Vik Shirley is a poet whom I think is proper good. Vik recently released a really good thing, called Corpses, from Sublunary Editions and I happily wrote about it. https://sublunaryeditions.com/?product=Corpses
"What is the word for the end of our bodies? What is the sound of the corp singing? Vik Shirley is really such a brilliant writer to be able to evoke the absurdity of what death might be, beyond us, beyond what we can conceive, and what language might do with that, in such a darkly funny, wry, vivid set of poetic texts. This is doing the work poetry needs to be doing, its about language itself as much as it about the absurdity of our own physical lives and non-lives."
Vik also did an interview with another excellent poet Matt Haigh where she generously mentioned my interest in actually funny poetry https://www.matthewhaigh.net/vik-shirley
Your most recent chapbook is Corpses from Sublunary Editions. Corpses is a pretty dark title for a poetry collection. What would you say is the role of poetry that is perhaps darker in tone than the usual declarations of love or breathlessness at nature?
People expect poetry to be about love or breathlessness at nature and that stereotype makes my skin crawl. Working against that expectation is what interests me, whether that's Matthew Welton's series on colour, in the style of university marking schemes, or Gabriel Guddings' poem 'On the Rectum of Peacocks'. There was something that Steven Fowler was discussing in his Lunar Poetry interview last year, about certain bands of aesthetics that are often missing in poetry, one being 'genuinely funny poetry', as opposed to unfunny, supposedly 'comic' poetry, the other being negative aesthetics, the equivalent of a horror film in poetry, something that makes you feel 'bad as a pleasure'. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about being human. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about the world we live in …
