Introduction to Serge ♆ Neptune and Wendy Allen
Introduction by alice hiller : A very warm welcome to our Broken Sleep Books Voicing Our Silences special featuring Wendy Allen and Serge Neptune. The video features my introduction, performances by Serge and Wendy of their poems, a conversation between them about their work, and two prompts for you to try and home with your own writing. There’s also some feedback from a couple of Voicing Our Silences poets, who took part in the workshop, to give you a sense of how they worked for us.
As you’d expect from Broken Sleep, Serge and Wendy are poets to whom risk-taking comes as naturally as breathing. Also instinctive to both of them is the language of the bodily self as political space. Turning to Serge Neptune first – merman extraordinaire, he’s a fin-tailed London-based queer poet, mentor, and producer. He created and hosts the inimitable Neptune’s Glitter House for WayWard Poets, which made lockdown a lot more bearable for his many fans, myself included. Widely published, Serge chaired A Celebration of Queer Writing with Andrew McMillan, Mary Jean Chan and Paul Mendez for the Cheltenham Literary Festival. So we’re in very experienced hands tonight.
Serge’s These Queer Merboys, was published with Broken Sleep Books in 2020. I absolutely loved reviewing it for harana poetry. Moving, visceral and tender, its poems hold the watery and land-based worlds of merboys and men whose “sky is a ceiling of white papercuts” and where “A smack of jellyfish rises up/ to shake the seacrest”. Calling to life a dream of hedonism when “touch becomes/ a flurry of honeyed fingers”, Serge’s poems are equally alert to the harms which can stalk rainbow lives. Recording societal and familial hostilities, Serge also explores queer-on-queer predation. Overall, a campaigning, inspiring, ferocious read – as you’ll be discovering shortly.
Singingly fresh and audacious, with a rasor-sharp wit, Wendy Allen is no less precise – or visceral – than Serge, when it comes to speaking through and with the body. Her powerful poems have been published, and commended in many competitions. The Tricolore Textbook, her debut with Broken Sleep, sold out before I could even get a copy. The poem Wendy gave us for our website is titled ‘Why do people take photographs of men surfing and not my Orgasm as it Peaks’. It sets the scene by revealing “my nipples are blushed buoys/ as they bob on the slowing wave of you”. This is a world whose rose-tint is more likely to be a post-coital glow, or dilute menstrual fluids, than anything from the garden.
Beautifully open to foreignness, the expansions of travel, and the possibilities of play in all its forms, Wendy’s essential work also holds a charge of anger and grief at the vast continents of female experience which have been excluded from art-making, even as female youth and perceived beauty have been relentlessly exploited. Like Serge’s, her poems are forensic, redemptive, and generous – as you’ll be able to discover for yourselves.
Note : if you read this introduction, maybe start the video at 5.12 so you don’t have to hear me twice over
Video of Wendy Allen and Serge ♆ Neptune introduced by alice hiller
Serge ♆ Neptune
Serge ♆ Neptune has been called ‘the little merman of British poetry’. His first pamphlet is These Queer Merboys, published with Broken Sleep. His work has been commended in the Winchester Poetry Competition and has appeared in Magma, Fourteen Poems, Finished Creatures, Lighthouse, Banshee, Brittle Star and the Queer Life, Queer Love anthology.
twitter @mermanpoet
a child comes out as a merman
when right after sunset darkness landed on our living room
like a butterfly on an open flower
mother didn’t bother to switch on the lights
and kept watching the telly
the telly blasting SINNERS! SINNERS!
while standing by the threshold to the kitchen,
I announced – my voice all jelly – I am a merman now!
& mother looked for a second, nodded
tucked her lips again into a blanket of silence.
the morning after a leaflet was next to my pillow
with content I could not decipher, pictures as bright
as sun-filled bubbles.
mother said
if I wanted to learn how to swim, they’d pay for lessons.
dad in the car pestered me with lectures about being
only thirteen and knowing nothing, being full of nothing.
you shall not lie with a creature of the sea, for they have no soul
and only by marrying a creature of land, may they acquire one
I started taking baths before sleep and went to bed
so wet I’d soak the sheets
then sleeping in the bathtub all night
I joined my legs tight with an elastic band
enjoyed every cramp every cold shiver
the next day screams and thumps out of the bathroom door
woke me up, as I delayed everyone’s morning routine
over breakfast, mother insisted, once more, I was clueless.
I said I’d found a new god, one more gentle and tender,
one that allowed for slipperiness, for mellowness
mother shook her head, dad shouted to go to my room,
called me an abomination
they decided to leave me alone,
a shadow sewing button-eyes on ghost dolls.
once, they watched a stand-up show on the telly, had their chests
shake with so much laughter, they couldn’t hear a thing.
once the water in my bathtub was all cherry, I tried to stop
the flower of my wrists from blossoming.
Serge ♆ Neptune
First appeared in harana poetry
Wendy Allen
Wendy Allen is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes. Her first pamphlet was published as a Legitimate Snack from Broken Sleep. Her poems have been published in Northern Gravy, Selcouth Station, Atrium, Damnation and Dear Reader.
Why do People Take Photographs of Men Surfing and not my Orgasm as it Peaks
We are speechless
floating on our mattress of foam off the shore
my nipples are blushed buoys
as they bob on the slowing wave of you
my hair advert pretty as it moves
over your cock like the tide
I like the off white of afterwards,
dirty bridal stains traced on our lips
I want to stay open-mouthed,
remain on this high, photographed
on this invisible wave.
I want to have it framed –
do I smile as your tongue
turns circles into crests as I surface
Wendy Allen
This poem first appeared in Northern Gravy