Decomposing Robert

Résumé éditeur

with an afterword by W. N. Herbert (1961-...) // In this long poem, David Spittle seeks to mirror the decomposition of the human body with the decomposition and syntactical entropy of language itself, in the same way Wittgenstein's early philosophy attempted to mirror the structure of reality with the structure of language. Interspersing fragments from Robert Browning's own poetry into his own and seemingly interweaving his visions with those of the Victorian poet, Spittle ingeniously exhumes not just the meaning of Browning's own life and writing, but also the remains of that life's meaning for us today – poetry helping record, like an involuntary seismograph, the thoughts and actions of any one life on earth. Thus, the poet tackles the problem of how a human lifespan can be both mentally and linguistically deconstructed within the very body that housed that existence in the first place. // David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker and essayist. Following his pamphlet, B O X (HVTN, 2018), Spittle published two poetry collections, All Particles and Waves (Black Herald Press, 2020) and Rubbles (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). He runs an ongoing series of interviews with filmmakers talking-about-poetry and poets talking-about-film: the first volume Light Glyphs (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) includes interviews with John Ashbery, Guy Maddin, Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair, So Mayer, Lisa Samuels and many others. Spittle's films have screened in festivals and been broadcast on the BBC, and alongside filmmaking his film criticism has appeared in Sight & Sound and as part of select Blu-ray releases. He continues independent research across film and philosophy.