Colin Herd’s poetry connects Glasgow, collaboration, artist books, conceptual writing, humor, intimacy, ekphrasis, aleatory form, and the fluid social energies of contemporary Scottish poetry. A poet and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Herd has published books including too ok, Glovebox, Click & Collect, You Name It, Swamp Kiss, