Melissa Nolas. The Noise of Time (2020), poetry collage on mixed media paper. A3. Realised on the poet's living room floor on April Fool’s Day, contemplating lockdown, using headlines from old copies of the London Review of Books. She fell out with the LRB when the publication refused to review Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire. You can read about what happened here. Until that point she hadn’t realised quite how male and white the LRB was. I relish these moments of reveal. As much as possible, all attempts were made to preserve the original titles from the LRB; sometimes that wasn’t possible and, like life under lockdown, they have also been truncated. I wish that I had come up with the title ‘The Noise of Time’, it is delicious. But I haven’t. She borrowed it from Julian Barnes, who borrowed it from Osip Mandelstam, a Russian/Soviet poet and essayist of Jewish heritage who, on his Wikipedia page, that he didn’t write, is also qualified by the woman he was married to: ‘he was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam’, a Russian Jewish writer and educator whose mother was amongst the first group of women to qualify as a doctor in the Soviet Union. It is not often that men are qualified by the women to whom they are married. But we are all defined by our relationships. The collaged poem has nothing to do with the original reviews those pasted titles were once attached to. Like a lot of headlines, which are misleading of the story that follows, their meaning has been re-written. All refractions are the poet’s own. Naturally. 

London, April 1st 2020.

Originally published on Stills, ‘a holding space for uncertain times’, that my friend and also photographer, Nancy Graham, and I created as a way of making sense of the clusterfuck that was the Pandemic. ‘No perfection, no legacy’.