Published work
I’m honoured to have had work included in various anthologies and journals. This is a selection of books that are currently available to buy.
Adventures In Form is a ground breaking anthology published by Penned in the Margins. A rule shattering collection of new poetic forms featuring over ninety poems by forty-six contributors including Patience Agbabi, Christian Bök, Joe Dunthorne, Inua Ellams, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Ruth Padel and Hannah Silva, edited and introduced by Tom Chivers.
I contributed two poems. The Times Literary Supplement was kind enough to say: ‘The most ingenious poem in the book is Nathan Penlington’s “annotated silence”, consisting of four symbols and their corresponding footnotes.’
Cut Up! is an anthology inspired by the cut up method of William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin, this volume brings alive the possibilities afforded by chance, and cracks open the future. The cut up method had a huge impact on all art forms in the 20th century, and helped produce the Burrroughs’ Naked Lunch, Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, & Radiohead’s Kid A. Cut Up! brings together established and new writers, all with a different approach to exploring the method – my contribution examines what happens when we let technology speak for us.
Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge is a lovingly produced sequel anthology of computer game poems, published by the creative independent poetry press Sidekick Books . Pieces range from graphically inventive, playful homages to seminal games, to radically new multi-player poetic forms. Contributors include writers such as Luke Kennard, Ross Sutherland, and Chrissy Williams – all contributors are even represented by their pixelated counterparts in full colour fold-outs. See if you can spot mine.
Marginalia looks back at some of the writers and poets that helped shape the first decade of Penned in Margins, an innovative publishing and performance producing company based in London’s East End. It’s a company that since its inception by editor and poet Tom Chivers, has been pushing at the boundaries of experiential creation.
This anthology is an excellent example of the diverse range of one of the UK’s most daring independent publishers.
The Journal of Experimental Fiction, edited by Eckhard Gerdes, is dedicated to innovative writing. I was honoured to have six pieces published in Vol 35. The work takes the form of poetry written in binary, predictive text, barcodes, op art, bureaucratic speak, and a complex word search in which the last line forms from the letters not crossed out.
Older work
Here are some very old things from the archive. You never know, somebody might have found a copy of one of these in the bottom of a box in the back of a charity shop. Hello to you. To save you wasting time searching for non-existent information on the internet this section is just for you.
2001
71% inflated ego/29% somebody else
This was my first collection of graphic poems. It contains poems written as washing instructions, bureaucratic small print, and binary. There are windowed holes, post it notes, and hand writing. It is a nice thing. There are only fifty as they were a pain to print and assemble – 71% were covered with mango translucent paper, 29% in purple beach ball plastic. Even now my copy still has that heady smell of a fresh summer season. Lots of these ideas were reworked into Almost Nearly.
2000
Don’t need English lessons to learn our lines
This beast of a thing is my MA thesis – the first history of UK performance poetry. It covers poets, producers, and promoters from the 1950s to 2000. The main thrust of the research was to uncover the almost forgotten history of a largely DIY or small scale phenomenon – the photocopied flyers, small run zines and pamphlets, undocumented performances. It also gave me a chance to speak at length to some of main proponents of poetry in performance – Adrian Mitchell, Adrian Henri, John Cooper Clarke, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Hegley – and many less well known contemporary poets to examine what is meant by the term Performance Poetry.
1999
1728 Haiku Machine
Inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau, this was an attempt at a physical interactive device that could generate a total of one-thousand seven-hundred and twenty-eight different haiku. You could turn, and flip each of the double-sided discs. I remember drawing out the original hexagons by hand as I didn’t have a computer capable of the job. It was designed to fit onto one A4 sheet of cardboard, which you cut out and assembled – I even supplied the split pin. There is/was perhaps a hundred of these in the world. Looking back I think the idea is sound, perhaps not so much the writing. Maybe it’s something I’ll come back to.
1999
Goose the Aged
‘Two men, one pen, and a 303’ was our tag line. A spoken-word / electronic music crossover – lyrics were observational narratives about my home town of Rhyl, told from the viewpoints of different characters. Imagine the Sleaford Mods, but with even less of a focus on song. That was us.
There aren’t many of these – I think perhaps 30 on tape and 50 on CD (we had to outsource the copying to a friend of a friend with a CD writer). We recorded it in one take in a small studio in the back of music shop in Rhyl. We sent it to John Peel, he sent us a letter back but I can’t find it anywhere. I will have kept it, I mean, I’m the kind of person who keeps most things. Of all my early stuff, I’m proud of this one. Mike was, and still is, a great musician.
If you play The Boy in the Book – look for the hidden track from this album, Prendergast the band will show you the way.
1999
Funking Kunst
Ha, see what I did there? Err, yeah. This isn’t completely terrible, but it’s not great.
37 poems with a stand-up attitude, and a sarcastic undertone. A flurry of references to PlayStation and semiotic theory really pins this in the last year of the 20th century. But it does contain the first version of the performative art/poetry hybrid Tekken 3 Love Poem made entirely from PlayStation controller commands.
1998
let there be light
This is the accompanying zine for an interactive art installation made for my degree show. Formed from a series of light-boxes covered with pages from newspapers and magazines, viewers could select which boxes to turn on and off, creating surprising natural montages of text and image.
It was an exploration of the things we’ve become immune too – the preoccupation with the constant need to sell us things alongside horrific images of death, war and famine.
1998
Operation Margarine
The second of a trilogy of poetry zines I made during my university years – of the three I still have a fondness for this one. It is slim, twenty pages, but so am I.
I think some of the ideas still stand up, even if some of the references are long gone – BT’s Friends & Family anyone? It also contains the first appearance of the unperformable Love/Hate poem in which all the words are crossed out. Extra points for working out where the title comes from.
1997
Passport to Leisure
We all have to start somewhere. These 24 photocopied pages are my first poems written to read and then sell at the poetry nights I used to go to when I first moved to London.
A pun heavy stand-up style dominates most of the work, but I had an early fascination with experimental graphic poetry – a poem made entirely from barcodes (groan now) called Bard Code, and a poetry by numbers. I reworked these last two ideas a couple of years later, but one thing I never went back to was the poem designed to be folded origami style into a condom. I think there was a joke in there somewhere, I’m not sure where.