A Lot of What I Like is Trash…

All poetry is experience recycled, not all of it necessarily the poet’s own experience, so we were happy to receive a good deal of transformed work for this issue. Some of it, in part, was made from renewed materials, as in Christodoulos Makris’s poems created out of untreated text from anonymous sources on the internet; and Martin de Porres Wright’s paintings, made using bitumen. Some of the poems in here deal with what might be termed the lives society wishes to ignore, as in pieces by Margaret O’Brien, Nicola Jennings and Órla Fay. Jennings, in addition, sees the beauty and terror in discovering an injured bird in the street. When does a life become detritus? Other pieces responded slant to the theme, including Jeff Gburek’s fine poem, Susanna Galbraith’s wonderful ‘CITY’ trilogy, and Richard Biddle’s intriguing visual poems. Nobody came to us with trash talk, or a trash aesthetic, or ‘white trash’ or a call to ‘trash this joint’, not that we could see; but that’s fine. Trash is always subjective. And while a lot of what we like is trash, we think you’ll agree that the work in this issue of The Pickled Body, is not.

To read the issue, go here.