⤷ @billydyllib
⤷ billy_morgan@live.co.uk

The video is closed by a rhyming poem, partly derived from W. G.  Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ (1998), that tells the story of a Roman drinking glass excavated from an English field.
       Laughing at language, the poem unfolds into a quasi-erotic encounter between two strangers on a polder.

“Joan wondered. She wondered up tchapel. She wondered in. She took a pew. She nodded at th’assemblages around her.

Tchapel had been there for long. Then one day, unsolicited, a crack ripped up tstonework. Only a partridge was in earshot. First things first tglass creaked. A long moment, and then… Windows burst joyful!joyfully, as in sequence, tracery, arches, buttresses, rafters, hallowed of all splatted tground. Was this how th’reformists did it?

Joan wondered.

She wondered down tgarden. She wondered over t’fence. She wondered up tlong-backed hill, barren bar a few saplings sequestered by wire; thground, ragged as if scorched by fire. She wondered up tpriory. Topheavy ruins stood there in suspension, like thunderborn seastacks, old sledgehammers. She wondered through thdoors. She wondered through thyears.

She wondered through th’assembled congregation, through thbush smoke of old worship, through tbaritones, through th’hats, through t’minor keys. She wondered down taisle. She knelt, she was a good woman.

People recognised this.
..”

“she was hard, he was hard; they didn’t mean it; they were just like that; two hard people, lying next to one another; the doorbell rang, it was his dad; they laughed; they laughed; they heard footsteps coming up the stairs, they stopped laughing; they stopped laughing;
..”

“..Did I really have the mettle and the common sense to survive out there in the corporate world? I had never had a good telephone manner. Perhaps I was just in the art crowd because these were the only people that would accept my irresponsible self?”

“dusting – it’s this way – it’s the other – it’s rewarding – it isn’t – paddle towards you – it’s cold – it isn’t – it is – it isn’t – cold in here – 2007 I think it was – 2007 I think it was – lifted – the needle – a candle to her – too soon – too late – it’s left – right – wicked – don’t look at me like that – it’s fine – fatal – it’s – rewarding – yeah – paradise – is a Bacardi island – or – yeah –

..”

“You come down from the slope. You see green; you see blue. You speculate on your position for a while. You watch the shallow pan of the valley spread before you. You follow the weft of the fields and the wild copses with your eyes. You note the mixture of cultivation and natural abandonment. Your eyes sting from the midday sun. Your calves pinch as you make your way downhill. Your way is marked by loose rocks; the ground is dry but the further the horizon stretches the more green its haze becomes. You are thirsty. You sit for a while..”

“..The narrator, sneaky git, comes on just in time to be the final inane voice that you hear:

        Sie: Yes, the temperature grew high, so high that their very substance began to melt. One could compare it to a giant microwave; they so gave and received new forms simultaneously. To an onlooker, they simply fizzed. It wasn’t the end, but it wasn’t the beginning either. It was all just repetition.”

“..
13.  Not so much that you shouldn’t cry, but that things releasing water – the water that drowned the mouse – the septic wellwater – should make any one person more heavy than anyone else; and what, after all, did they mean by AllTheCrying, and by extension, AllTheHeaviness, that welled up, underfoot, that SOGGED the fallen tree trunks, and bloated the fence posts to such a softness that adolescent deer could peer their heads between the cracks, to the point that no Mxn nor Womxn nor Daughter was an island no more, but AllWereWater, overflowing the ancient ditch that encircled their house, to the point that everything leaned on everything else, and there was no original sadness, much less than an ORIGINAL sin, because it didn’t matter how heavy you were individually, it was about how heavy you were together, because everything, leaning on everything else, produced a cumulative weight, and that was the thing we should be TALKING ABOUT.
    a.  Not some stupid child with a ble3ding head. But how 1 thing led to another.
    ..”

"...Continuing the tradition of folktales, which are typically passed on by word of mouth and changed over time, Bagiński has invited artist, writer and performer Billy Morgan to write a contemporary re-telling of the story of the Little Mouse. Responding to the state of the world as being at the precipice of ruin, Morgan’s text, 30-something The sod, (2020), materialises what is at stake –affectively, emotionally, physically– in creating re-associations between the original folktale and present time. Measuring the scale and rhythm of ecological disaster as being chaotic and contingent, Morgan pulls from the surreal and somewhat comical tone of the story, and nods to its repetitive structure with its own uncontainable logic. Throughout, the writer reflects on the effects of anthropocentrism –the belief that human beings are the most important entity in the universe–, alluding to patriarchal, colonial and capitalist systems as culprits in the on-going process of environmental catastrophe."

“Sense & Cessation: Earthly Constructions of Nationhood”, 2020
Text

An essay on earthworks, queer eternities and the precarity of the material ground as a form of nation-staking.

“1. Landing

What is it you are so proud of about your country?
Being able to wake every morning to the same view?

Through time, we have complicated notions of landedness and nationhood with our earthly constructions.

Be it by stealing the seabed from the sea, as in Norfolk’s engineered plains, or in erecting earthworks to demarcate the murky borders of our nations, as the muddy dyke that rips through the Welsh Marches; it is perhaps no coincidence that ‘The Matter of Britain’ refers to the body of medieval literature and poetry that constitutes the predominant mythology of the British Isles. Our identity as a citizenry often starts with the matter beneath our feet.
..”

It was published in Krzak Papier no.2, July 2020.

The text can be read here.

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Poems 
2018—present

My poetry writing is a continuous practice, from which I source material for my performance works. Three of my poems were featured in the recent anthology, ‘Modern Queer Poets’, published by Pilot Press in January 2020 and stocked by Tenderbooks and Antenne Books, London.

You can download a sample of my published poetry below:
    — Three poems from ‘Modern Queer Poets’, (2020)    
    — ‘songs of Poland’, a poetry anthology (2018-19)

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Scripts
2019—present

Scripts are produced for each performance work that combine elements from both my poetry and fictive writing.

Above, a page from ‘songs of Poland II’.

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