‘How to read a poem to a spider‘ is a poem that imagines how human speech might ‘sound’ to a spider, a creature with an entirely different way of perceiving and processing the world to humans. It came out of participating in Kaori Nagai’s research project ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis‘ for the past 18 months. 

I was fascinated by the research of fellow researcher Nathan Morehouse who investigates spider sight and spider evolution at Morehouse Lab at the University of Cincinnati. In follow-up meetings Nathan shared more of his research, and the notion that some spiders perceive human vowels as ‘danger’ really stuck with me, as it placed the spoken word in an entirely new, dangerous dimension. The poem is a test of the capacity of mammalian utterance to bridging the gap between the spider and the human experience of the world.

The incredible peacock jumping sculpture is by Josie Turnbull, the artist attached to the research project. Josie works in many mediums and has utilised found objects and scraps to make a sculptural response to our conversations around spider senses. We named the sculpture ‘Maratus quisquilius’, which is a play on the species name for the peacock spider. ‘Maratus’ is the genus, and then we added ‘quisquilius’ which is Latin for ‘odds and ends/refuse/rubbish’.

There is a second page for this same poem on the conference website where the poem is annotated by Nathan Morehouse to highlight the spider facts that inform it, check that out here.

Rethinking Fables was a great project, you can also read my story ‘Silken Cities‘ which was presented at the final conference.