David Spittle

David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker, librettist, and essayist. He has taught across Creative Writing and English Literature in HE for over ten years (Newcastle University, University of West London). Spittle has published five collections of poetry, B O X (HVTN, 2018), All Particles and Waves (Black Herald Press, 2020), Rubbles (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), Decomposing Robert (Black Herald Press, 2023), and How Eyes Rest (HVTN, forthcoming). He also runs a series of interviews with filmmakers talking-about-poetry and poets talking-about-film, the first volume Light Glyphs (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) includes John Ashbery, Guy Maddin, So Mayer, Andrew Kötting, Redell Olsen, Lisa Samuels, Iain Sinclair, and many others. Spittle's films have screened at festivals internationally and been broadcast on the BBC. Alongside filmmaking, his film criticism has appeared in Sight & Sound and as part of select Blu-ray releases.

Website: https://www.davidspittle.uk/

Twitter [X]: @DavidSpittle7

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Day 5.

I can’t pretend to have done

much more than bramble my connection

and that’s what brought me there     in a way 

neglecting forms of intelligence

that have no need to think so let me

listen to the creeping garden

breathe a film around me

and intuitively             it has someplace to be

but me

I lose my step to talk to it       of it     

as it might be or is but cannot             I don’t know              

how it feels     to move from place to place              

one cell            in cohort          a many one     

cohere a song in growth         over cold        

without a care

                      or doubt

pulse of place a transit of in

a ‘keeping pace’

not

what it was

            as I might

look back

on        say, last year               how depression

as though a menacing pet were cultivated from me

to chide head hackles raised from bites

a nuisance       as opposed to the can’t go on

chemical for metaphor, hydra’s

jaw on jaw reborn as nettles

in trying to outthink a problem of thought

ill coils squid ink sudden from this and that

to everything   and then it had me again        

not mine but surging through and back again

            after years

and      as if living had a path, inching forward

now vertiginous crawl            a fall on either side

howling it has always been this way and it will always be

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