about Mendoza

Mendoza is a Northumbrian poet and researcher at Birkbeck University investigating identity through poetic practice. Mendoza writes and performs under several personas, most notably “Linus Slug: Insect Librarian”, “Elgar Funk” and “Elffish Jon”. The poetry itself references Northumbrian history and culture, as well as insect folklore and mythology. It engages with the act of remembering, and the ways in which memory alters or defines the formation of individual, social, and cultural identities. Mendoza­Slug is the founder of ninerrors poetry series, editor of FREAKLUNG poetry zine and co-editor/event organizer at Stinky Bear Press: highly active, and to good effect, in the thriving but often seemingly private world of avant-garde poetry. Their (and I use the pronoun advisedly – how else can a range of personas be adequately referred to?) reputation is extending beyond the dark undergrowth of the avant-garde to reach and engage a wider audience, with appearances in recent wide-ranging anthologies of what’s most exciting in current new poetry.

Identity, and its exploration and presentation, is a major focus of Mendoza’s poetry. Identity as what? – as given (here is this body, these memories, out of Northumbria as we happen) – and equally as constructed & performed, as a series of masks, as a series of roles adopted with different audiences. Does identity exist alone & solitary? Mendoza’s poetry, and that of many of their peers, would strongly suggest that’s meaningless – like the tree falling unobserved in the forest: nothing to be said about it. A lot to say about the dance of language between and within people. A lot to say about other ways of existing within this world than those sold & fed to us – that’s where (for me) the force of the interest of the insects lies, and, yes, MendozaSlug has really truly been an insect librarian. The actuality of otherness, of insect identity, is what this poetry gives me, in poems which are funny, mischievous, moving and highly original. Identity of another, your identity, their identity, is always mysterious & different:

young born furred with open eyes

                                O magpie thief your speechspeech

              tongue is

                                             cleft of lip and palate

the sequence frass gazette ends. In it are insects and people, history & possible poems, ways of talking about who you are, who you aren’t and who you might be, mulched up and fertile (frass is the term for insect droppings & waste – vital to maintain ecosystems – ‘tis only nature) . To quote Edmund Hardy (on another poem): 

Linus Slug gives us a new type of ambiguity in poetry, a principle of the playful infinite in a pamphlet which moves through a rich decay - of violence, disembodied news, the eyes of scorn - to find the points from which switches, sexuality and delight can flourish against and over. These points cluster, scurry and fly everywhere - as insect familiars, as "Lay of the last poetic" - and later return into layers of code at the point of disappearance, "I stole from J who stole / from H who / stole from F in Rymans".

Mendoza is an intelligent and skilled performer: prepare to be astonished, intrigued and delighted, and to recognise the life within these language creations. A strong presence is made, engaging & unforgettable – the person constructing/constructed by personas demonstrated, the vitality of language upheld in flight. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry

Much of Mendoza’s writing has been published in small, fugitive editions, circulating within a community of other poets, making it difficult to access for a more general reader. Most recent publications have been POEM / ART / THREAT! (Stinky Bear Press, 2013) and Inside My Head My Dog's A Bear (Stinky Bear Press, 2012). The poetry can be read most easily in some recent anthologies of the most interesting new poetry (the first two of which certainly present it to a wide audience and in varied company):

edited by Nathan Hamilton, Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe Books, 2013)

edited by Sasha Dugdale, Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt Publications, 2013)

edited by Chris Goode, Better Than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries (Ganzfeld, 2011) (as Linus Slug)

ON THE INTERNET

Blog: ninerrors poetry series < http://ninerrors.blogspot.com > – (as ninerrors; many “niners” [9 in various ways] poems, by Linus Slug, plus other poets collaborating in enterprise)

Linus Slug, “ ::field notes::”, ctrl+alt+del 5, 2013 < http://theabsurd.co.uk/cad/issues/cad5.pdf  >

Mendoza, poems in Herbarium (edited by James Wilkes, Capsule Press/Wayward Plants, 2011) < http://www.physicgarden.org.uk/2001-2/ >

slmendoza , “Northumberland Poems”, Veer About (edited by Adrian Clarke & William Rowe, Veer Books, 2011) < http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2011/02/veer-about-2010-2011.html >

slmendoza (aka linus slug),  “Junctions”, Cannibal Spices No. 4, 2010               < http://www.openned.com/epubs/2010/4/14/cannibal-spices-no-4.html >

