Penny Goring’s Poems Would Have Been a Big Hit on Tumblr

Katie Tobin explores Penny Goring’s current exhibition at Arcadia Missa and Goring’s accompanying poems. 

Like many Zoomers born before the turn of the millennium, I used to regularly use the once-popular microblogging site Tumblr. As a reasonably well-behaved teenager, I did not take advantage of Tumblr’s abundance of sexually explicit content. I did, however, use it almost exclusively to source (very unremarkably) bedroom-decor inspiration and trawl through a feed of posts sourced from the depths of the Rookie Magazine archives. I remember this particular point in my digital coming-of-age fondly: well before the opprobrium that surrounded Tumblr’s nudity ban, it was the first time in my life I had unrestricted access to information about subcultures and films that I’d never heard of before. (For some reason, I was always shown GIFs from Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), a film I still have yet to see.) The intrigue that the romantic, almost tactile quality of those posts conjured in me feels so specific to that time as, too, does the work of poet-artist Penny Goring. In her own words, she ‘fell in love’ with Tumblr’s DIY ethos and self-publishing culture, so took to sharing image macros amongst the alt-lit poetry community. Presenting work like this in a gallery space – as is currently the case at Goring’s show at Arcadia Missa, Cold Hunt Corsage – could risk undoing the whole point of her project. But, pleasingly, the clash of art and text here manages to surpass the formal constraints of the white cube without sacrificing what makes it so great in the first place: its immediacy. 

For Kathy Acker, the enfant terrible of postmodernism, ‘the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.’ Acker was a writer who understood that the body, language, and violence were always in some kind of perverse relationship, and there’s a familiar pulse in Goring’s own work – something akin to the ferocity and tenderness of Acker’s own anarchic explorations. Both of them are drawn to destruction, to the body’s decay, to the collapse of order. (I’m not surprised that Goring was featured as part of ICA’s Acker retrospective in 2019). But in Goring’s case, I’m thinking here of an earlier piece, Emotive title (Super virulent hyperdeath virus targeted at you know whose) (2017), in which a kneeling ‘Amelia’ – part alter ego, part ghost of a late ex – sobs rainbow tears into a pool of shit, clutching a severed leg like a relic or a regret. It’s grotesque and a little bit pathetic, but there’s something almost tender in the horror. The violence is obvious, unavoidable, but so is the empathy: a portrait of devastation so lurid, so over-the-top, that it returns to sincerity. The same could be said for her new digital collages on view at Arcadia Missa, Dam Goods (2024) and Ruined (2024), in which a young Goring’s face and plumes of coloured smoke are superimposed with messages of abjection and self-annihilation. ‘I am damaged goods’, one piece reads. The other: ‘How many times I can be ruined’ – a statement, not a question. Looking at them, and her bulging fabric sculptures, makes me think of Acker again: art that is jagged but soft, saturated with rage but also a sort of surrender. 

Accompanying these works are four new poems from Goring. They are an interesting counterpoint to her visual art in that they resist the visceral excess of Goring’s imagery, opting instead for a more intimate, almost quiet confrontation with transformation and decay. ‘Fantastic List’, for instance, opens with a familiar song: ‘I grew a tail. I grew horns. I grew extra legs / I grew flowers with a click of my fingers / I did not do it for you.’ It’s a metamorphosis that is at once grotesque and fantastical – a reimagining of self that leans more towards the monstrous than the mythic. But what gives levity to these poems, though suffused with ideas about dislocation and existential fatigue, is the playful absurdity of their fragmented syntax and the surrealist imagery at play; ‘Dark as disco horse,’ she writes, ‘A sexual force / Disco dark 49p.’ There are fleeting moments of bathos in ‘Dangerous in any position’, where Goring’s interest in the contradictions of body and selfhood emerge with a knowing irony: ‘Pretty ugly / Big small / Limp stride / Perfect.’ In a time of unprecedented upheaval, it requires a certain level of bravery to revel in the dissonance between beauty and violence, strength and fragility. But Goring’s art and words, much like the platform that helped nurture it, exist in that liminal space between the personal and the public, the grotesque and the sublime. As I look at Piggy (2024), an image of a woman riding a man horsey-style, I am struck by a sense of reckless abandon. I think to myself: ‘This would have done numbers on Tumblr back in the day.’

Walking the death dog 

I wanna be burnt on a pyre not buried or
Curated 

Under a see-through Nightgown 
Footnotes full of Love 

Talismans of Fuckery 
In the mansions of Impossibility 

All this Cold stuff in one tiny bed 
Supply and demand Sucks the future 

Trees moving faster than Trees
move As I roll my stiff Neck on the
sheets 

Life gets Thinner 
And I’m in here, like a Ghost train 

Still Pretending 
Even more than I thought Possible 
I have never been Unfaithful to the sky

The melty doors of yes/no 

Fun 
A blood dark fugue 
The sleep itself 
Dark as disco horse 
A sexual force 
Disco dark 49p