Books by Steven Hitchins:
Coaglorhythms (LPB, 2021)
Accordion flexagon of spacetime rhythmanalysis of Pontypridd.
The Lager Kilns (Aquifer Press, 2019)
The Lager Kilns gathers together texts and images created by Steven Hitchins for The Canalchemy Project, a collaborative initiative initiated by Hitchins, which involved walking sections of the Glamorganshire canal from Merthyr Tydfil to Cardiff Bay, with a varying group of poets and artists, performing actions and readings along the way. The book is accompanied by its sister volume, The Materials by Lyndon Davies, and the two books can be purchased together as a special offer package from the Aquifer website. To celebrate their joint publication, The Literary Pocket Book has produced a limited edition, handmade Microanthology collecting pieces by each of the Canalchemy participants.
‘The canal is many things, made of many voices, an infinite ribbon of infinitely divisible experiences, trampled over, blotted out, overlaid and then recalled, not as itself, canal, but as a series of partially organised remnants, whether natural or man-made. The damage remains, the poison remains, but everything has changed because of the damage. What the damage left us when it became history: something to look at through a pane of glass; somewhere to take a quiet stroll at evening.’ – Lyndon Davies
Brynfab Collider (zimZalla, 2018)
A collaboration with Rhys Trimble: Cymraeg-Anglo linguistic reversible flickbook mashup. Colliderings of Welsh and English words using an englyn by the nineteenth-century Pontypridd-based poet Brynfab. Available now from zimZalla.
Click here for a rapid fly-by.
Buy now for £7 within the UK or £10 elsewhere.
Watch video:
Ilan (Stranger Press, 2018)
‘Via the shadowy presence of a little-known saint and other previous residents, Ilan takes a geological approach to the time and space of Eglwysilan and its surrounding area, digging down into the past to throw up verbal fragments that glitter with possibility. Glimpsed lives of bridge-builders and miners intersect with pitch-perfect evocation of twenty-first century voices in a language as slippery, resistant and compelling as the landscape in which it is entangled.’
– Zoë Skoulding
‘Steven Hitchins is an acute observer, with an eye for detail and an ear for contemporary speech. He is also a poet with a sense of the historical and geological forces and processes that have made his native ground. Above all, his imagination is alive to the material and psychological transformations of life in time and space. His alchemy transforms history and myth, and fact and dream into poetry. Ilan is a marvel of language, which repays many readings.’
– Jeremy Hooker
Ilan is available from Stranger Press.
£8 including postage – To purchase Ilan from within the U.K. please click here
£8 plus postage – To purchase Ilan from outside of the U.K. please click here
White City Automatic (Prifysgol Y Treiglo, 2017)
White City Automatic is an evolving processual remix of Steven Hitchins’ The White City and Rhys Trimble’s Swansea Automatic (both published by Aquifer Press in 2015). We started remixing each other’s poems for Ghost Jam 2 at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, in 2016. Then we collaged our cut-ups into pages of each other’s books and performed them at The Other Room, Manchester, in 2017. Later in 2017 we held a Remixology workshop at Glasfryn, Llangattock, where participants did their own collages from the texts. It is hoped that the remix will continue.
Read at the Prifysgol Y Treiglo site or download White City Automatic pdf
Winter Texts (LPB, 2016)
30 text messages sent between John Maher and Steven Hitchins during the winter of 2014-15. Printed on neon yellow slips housed in a blue accordion with pockets.
Watch reading at Free Verse: the Poetry Book Fair.
Yth (LPB, 2015)
Collaborative zed-book with Rhys Trimble. Three sequences of experimental translations of Dr William Price’s eccentric visionary work Gwyllllis yn Nayd (1871), including a psychogeographical derive, a series of algorithmic transformations using Markov chains, visual poems, collages and photographs.
“The density of the Welsh-English collision relies on an extensive knowledge of both languages, yet the horizon of understanding escapes as the reader approaches on a wave of verbal intoxication.” – Sharon Morris, Poetry Wales 52.3, 2017
Watch reading of extracts from Yth:
Translating the Coal Forests (Singing Apple Press, 2015)
A Literary Pocket Book / Singing Apple Press collaboration by Camilla Nelson and Steven Hitchins.
Poetic strata retrieved from textual petrifaction of swamp-deteriorated coal text intersect and diverge in performative translation.
Pages of F.J. North’s Coal and the Coalfields in South Wales were left to deteriorate in a coalfield swamp. From time to time the specimens were suffused with mud and silt sufficient to cover up and seal the letters. Eventually we returned and remains were partially retrieved. OCR text recognition programs were used to take casts or moulds of the crumbs. These petrifactions preserve the external form of the page debris: tears in paper replicated in contours of stanzas. We each made an attempt to translate the fossil texts, perceived patterns in their carboniferous frottage, remaking the originals in an altered fern.
Printed on transparent pages housed in an accordion of Camilla’s home-baked mud-grass-coal paper.
“The whole thing is bound tissue-delicately, as if struggling to retain its wholeness, the previous lives of its material pressing it apart from within… Just as the thing falls to pieces with the touch involved in reading, the words and sentences of the text dissolve and reform themselves grammatically, metrically and narratively… Reading this, we get the uncomfortable feeling that it’s the coal forests – those huge, primeval forests turned to the fossil fuels we’re currently exploiting to burn down the world – talking… It’s strong, affecting stuff, harmonising form and content, text and object, meaning and implication – meaningfully together.” – Joey Connolly in Poetry Wales 52.1, Summer 2016
Watch reading at Enemies/Gelynion:
The White City (Aquifer Press, 2015)
The White City is a participatory sensing expedition that allows readers to explore the streets of Rhydyfelin, a suburb of Pontypridd in the South Wales valleys. The book comprises two dimensions: a guidebook or map towards a group expedition into the city and a book-based installation documenting the expedition that has yet to take place. Documentation as a starting point rather than an end result: before the work is finished, before the poem is begun. Thus prepared we enter the streets, in search of the White City.
“…a stripped-down stream of consciousness… poetry found in the everyday reality of a small town in South Wales with its concomitant economic difficulties and social issues… The overall tone of the piece fits the black and white production of the book; the vitality of past events cloaked by monochrome pictures and dry discourse, whilst the future for the inhabitants of The White City appears equally devoid of colour. What colour can be found is in the poetry of Hitchins…” – Adrian Osbourne in Poetry Wales 52.1, Summer 2016
The White City is available from Aquifer Press
Extracts from the White City are included in Poetry Wales Spring 2015 50.4
An audio guide and essay are included in The Goose
Conference paper ‘The White City: A Participatory Sensing Expedition‘, presented at Landscaping Change, Bath Spa University 31/3/16
Real Radio (Gwasg CAD Press, 2014)
It’s Jagger here on Real Radio with another feelgood flashback… Radio and conversation poems documenting a car journey from Pontypridd to Bangor for the Nomadic and Processual Poetics symposium in 2013. Published on Rhys Trimble‘s letterpress in a variety of colour options.
‘Mesmerising… the sheer banality and juxtaposition of some subterranean unspoken need with interfering text sounds and more – really kept me on my toes and fascinated.’ – David Greenslade
‘Song-length “poems” … track across the pages in a teeny-tiny lower-case font reminiscent of the marks of tyre treads. In places, the emotional (yet anonymous) inner world of the song lyrics combines with banal interpersonal exchanges to create collisions that are at once playful and touching… The results alert the reader as much to their own ability to make poetry out of the found and the accidental as to the theoretical questions behind the author’s decisions, making this a joy to read.’ – Rosie Breese in Poetry Wales (Spring 2015, 50.4)
Read the bonus track here.
For the performance piece at the North Wales International Poetry Festival in Bangor, I made a set of limited edition DVDs of my film Red Light Radio to accompany the book.
Watch the Red Light Radio film:
Watch the Real Radio reading in Bangor:
microtopias (2013)
Box of 56 poems. Each poem is sealed in a C8-sized envelope. The poems were written on a Nokia 6700 mobile phone between October 2011 and November 2012. They are titled after the ringtones on the phone.
5 poems from this sequence were published in ctrl+alt+del issue 5 – read cad5
Download PDF of performance leaflet: microtopias booklet
Download full PDF of the poems: microtopias-book
Listen to microtopias recording
Bitch Dust (Hafan Books, 2012)
A cut-up odyssey into the Coalfield Interior. #5 in John Goodby’s Boiled String series. With art work by James Green and an afterword by Allen Fisher.
“A strong excavation, tight, intense and close worked. A powerful twist against territory and time.” – Iain Sinclair
“Bitch Dust succeeds by exposing [the] shiftiness in the nature of place…. decentered, polyphonic, compressed, and, like dust, aggregated from many sources.” – Giles Goodland, Poetry Wales
“Bitch Dust takes on the apparent disparities between lyrical presence and pressure, narrative contemplation and impetus and disrupted forms. There is a powerful attention to geological presence directly grabbed by aspects of industrial Wales and as a consequence its geography. This is attended to through the use of refrain and recurrence that lilts into and away from song, words from word sounds and meaning shifts, alliteration from charcoal to cold in the Cynon valley, crushed words, quarried words, clipped into short sentences, wonder words, invented words.” – Allen Fisher
Buy a copy on Lulu
Listen to readings from Bitch Dust at the Hay Poetry Jamoree: part one & part two:
Palisade Winters (LPB, 2011)
Miniature accordion-fold booklet. I saw this fold in a book; I had some horizontal cut-up narrative prose paragraphs and some vertical haiku/text-message poems and thought it would be a good way to present them. The fold-out pages can induce multi-directional readings.
Download pdf: Steven-Hitchins-Palisade-Winters
The Basin (LPB, 2011)
Sequence of poems about Abercynon, a former mining village in the South Wales valleys where I grew up. The poems use collage methods to explore borderzones of rural and urban, past and present.
Download pdf: Steven-Hitchins-The-Basin
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