‘The Unmoving is a dark and delicious exploration of post war landscape.
Maria Stadnicka’s beautifully crafted lines cut like a knife,
her poems come to the page like water from a deep well, only the well has been poisoned. Masterfully succinct and shrouded in Stadnicka’s trademark sense of mystery,
The Unmoving is as vivid a poetry chapbook as you’re ever likely to read.’ (Broken Sleep Books, 2018)
Ward 7H. The spring jumped on me. Donald broke a leg in the playground. The nurse ‘nitialled his file and admitted him last week. We spen’ the evenins playin’ cards. After dinner, I give ‘im chemistry equations and leave ‘im to it. But let’s continue the session.
I’m telling ya, doctor, I’m defined by objects lost in a train carriage. I am sayin’ this only to you, not to ‘hem, but I know they can read my thoughts anyway. I just know it. A burst of laughter chokes me. I zip it. My arm is num’, my smile too. Donald is watching. He breeves down my neck and I know he is smokin’ behind the curtains. The ward is full of ash. I can hear his lung. Aren’t you tired, mate? ‘Cause I am. The night guard watches. ‘come play wif me’ over a cuppa. Overall quiet.
I’m defined, as I said, by lost fings. I lost a revolver, some stamps, an umbrella. Some childhood pho’os and my dog, Derek. A plastic ruler, my dad’s jacket, my eyeglasses. A few other fings. It could be thirty or so bits of ‘istory. Stop starin’, doc’, you make me itch all over.
I’ve only known Don for a few days but I can tell he is a good egg. He ain’ talkin’ much now as he used to in 2017. Kindda lost his shine a bit, his hairs, but he’s watchin’ over me like a God. I’ve started prayin’ to him now and he’s chuffed. He likes me. This morning he came by my bed and gave me a present. A nuclear boomerang. Hallelujah!
Published in ‘International Times’, available here.
©Maria Stadnicka, 2018
When I was a child and lived in an overheated three-bedroom second floor flat, my brothers used to make water bombs. They would fill plastic bags up with cold tap water, tightly knot them, and throw them over the bedroom window every time they would see a pretty girl crossing the alleyway underneath. The water splashed all over the victim and they laughed their heads off, behind curtains. This detail came to mind watching the Brexit process taking place, month by month.
Photography: @JStadnicki, 2018
On reflection, the ‘hahaha-hihihi’ is coming this time from Downing Street as I get on with my form-filling life.
It’s has been hot recently (anyone noticed?!), even I can admit to that, and I’m used to Siberian summers. However, the heated discussions among the ministerial flock have raised the warning level from orange to red as nobody seems to have a clear view-point, nor an exit plan or a rescue package. It feels more and more like we’ve all been hoarded up into a long-haul flight, with a crew of unqualified attendants. In case of crash, it’s going to be ‘each to their own’.
Earlier in the week, the BBC mentioned how the PM is risking a revolt (I wish!) if the ‘type of Brexit she promised is not delivered’. Come on, Duncan, calling the PM ‘insolent’ on Twitter will not bring a velvet revolution. When Tusk issued a ‘last call’ at last week’s summit in Brussels, he didn’t mean your plane to the Maldives was about to take off. He meant business as you were about to sip another cooling lemonade. Last Saturday, a ‘livid’ Gove physically ripped up a report (did he really?!) for a new customs partnership with the EU. Qui prodest?
I get to understand miss Vicky when she said we needed a ‘practical, pragmatic deal that gives certainty to business and trade… not an ideological one’. The only things with it is …. everything on paper stays on paper and, therefore, is ideological. I’m back, for now, to reading Nausea. It makes, by far, a clearer point.
We are about to leave, I’ve got used to the idea by now, but there isn’t a destination on sight. We might find ourselves flying over the European economic space until the engine runs out of fuel. And then, let’s see who’s got a parachute.
©Maria Stadnicka, July 2018
published in ‘International Times’ / 3rd July 2018
Photograph: ©JStadnicki, 2018
There is no way one can observe the social transformations within a community and society without resorting to strong political clues in order to understand the sources of those transformations. And clearly, when things go wrong, we blame the politics, the legislators, the government. But when the political sphere moves away from the reality of the people it represents, the laws and the policies have no real impact on the wide majority. The decision-making groups have little will to support change, and the economic downturn Britain has been experiencing for over a decade seems to move towards a silent collapse. And nobody appears to take responsibility. The blame placed on the government rules like a shadow, hiding underneath the roots of bad financial decisions, personal greed and managerial incompetence.
Let’s consider the situation the art sector is in at the moment. The issue came into focus with the news of the devastating fire which, this second time, damaged the Glasgow School of Art beyond repair. There you have £35m down the drain, or rather turned to ashes, and everybody is powerlessly looking at the building asking, in disbelief, ‘how could this be possible’. The fate of the Glasgow School of Art seems, for now at least, sealed by confusion and uncertainty. Who is to blame?
Extrapolating the Glasgow tragedy, we are looking for someone or something to blame for the uncertain fate of hundreds of art schools across the country, which slowly, but surely, are decapitated by unachievable targets and percentages. This time, we encounter another type of devastating fire, which is slowly cooking to ashes the art sector, in general, and the art education, in particular: the drive to achieve the funding targets, the attendance and the achievement rates, the literacy and the numeracy benchmarks. What do they all mean? Certainly, they mean nothing to those involved in the art sector (students, artists, writers, musicians, teachers), but mean everything to those in charge to justify the bureaucracy supporting their livelihoods; bureaucracy which satisfies the pleiades of regulators and inspectors. The focus of this type of education is not the youth’s creativity; it is to produce a nation of self-absorbed adults, ready to slot into whatever social square is allocated to them as soon as they join the education system.
