Creative Conversations: Nicky Melville

nicky (nick-e) melville is a poet, creative writing teacher, musician and occasional artist. For over twenty years, he has been developing a range of peripheral and small press publications in a variety of forms and genres: found poetry and erasures, visual poetry, lyric experiment, conceptual and post-conceptual writing, and a badge. His work takes aim at and interrogates the imperatives of capitalism, politics and ideology. melville’s last book, The Imperative Commands (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2022) is available here and his selected poems, Decade of Cu ts, is published by Blue Diode.

“Innovation is not simply copying previously innovative practice, but finding different ways of doing things. Nicky Melville shows us the way forward.”

—Tom Jenks (zimZilla), on ALERT STATE IS HEIGHTENED

“Tom Raworth once wrote that ‘80 percent prefer chips to poetry’. He could’ve been writing about cats, dogs, chefs or kids, but clearly those surveyed, alas, hadn’t read the poetry of nicky melville. This much-anticipated ‘new and selected’ is top tier snack box stuff for surviving a Decade of Cu ts. Through erasure, collage and prickly lyric, melville tracks the sinister language games, coincidences and contradictions within political, institutional and corporate discourse. Channelling the ambience of everyday life — from ABBA to ASDA — this book is a ‘BUG HUM’ of relentless attention, love poems and fail poems, precarity and community. Here, poetry is deep-fried, spliced and caressed, heavy salted, ghosted, shared, brought in from the cold.”

— Maria Sledmere, author of neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press)

The Zoom Link to attend online is: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/84847985257

Creative Conversations is supported generously by The Ferguson Bequest. Professor Thomas Ferguson (1900-1977), Henry Mechan Chair of Public Health (1944-64), bequeathed his estate to the University, with the instruction that the money should be used to foster the social side of University life.

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