Paul Stubbs
poet
Poems & readings
At the National Poetry Library, August 1st 2018
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A recording from the National Poetry Library’s Special Edition series. Featuring a very special line-up of poets who have been seriously influenced by the revolutionary French poet Arthur Rimbaud – Niall McDevitt, Paul Stubbs and Blandine Longre, Penny Rimbaud, Louise Elliot, and Jeremy Reed. Recorded in the National Poetry Library on Wednesday 1 August 2018.
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https://soundcloud.com/nationalpoetrylibrary/rimbaud-in-london
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Poets Live series, November 8, 2016 - At Berkeley Books of Paris
Paul Stubbs read from The End of the Trial of Man (Arc Publications, 2015) and The Icon Maker (Arc Publications, 2008).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diG-t9VoYyk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ywyqqn2mo
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Poems recorded at The Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast, February 2008
http://digitalcollections.qub.ac.uk/poetry/recordings/author/Paul%20Stubbs
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After the flood – Head I – Paraphrasing the Dumb – Prayer – Seascape – The Paralytic child – The Pope departs his Heaven – The Scream
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Other readings
https://www.youtube.com/user/Cdebarra70/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0
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October 2025
Four poems of mine have been published in Big Other magazine
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from The Lost Songs of Gravity (2021)
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A painting by Siemon Scamell-Katz inspired by this poem
​https://www.siemonscamell-katz.com/new-page-2-1-1
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THE SEARCH FOR THE COSMOLOGICAL CHRIST ENDS IN ICE
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Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed
—Simone Weil
For my Blandine
Since the first nebulous
galaxy folded in its petals
and began to bloom only
outside God’s mind, you’ve been trapped here,
a cipher,
freeze-framed by faith;
pre-dating what pre-dated theology
(with your Christological visor lifted
to reveal an eye swabbed
by unbroken resurrection);
while sealed up behind
a glass case of your skin
in a museum
of irretrievable sensations…
so unable to invite sin,
or escape yet the state
of holy gangrene,
you, a churchless Christ
shipwrecked along with the shrapnel of the big bang,
a superabundant skull
hurtling towards what first mind? you who, shall never
provoke a ritual and be
grafted to a human tree.
For neither dead nor alive,
and unable to stretch the
limits of heaven or hell even an inch,
let alone be celestially winched
above your own body;
while continuing to clutch a phylactery
containing scripture already expired,
a forgotten scrawl in God’s
first ledger. A reckoning and a curse for the holiest men
unable to theologically
depart your own cold heart and
negotiate their Ascension.
Then, how many philosophical suppositions
will first have to be falsified before you,
you are allowed to
allegorically thaw?
You, who, without
religion will remain what, in lieu of sin you have
always been: a stylite
or rank moistureless thing abandoned
on this icy terrain…
—So what alien monstrosity, upon a beach, on bended
knees somewhere
in the universe is this
moment scavenging
a shoreline for the first
torn piece of your gauze to be washed up at its feet?
an alien akin to a
gnarled, stunted statue caked in the mud of a half-breathable atmosphere…
a monstrosity on all
fours and praying for
your flesh to be stretched across its nothingness…
—And with one billion Christologists needed
now on earth to forget their opinions on the biblical Christ
in order for you to
stop re-churching it, ice...
So, in order for God to one
day teach you how not to rot,
just how many lung-replacing
canisters of his breath
would be required?
before you, in every Eucharist,
become the only
authentic chiliastic body to
survive the ceremony and arrive:
a bible-correcting
hologram ready to haunt God’s cognates from his mind,
while hoping to have
set up upon
every planet, the
most elaborate holographic lightshow in the universe
in order to portray (at the same time!) both your death
and resurrection! rather
than be left here as you
are to drip through the holes of your own atoms
and then wait, for any
first follower to pray
you free of this never- to-be-thawed glacier of a planet.
You who (that no juridical wafer
has recalled, or dying theological animal
smelt the blood of),
will continue to ignore the deep space
fog light search of us all...
Until when you are eventually thawed
back into view by faith;
and the still-to-be-fixed tarpaulins of your church,
they replace every
last temple and shrine erected (mistakenly?)
on earth in anticipation of you... on the day
when you, a periscope,
you rise up out of this
ice to view all beings,
and the last discernible
mannequin in the universe
still to resemble you, out of God’s head, it is shouldered...
(beginning suddenly
to work out for itself
how to supernaturally decay)
When you, God, finally!
you rename this never-to-be
prayed-to torso:
Christ...
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© Paul Stubbs 2019
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from Beast: The Lost Chronicles (Broken Sleep Books, Dec. 2024)​
The Relic
“What have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
in an age which advances progressively backwards?”
T. S. Eliot
Upon this day, fresh from a god’s crypt
or catacomb, you, the beast (a blunt and
impractical end to Historical theology) arrive,
struggling to surmise
just what it is, this relic,
this contraption fallen into desuetude,
half-buried in sand,
where every hour, in every century, blindfolded
and tonsured beings
(in case of your birth)
keep attempting to repair it: a prayer-machine…
(invented, built, then
abandoned by aliens?)
the only still extant piece of machinery
in the universe designed to re-open them:
Christ’s wounds…
re-open them to stop man
copulating with beasts.
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God’s Prophecy
“its hour come round at last”
W. B. Yeats
When your udders begin leaking Christian blood, you’ll hear it,
from the bottom of a staircase, before a door in hell’s basement:
“You will be born”
Throughout a lipless land of switched-off microphones,
into which a last species screams out in vain God’s name:
“You will be born”
As the last person to see you dissolves on your tongue,
and your mouth eats off your own ear until hearing it:
“You will be born”
Before a sudden involuntary stampede, as the saved, running off
the leg-braces of their human bones, they overtake you, singing:
“You will be born”
Until the day when, the love-lapsed you, has been pushed through into
a world of no-bone, cartilage or sinew, and you finally understand, what
“you will be born” means…
having fed for centuries on geckos, gnats and dead scorpions
to sustain that still unborn second Christ in your diaphragm,
until you in your
real body were born.
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© Paul Stubbs 2023
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