Linus Slug, excerpt from “Vignettes”, klatch 2 (collaborative assemblage, Openned, 2010) < http://www.openned.com/epubs/tag/klatch >

Elffish Jon, “Hitherto Hither Green”, Onedit 16, 2010 < http://www.onedit.net/issue16/elffishj/elffishj.html >

Mendoza, “Two Sequences of Poems”, Great Works, 2009 < http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/m1.html >

Linus Slug, various poems on National Poetry Filth April, 2009 < http://thedailyfilth.blogspot.co.uk/>

Reviews

“Reading Mendoza, or, Linus Slug” (a review of Junctions), contributions by Jeff Hilson, Richard Owens,  Peter Riley & Edmund Hardy,  Openned Zine, eds. Alex Davies & Steve Willey, Issue 2, June 2010 < http://www.openned.com/storage/pdfs/Openned%20Zine%202%20Reduced.pdf >

Jeff Hilson Reading at Stort Poetry Group

The poet Jeff Hilson will be visiting Stort Poetry Group on Wednesday March 7, at 7.30 pm, to read and talk about his poetry. The event will take place upstairs in Waterstones, Bishops Stortford, and there will be free admission, but a collection for the poet’s expenses.

Jeff Hilson has been a major actor within Innovative Poetry in London through the period since 2000. With Sean Bonney and David Miller he co-founded Crossing the Line in 2001, a poetry reading series based in London, initially downstairs at the Poetry Café, with a wide range of figures reading, to an audience always heavy with their fellow poets. Jeff Hilson’s teaching of Creative Writing at Roehampton University has established him with a major reputation as a nurturer of poetic talent (teeshirts bearing the legend “Hilson School of Poetry” have been sighted). He has also edited one of the most important anthologies of recent years, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) – sonnets remade for a whole new world.

Most importantly, though, he is a witty and haunting poet, whose performances of his own poetry engage, astonish and amuse his audiences. His poems combine “found language”, from sources such as literary or natural history or of course poetry itself, with lively contemporary speech and attitude. His early published work provides an ironic commentary on the traditional English poetic subject of Nature – the poem sequences are constructed from fragments of language used to define & describe grasses (A grasses primer) and birds (Bird Bird), worked up into longer collections of fragments. In stretchers, the range of source materials is expanded, but Hilson also matches this to a single repetitive formula: 33 short lines refusing narrative coherence (but not narrative) and enforcing a true heteroglossia, a creatively conflicting range of voices, from the bus, the pub, the book, the dream.

His most recent book of poems, In the Assarts, is centred around what were historically waste places, newly cleared land where people could live free lives. In a series of rough sonnets, Hilson jumps between the past roots of our culture and landscape and our messy present day – to show what is similar, what different, what tragic, and what comic (especially). It is poetry about the idea and the reality of present-day “Englishness” – and being English, does not take itself seriously (but is, inside, deeply so). The poet Tim Atkins, whose brilliant “translations” of Horace and Petrarch likewise show us ourselves through anachronism, violent tone-shifts and sheer comedy, describes thus In the Assarts: “Jeff Hilson's hilarious, tragic, wobbling, witty poems mix the high seriousness of Stein, Spicer & Ceravolo with the pleasingly ridiculous Englishness of both Stevie & Mark E. Smith…Reading [them] is like encountering Buster Keaton in a codpiece staggering down the Walworth Road clutching a handful of Clifford T Ward & Krautrock albums whilst being pursued by Francis Picabia & the Sheriff of Nottingham. Hooray! Jeff Hilson's happy project is the most exciting in contemporary British poetry.”

Hilson has achieved a poetry which is both learned and unlearned, lewd and ludicrous, loud when he reads it, never laudatory. Yes, the word “ludic” hovers around here – it is a solemn and obsessive game, serious and comic, an invented ritual which engages you through its vitality and humour, and which could boast “All human life is there.” What in some ways started as a formalist patterning of found language has grown into a quite lovable account of our life in language. It does you good to encounter or hear Jeff Hilson’s poetry.

Bibliography

A grasses primer (Form Books, 2000)
stretchers (Reality Street, 2006) which also includes essay “Why I wrote stretchers”
(editor) The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008)
Bird Bird (Landfill, 2009)
In the Assarts (Veer Books, 2010)