And here we face again another type of politics. The ‘politics of inevitability’ as Snyder eloquently describes it, which makes the art education vulnerable and a victim of the constantly expanding globalisation. Since the mid ‘80s, the way we talk about art has fundamentally changed as well as the way the education system works to serve the economy, under the bright colours of neoliberalism. One would say, what is the problem with that? There is nothing wrong with expecting profitability, and economic success. There is, though, if the principle on which the profit is based, is wrong.
The education and the arts remain essential social institutions in a healthy society. They create and preserve what we call our ‘decency’. They remain our ‘sane barometer’ if you like, which supports the configuration of our future and the values this future will act upon.
I remember a recent conversation I had with a head of school who recognised that things have taken a turn for the worse, with the Brexit uncertainty looming, but, as he said, ‘what can one do against a whole government, with a mortgage to pay?’
Here we are again, in the blaming game equation. The well-suited head is back in his leather chair, the young artist is back revising for another maths test. New financial cuts are drowning the hope of an economic recovery and the silence of those suffering its effects sounds more and more like a resigned agreement. Not once we feel that the history allows us to see patterns and to understand that action is a possibility.
History permits us, ‘to be responsible; not for everything, but for something’ as the poet Czeslaw Milosz said. This responsibility has always worked against loneliness and indifference.
©Maria Stadnicka, June 2018, Gloucestershire, UK
‘It is unfortunately hard to recall our quasi-permanent concern with the future, for on our return from a place, perhaps the first thing to disappear from memory is just how much of the past we spent dwelling on what was to come; how much of it, that is, we spent somewhere other than where we were.’ (de Botton, 2002)
Photography: ©John Stadnicki, 2018
A new poem published this morning in ‘Stride’ magazine:
Photograph: @John Stadnicki – MMXVIII
I covered my face with black ink
rounded all my possessions up
and set fire to everything
at the top of a hill.
click here to read the full text.
Photography: ©International Times, 2018
(to Aidan Semmens)
Hello. I am a feature
on a CCTV camera, with
private resonance. At
the top floor, I
can barely sleep for the sound of gunfire.
I hear the poetry when I order a pizza.
Still there, are you?
…‘yeah, […published in ‘International Times’ to read click] here
Study I, 2018
Study II, 2018
Study IV, 2018
Study III, 2018
Study VI, 2018
Study V, 2018
Photography: ©John Stadnicki, 2018
Photograph: ©John Stadnicki 2018
In recent months, I have been visiting my local surgery on a weekly basis and it has become a matter of routine to book visits and then wait my turn to be seen and checked. A matter of luck to have so many appointments, but not so lucky to have to report the effects all this prescribed medication have on me and then to find out that everything has been recorded, that the doctor has noticed if I washed my hair or not, or if I wear black, too much of it, or if I smiled or not. But then who cares anyway. I am the number written in all my medical history and my number defines my apprehension to allergies and infections.
It is the flu season, therefore busy. This morning a woman takes her nail file from her handbag and finishes her manicure just before she is called in. A man in his thirties, in a dark grey suit, with muddy brogues, on the phone with someone called Helen organises his daily appointments. The person sitting next to me finishes a BLT and wipes his hands on my chair then keeps on texting. The waiting room, packed. At 11 o’clock, twenty-two people in waiting, talking, texting, arguing, having coffee. Busier here than the bus station just across the road. And these people, most of them, look lonely. And for this, we now have a new solution and a new scope.
This week the Cabinet announced a new appointment. A minister for loneliness in response to a documented increase in mental health cases, to a reported sense of disconnection and social isolation. According to figures published by The Guardian, we are talking here about nine million people, which is a significant slice of loneliness in the British society. Furthermore, NHS Digital shows that prescriptions for antidepressants reached an all-time high with over 64 million items dispensed in 2016. And this represents a massive 108.5% increase in a period of ten years.
This is a clear indication that we now institutionalise loneliness spending billions on pharmaceutical companies when very few alternative solutions are available to the local communities. We witness a serious lack of professional support for people suffering from mental health issues, although it is statistically recognised that one person in five is affected, at some point in their life, by mental health issues. Yes, about the time to do something about it. But what the government is choosing to do is to add to the amount of bureaucratic garbage the ministerial departments produce on a weekly basis, without concrete results or impact at the deeper levels of our society. Let’s talk further numbers.
A minister cashes in over £141,000 a year, without bonuses, travel and communication expenses, without the support staff and other technological aids. You could double or triple the sum and easily get over the half a million threshold. A mental health nurse’s annual income, at the beginning of their career, barely touches £22,000. My local surgery, or others across the UK, could easily benefit from employing further ten newly qualified nurses or a few therapists. I live in a small community where resources are stretched and stretched further and where, at times, waiting for hours to be seen by a practitioner has become an acceptable rule.
Who benefits from a new ministerial portfolio when it is historically demonstrated that no institution has ever protected the individual, when, actually, the institution is there to protect itself through complicity to a policy of silence against corruption, error and monetary gains?
I want a Ministry of Despair!
©Maria Stadnicka, 2018
Photograph: ©John Stadnicki, ‘Corpus I’ – MMXVII
(for Katie McCue)
The soldier, asleep by his polished sword,
was somehow surprised.
Such a big storm!
The colours, all of them, disappeared.
The city collapsed in a big crevasse.
When she cried,
everybody cried.
The roads, the windows had to be shut
when she needed silence.
The words had to be wrapped in silvery knots
just before
they became people.
The stories stopped being written,
the earth stopped,
the war stopped.
And simply because she had
a fear of butterflies.
The butterflies were not scared of her.
Photograph: ©John Stadnicki, ‘Corpus II’ – MMXVII
Maria Stadnicka 