12 / camellia, hollyhock, tarragon
A bit about villanelles, a bit about slipperiness, a bit about The Passion. (And, like, some pretty hefty footnotes, dude.) šŖšāØ
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 youāre in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, itās launching at Meow at 6pm this eve!!! šš¾
samesame but differentās 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)
Weāve got some really great writers and artists involved in these rescheduled events, so Iām looking forward to seeing everything come together. Iām also looking forward to getting down to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and to experiencing a series of revelations about the heights of people Iāve 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 couldnāt help thinking of Wendy Copeās āSummer Villanelleā. In particular, three lines: āThe movie in my mind is blueā / As June runs into warm July / I think of little else but you.ā
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 Fountainā¢ 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 2.07ātoward the end of the episode, standing in front of her mirror, flashing back to the events of the preceding hours. If thatās what youāre looking for in a poem, Wendyās got you with āSummer Villanelleā. (The speakerās aforementioned āblue movieā fantasy mightāve already clued you into that.)
The crossover of passion and summer villanelles brings to mind, perhaps quite glaringly, Jeanette Wintersonās The Passion. (I can hear you now: āTate, you used the word āpassionā twice in that sentence. Could you not have thought of a different earlier word?ā And yeah, dude, I probably couldāve, but the passionās where the connection sits. There, and the central character, Villanelle.)
Iām 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 choicesāprecarious, coincidental, a threadbare rope of a bridgeāand sustained by plain enjoyment. But donāt 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 ofāand forātexts 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 Haynesās Velvet Goldmine (1998), which I went on to introduce to my then-flatmate K. I wonāt immortalise that experience here just yet, because itās 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 āHUGEā.5 I can count on one hand the number of times Iāve reread academic work after submitting itāmy reaction is pretty uniformly, āgod, Tate, just let a sentence endā, and look at me, committing the same error hereābut 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 āThe Cityā is a character in Sex and the City, and Iām 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 livesāthose men who are definitively men, amongst the gender play of the novelāare 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.
Iād speak more on The Passion, because, honestly, I think my essay bangs. But Iām 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, āIām working on something and I wish I could tell you, but, Iām sorry, I just, like, canātā thing. You can read the novel yourself and come back with reckons, if you like. You can read āSummer Villanelleā and try to figure out whose voice it is.
I think thereās 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 Iāve 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 itās 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 theyāre mine theyāre mine Iām here and I know them. I love them, even. They mean something to me I canāt quantify, only I miss them when Iām gone, and miss them almost more when Iām 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 happinessāand 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 Iāve 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 Iām not that kid on the outer anymore. (To be fair, I think once youāve been that kidāor felt like that kid, at leastāthereās always a part of you ready to revert to it.)
And Iāve laughed, of course! Iāve laughed and been ill and had cups of tea, and my monsteraās sprouted its holiest leaf yet. I mean āholyā and āhole-riddledā both, in saying āholiestā. If youāll 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 landingāand yet. Hm! And yet indeed, my friend.
Thatās allāor enough (more than!)āfor now. The material facts of my life are, I think, about to change again. Iāll report back with the extent of it next month.
For the record, I also think you could make the case to tie āSummer Villanelleā and Killing Eve together. For obvious reasons. But also, yāknow, 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 āwarmā!
lots of people use the word āwarmā! but I love it! I canāt help it! it is a caring, multipurpose adjective!
āI think of little else but youāāI 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 todayās newsletter, having taken stock of our footnotes)
also makes me think of āLittle Freakā, 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!
Iād 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. Iāll 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.
āThe size of an MA thesis, at least,ā 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 littleāall-in-all irrelevantāMatthew Vaughan reference there, alongside an image that definitely leapt to mind because of a show Iāve been re-watching with (and without) my grandparents. Bonus points if you can guess which. No bonus points if Iāve been accosting you about it in DMs!