Author: Hayward, Danny

Paperback/softback 94pp
h190mm x w120mm x s5mm
ISBN13 9781915000019
978-1-915000-01-9
ISBN10 1915000017

About Training Exercises: Organized violence committed on ordinary speech is therapy for those who dont believe in literature as value. Training Exercises is an unpacking of that dictum: seven short essays, letters, reports and anti-biographies written to overcome the feeling of resistance to the defacement of what strikes us as true. An anti-purge written out by lipstick or hammer, scrawled over the top of itself and run through a translation program that turns everything upside inside down, its pieces include: a polemic against catharsis; a letter to the poet Dom Hale on his book Seizures; and a series of on-the-spot reports on the UK Illegal Migration Bill, East London poetry readings, the politics of the war in Ukraine, and a conversation about the meaning of damage in contemporary literature.

First you learn to write down your ideas, then you learn again how to write all of your lurid political and intellectual and intimate disappointments and all of your childhood hopes over the top of them. Jack Spicer scrawled the name of his book in pink lipstick on the cover of the academic journal he had published in: Training Exercises scrawls itself on top of that.

About the author: Danny Haywards most recent poetry collection is Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022). More recent work, along with an earlier collection of critical essays, can be accessed at Free Trials