Hello —
I took the adjacent photo from a rooftop of a multi-storey residential building off Nathan Road in Kowloon, Hong Kong in the summer of 2019. The lit-up doormat, bright red with gilded traditional script across it, is illuminated beside a loose pair of briefs or pyjama bottoms. Although upside down, it reads ‘Welcome’.
This website features all my published work, radio shows, audio projects, and essays.
— Charlie Jermyn
Published work
The Couch, Het Hem
I wrote a triptych of essays on the Dutch landscape published in Het Hem’s digital magazine, ‘The Couch.’ Threads run through all three: iconoclasm, the natural world, landscapes, seascapes, divinity, damnation, and the great lessons we can take from artworks.
A devilish grin, a suburban carpark
“Essayist and poet Charlie Jermyn makes a do-it-yourself pilgrimage through museum, muck, rain, wind and pub to visit Jan Steen’s old haunts"
The distant bungee jumper, a dangling herring
“Charlie Jermyn was on a mission to discover the history of the North Sea resort town of Scheveningen. The essay tracks Charlie’s disorientating pilgrimage through a haze of mystical sea creatures, marshland, beached whales, kibbling, hungry gulls, and bungee jumpers.”
A neon palindrome, lessons from the crouching man
“As subject matter, artists have forever been drawn to the apocalypse. Creation and destruction are at opposite poles of a spectrum, yet they reverberate off one another; one only exists if the other does, too. Something comes from nothing, nothing becomes something — and the role of art, as time goes on, is to dangle somewhere in the space between. As viewers, what lessons must we take from the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Antony Gormley?”
Onomatopee’s ‘The Vendor’
Radio
I am a monthly resident at Stranded FM Utrecht with my show 'More Poetry is Needed'
Listen back to all the shows, all kinds of everything in poetry and music.
Each show I take a poet or poets part of a certain movement and discuss their cultural impact and imprint on a place in time: Music, poetry and personal reflections.
The show name is based on an artwork by Jeremy Deller (picture above), commissioned as part of a Dylan Thomas 100 project [Pictured] More Poetry is Needed is plastered on a wide wall at the back end of Swansea's Quadrant Shopping Centre. A reminder to commercial shoppers and the lines of parked cars: everybody and everywhere could do with more poetry.
