatmate K. I wonât immortalise that experience here just yet, because itâs bound for somewhere else (and not by me!). But I loved that evening with K, and the film had followed me through factual and fictional echoes of K, and it stemmed from that time at university.4 For now, though: a dip into The Passion.
I wrote about the book for my coursework essay, initially planning a double feature with Nightwood that my professor very rightly said was âHUGEâ.5 I can count on one hand the number of times Iâve reread academic work after submitting itâmy reaction is pretty uniformly, âgod, Tate, just let a sentence endâ, and look at me, committing the same error hereâbut I looked over the one on The Passion after mentioning the novel above. I was drawn right back into the fold again.
I wrote about Villanelle, and about Venice. People say âThe Cityâ is a character in Sex and the City, and Iâm inclined to think the same about Venice in this Winterson. The city, particularly at night-time, is cast as a place of playful slipperiness, wherein selves stack, costume-like, and refract as light would against water.6 Venice deals, as Villanelle does, in ambiguities. So does her lover, the Queen of Spades. And yet the men in their livesâthose men who are definitively men, amongst the gender play of the novelâare seeking clarity, seeking cut truth. And both lovers and rivals enfold one-another in echoes. Touches reverberating. Histories lapping and receding like tides. Never quite the same contact twice.
Iâd speak more on The Passion, because, honestly, I think my essay bangs. But Iâm also reticent to spill it to the (admittedly small) readership here when there are other potential homes for it. Take this as my version of that classic, YouTuber, âIâm working on something and I wish I could tell you, but, Iâm sorry, I just, like, canâtâ thing. You can read the novel yourself and come back with reckons, if you like. You can read âSummer Villanelleâ and try to figure out whose voice it is.
I think thereâs been an undercurrent of slipperiness running through June. Into July, now, too. The back-and-forth I was doing involved that kind of layer cake, View-Master slate of lives: a geographical back-and-forth, as well as an emotionally temporal one.7 Iâve been glancing along the edge of a former life, unable to quite grasp it, but being in many ways better off than that former life could have planned for, seeing the fruits of her labours even if itâs a different key in a different lock at the end of the night.
In June, I found myself walking down old streets and wanting to claim them. To scream theyâre mine theyâre mine Iâm here and I know them. I love them, even. They mean something to me I canât quantify, only I miss them when Iâm gone, and miss them almost more when Iâm here because I am anticipating the loss again. Or I am on the edge of something I once had, which no longer exists, which I cherished so absolutely, even at its lowest points. And I cannot find my way back. I cannot find my way back into being part of this. I am standing, ghost-like, in this raincoat, on the footsteps of a prior happinessâand no one can deliver me from it.
Well, perhaps not. That last part is a hangover from April. An overwhelming bout of sobs at the Surrey Hotel. Which I think I can admit to now! And not all of it was sad, which I worry Iâve made it sound like. The vast, vast majority of it was joy, which then served to facilitate the sadness, as a gnawing heartache grief. But only because the highs were such a verdant hum. There were so many oat milk lattes, and almond croissants; strolls and train rides and one lovely Airbnb. I stayed with friends, and I stayed alone, and had a place for them to visit. I went to Nahm twice across two separate trips and C and I got our favourite waitress just like we do every time. I saw excellent live shows, filled with old friends and new ones and a changing social dynamic, a realisation of perhaps Iâm not that kid on the outer anymore. (To be fair, I think once youâve been that kidâor felt like that kid, at leastâthereâs always a part of you ready to revert to it.)
And Iâve laughed, of course! Iâve laughed and been ill and had cups of tea, and my monsteraâs sprouted its holiest leaf yet. I mean âholyâ and âhole-riddledâ both, in saying âholiestâ. If youâll forgive the sentimentality.
All this to say: the slipperiness has led itself to a kind of solidity, like a bunch of stray threads woven into that famed red string. There have been some real unanticipated flukes. Lots of leaps of faith embarked on with no expectation of landingâand yet. Hm! And yet indeed, my friend.
Thatâs allâor enough (more than!)âfor now. The material facts of my life are, I think, about to change again. Iâll report back with the extent of it next month.
For the record, I also think you could make the case to tie âSummer Villanelleâ and Killing Eve together. For obvious reasons. But also, yâknow, for fun.
With an appropriate amount of love,
T
movie mention!
imagined-scenario-playing-out-as-though-it-were-a-movie mention!
colour mention!
colour mention being blue, which always makes me think of Joni Mitchell!
use of the word âwarmâ!
lots of people use the word âwarmâ! but I love it! I canât help it! it is a caring, multipurpose adjective!
âI think of little else but youââI mean, come on
romantic!
also my relationship to liking literally anything, which my (beleaguered, generous) friends will corroborate!
(it has been a Big Month for Television)
(I suppose this quality of fixation is a theme of todayâs newsletter, having taken stock of our footnotes)
also makes me think of âLittle Freakâ, because apparently I cannot get through a newsletter without bringing up Harry Styles. [THEY] NEVER SAW [HIS] BIRTHMARK!!!
This is the first time in a newsletter, though!
Iâd written my dissertation on The Two Gentlemen of Verona the previous semester, alongside taking a paper on British/Irish theatre and psychoanalysis. At the same time I was unpacking The Passion and Velvet Goldmine, I was writing about the camp idea of Being-as-Playing-a-Role (again, Sontag!) in Shakespeare in Love and Jojo Rabbit. It was for a class called Theatre on Screen. God, what a time that was! How lucky I was to devote hours, and hours of care, to those things in such a structured, concerted manner! I miss taught courses! My thesis was lovely but a very solitary practice!
Perhaps Velvet Goldmine deserves its own time, in another bouquet. Iâll save that for later on in the year. Really, much of what there is to say is that I got it as a result on uquiz once, before I studied it, and so (with a kind of self-obsession) I must have felt an affinity for it from then. But I was very glad to be able to look at the film so closely. There was almost too much to say, too much for the time, every thought and feeling trying to explode out like stuffing through a seam. Looking back on my time studying, I think I was lucky to find an arena that rewarded the no-stone-unturned, quest-like, almost compulsive approach I take to caring even remotely about anything.
âThe size of an MA thesis, at least,â she said. Are you sensing an inability to do things by halves!
Almost two similes for the price of one sentence here!!! How shall we cope!!!
A cute littleâall-in-all irrelevantâMatthew Vaughan reference there, alongside an image that definitely leapt to mind because of a show Iâve been re-watching with (and without) my grandparents. Bonus points if you can guess which. No bonus points if Iâve been accosting you about it in DMs!