My #poembrut vispo book Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire published with Hesterglock press in 2018 has 4 unpublished asemic / art poems now online at Mercurius, an online journal. https://www.mercurius.one/home/aletta-ocean-alphabet-empire

AOAE is available https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/aletta

The publication includes the essay featured in the book, on poetry, eroticism and pornography.

“You can never discover for yourself what you’ve been given. Bodies and knowledge, both. The primary purpose of this book is to worry about the division between the experienced and the perceived, and what is lost between that ever expanding gap.

Bataille suggests that you try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are in, to one in which your whole self is completely doubled. He means this to be a disturbance. He reminds us, you would not survive this process since the doubles you have turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now, as while you’ve split into two new versions of yourself, you cannot be the same, twice over. A kind of procreation is what he is suggesting and the metaphor is about writing, I think. To mark the pages then release them is to indulge oneself, fundamentally, in a productive onanism. Cells dividing, with some of that division escaping you. No wonder it feels sad, a let down, to release things into the world.

At some event, I’m watching a panel of speakers talking about something banal. The title is specious, it’s designed to intrigue but not offend. It’s a turgid literary festival, stuffy and fake, but the panellists keep talking about sex. They are almost battling each other over it. It is awkward, and insistent, but not, perhaps, for the reasons they’d imagine. They are desperate to appear comfortable with the notion of sex and in so doing are opening a gap between themselves and sex itself. Gone is anything remotely evocative of the experience, from within, within consciousness. I do not believe them too, it is a falsehood which is designed to make the audience comfortable while appearing to be discomforting. Aletta flits across my mind, as I’m actively daydreaming an escape, and it occurs to me there seems nothing more unerotic than poets talking about sex. “