Clive Birnie's Blog

My experimental poetry pamphlet Palimpsest was published by Verve Poetry Press in Jan 2020.

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Palimpsest explores a near future where mundane meets magical, truth blurs into fiction and digital and analogue collide. These are poems that are made rather than written in the conventional sense. Poems that are built from scraps of text appropriated from magazines, junk mail, ephemera; erased, redacted, cut up and overwritten with original lines to create palimpsests. The title is thus both a creative technique revealed in the visible lines of construction and an eponymous anti-superhero in whose steps we follow as she emerges from a collage of fractured narratives and cinematic dispatches from a dark and murderous hinterland.

‘Like spying through a thousand half-lit windows on a long night’s train journey. If James M. Cain wrote flash fiction, and it was illustrated by shadow artist Shigeo Fukuda, it might make something like this.’

Sarah Hilary

Author of the Marnie Rome crime series

& Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Winner

‘An exhilarating experiment in form and ideas. I was reminded of Max Porter’s Lanny; with Birnie’s anti-hero Palimpsest a sort of Dead Papa Toothwort character gathering scraps and sounds of our contemporary landscape, albeit at a more furious pace. A very exciting collection from a bright and inventive mind’

Lyndsey Fineran

Cheltenham Literature Festival

‘In the character of Palimpsest, Birnie has drawn from the zeitgeist a new mythological heroine for the 21st Century.’

Gareth L Powell

Author of the Ack Ack Macaque and Embers of War trilogies and twice winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel

‘I’m frightened of this book. I’m frightened of its truth. I’m frightened of its beauty. I’m frightened it is making me talk about truth and beauty. Most of all I am frightened to know that its poetic ideas convince me that a million dead dreams live on in the blood of such extreme imaginative thought, ready to consume me. Unless—the real danger of this book is its talent, which will change you, reader: you will marry it. It will become you. Birnie has done it again, this time with jaws of transformative, writerly, experimental love.’

Susan Bradley Smith

Poet & playwright, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Curtin University, Australia.

Most recent collection The Postcult Heart.

‘Like a frenzied, hallucinating Bear Grills, Clive Birnie conducts shamanistic GPS text-rituals, recovers lost sci-fi script-trails, scopes out and chases down ancient track-marks through fresh-frozen manuscript re-cycling. He leaves us a map exposing 21st century psychic text-truth(s); an erased Venn diagram of the Midblastula moment; the delineation of a burnt psychosis vernacular.’

Paul Hawkins

Poet whose books include Place, Waste, Dissent and Lou Ham: Racing Anthropocene Statements

I will be exhibiting some new prints as part of an open studios exhibition with my fellow Portishead Studios artists Anna Elliot and Kate Birnie on the weekend of 29-30 June 209. Full details can be found here. All are welcome.

I have prints for sale over here on my Big Cartel page including the popular Humans are Ridiculous, Angels in #Bristol and If You Can’t be Kind… Log Off.

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All are £25 + shipping.

[image error] Thanks to everyone who stopped by to talk about my work during The Other Art Fair and especially to those who purchased an original collage  or a HashtagPoetry# print.

I will have more HashtagPoetry# prints available very soon in particular the popular Humans are Ridiculous and Angels in Bristol (pictured).

Sign up to my mailing list here for updates on that: SIGN-UP-HERE

Clive

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I am exhibiting some new & recent poetry/art collisions at the up coming The Other Art Fair in Bristol – if you are around and a wander around an art fair sounds like something that might work I have an allocation of complimentary tickets available. All you need to do is go here:

A hashtagpoetry# sequence in response to URSPRUNGSALPHABET (Alphabet of Origin) by Nora Gomringer assisted by online translation engines and Twitter searches. All the images were created using apps on an iPhone 5S to redact and paint over screen shots of the iOS Twitter app generated via Twitter searches using terms generated by online translations of lines from Nora’s poem or occasionally the original German. The sequence was created and posted on Instagram and Twitter over 26 days from 1-26 May 2016.

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I am in the process of wrapping this project up. In practical terms it came to an end on National Poetry Day back in October but in order to archive it I am working on drawing all the various pieces of the project together in order to archive them. Since this website is now my public archive (my aim is to make my published and unpublished back catalogue available in one place), here are the GIFs: