Thank you for reading (or skipping) this far. A few thanks are in order before I offer a little explanation. First of all to Toby, who facilitates all of snailsnail. Secondly to Pari and Elena, for helping me to the place to write and lastly to Elisa, firm stalwart while I was editing.

The guiding idea behind these poems was to express what it is like to learn a foreign language by immersion - how it fragments your thinking. This is inspired by my experiences coming to live in Spain, which was where I started to write.

In truth, only two of the poems were actually written here in Madrid, those being Ligne Maginot and Mad·riz, the later of the two written as I was leaving, perhaps permanently. The rest of the poems were written on the Greek island of Amorgos over a period of two weeks. They were then edited in the south of France, Madrid and Aragon.

Aside from the theme of language, these poems are meant to capture a very specific moment in my life, a difficult time, and as such they are very personal poems, reflecting the tangle of thoughts and feelings of that period.

So here, then, I give a few notes on the poems, because I know that they are particularly impenetrable. I'm not sure how deep down I should go with the explanations – I shall just put fingers to keyboard and see what comes out.

Esp

This, of all the poems, is the one that deals most directly with the theme of learning another language and being lost in the labyrinth of two tongues. Right away the poem starts with the line "The tongue I forked"... and hereby we introduce the two prongs of Spanish and English of the poems. This line, for me, calls up images of body modders who actually fork their tongues - an operation that makes me a little squeamish (I won't link to a picture, but why don't you scroll down this wikipedia article and read the penultimate paragraph in the process section) and represents the pain of the process.
Much of the poem concerns itself with the subconscious processes going on in the brain. Thus we have references to The Rorschach Test and the Slit-scan photography process most famous for being used by Douglas Trumbull in the Stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tmesis

Tmesis, for those who don't know, is the process of inserting one word or phrase inside another, perhaps best exemplified by phrases such as, "fan-bloody-tastic".
The poem contains a number of references to the book of Revelation in the bible, for those who don't know it, why not try the lego version.

Code

This poem struggles with the idea of not believing in anything (see The Big Lebowski, "We believe in nothing!".
The final part of the poem lists several images about being stuck in loops: Skipping records; Musique concrète, a form of music which extensively uses tape loops; drum machine loops; and finally the last line of the poem is sort of pseudo computer code. It mixes two different types of loops in programming - a for loop and a while loop, both of which tell the computer to keep repeating certain instructions. If such a loop never stops, your computer will crash.

Bdy Stp

Not much to say about this one, it's about bodies.

rite

rite could be read a number of different ways but the one that I'd draw attention to is the return directly to the subject of the two languages... here they are described as lovers, alternately warring and loving each other.... the conflict between man and the devil in the garden of Eden is also referenced - the serpent separating man from God and at the same time singing "Praise Him, praise Him." And finally we have the image of a lone candle, always struggling to keep alight, but never quite going out.

How to Disappear Completely

This poem is about wondering how to disappear. The title is stolen wholesale from this Radiohead song. There is a short reference to Silvia Plath's suicide, "The iptssss… / Escaping gas niñitos en sus camas, / Trout in the oven", although why I connect it with trout is a mystery to me. Is there anything about trout in the Bell Jar? Or maybe it's a Hughes link... outdoorsy as he is... whatever.

I quote Wikipedia for the beginning of the second stanza:

The name atom comes from the Greek ἄτομος/átomos, α-τεμνω, which means uncuttable, or indivisible, something that cannot be divided further. The concept of an atom as an indivisible component of matter was first proposed by early Indian and Greek philosophers... During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists discovered subatomic components and structure inside the atom, thereby demonstrating that the 'atom' was divisible.

Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo

This is one of only two poems in the collection (the second being Ligne Maginot) that strays from the intensely personal towards something vaguely political. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, or May Square Mothers are a group of Argentine mothers whose children 'disappeared' during the dirty war. You can read about them on wikipedia, obviously.
This poem is about how people relate to traumatic events in the past, the title contrasts with the approach of the poem, which is that forgetting is better - the approach that Spain has followed towards the years of Civil war and dictatorship. While I'm more admiring of the Madres the poem's way is definitely easier.

Ligne Maginot

The Ligne Maginot, more commonly known in English as the Maginot Line was a defensive wall that France built between itself and Germany between the two world wars which, despite being formidable in its fortifications, failed to protect against German invasion in 1940.
This poem is the second of two political ones in this collection and treats, broadly, the building of walls between nations. Although the reference of the title is a historical one, today we can refer to Israel's wall between itself and Palestine, the United States' attempt to secure its border with Mexico and the walling in of favelas in South America. More broadly speaking my concern is with national borders in general which are often fairly senselessly or arbitrarily drawn. Mixed in with this are references to Werner Herzog's film version of Woyzeck. And in particular the story told in his documentary about the star of that film, Klaus Kinski, related by his female co-star concerning a blister appearing on her lip after the scene in which physical evidence of her infidelity is discussed along the same lines.

Worse Things Happn at Sea

Not much to say about this one. The title is an English expression meaning 'things could be worse'.

wich

Not much to say here either, except that it contains my favourite bit of Spanglish in all the poems, "semi-desnudity". This and the previous poem are at least partly about the same girl.

Noscitur a Socio

The title is Latin and I found it in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, where it is translated as "You may know him by the company he keeps."
The poem is basically a list of different ways that people could refer to depression, though it digresses a little towards the end and starts to refer to ideas of fate or destiny. There are a few famous ones in there, such as Churchhill's Black Dog, the Slough of Despond from A Pilgrim's Progress, etc. Fate references include the actual fates, as personified by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Julius Caesar's Ides of March, and Sisyphus and his rock in Hades, plus the reading of tea-leaves. Followed by biblical stuff, obviously, the oracle at Delphi, and why not a little of Freud. So many things to blame!

Borrachera

This is a poem about drunkenness.

Culp

Connected with Noscitur a Socio, this is another poem about blame and maybe finding it in yourself.

Mad·riz

First, the title. That dot is an interpunct. I used it because I like the name, and because it separates the 'mad', an English word, from the rest. I'm sure you know there isn't normally a 'z' on the end of Madrid, that's a joke on the Madrileno accent, which tends to excessively lisp the 'd's at the end of words. Spanish people'll get it.
This, as previously mentioned, was written on departing from Madrid and so encompasses both sentiments of loss and departure and mixed feelings over what had not, in fact, been a particularly fun year. The main motif of the poem is riding around underground on the Circular Metro line without seeing any of what goes on in the city.

Pictures

And finally, what about the pictures? Not much to say here except, they were all drawn in inkscape.

• The picture for Esp is an ñ, a letter in the Spanish alphabet;
• Tmesis shows the ancient Greek word τμῆσις, meaning 'a cutting' and the root for the word Tmesis;
• for Code, look here;
• Las Madres shows a dottified version of the symbol of the Madres, their white headcloth that they wear with the names of their disappeared relatives embroidered upon it;
• Ligne Maginot shows a pair of lips being stung by a wasp (make your own interpretations if you will);
• Borrachera shows a bottle of Mahou beer;
• Mad·riz shows a map of the Circular Metro line in Madrid. Looks like a kidney to me.

you can email snailsnail at onepuntostop@gmail.com

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