Spider Poetics

A series of poems from a longer poetics of my practice that consider what a poem might be and how it comes into being. They contend that writing is uncanny, at once real and illusory, intimate and alien, a process into which a writer disappears and from which they return. Responding to Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich, Nicholas Royle states that the uncanny may ‘be construed as a foreign body within oneself, even the experience of oneself as a foreign body’; in these poems, the act of writing involves foreign bodies—specifically, spider bodies. Playing with the conceit that poems appear on the page like spiders—sudden, silent, looking like something quite different until one sees them up close—these poems hide in corners, double up, shift shape, align left then right, expand to the margins, contract, disappear. They recall the old lady who swallowed the spider, that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her, asserting that a poem can be construed as a spider body within the body, wriggling, jiggling, tickling, and that the act of writing one is an uncanny act of prospopoeia.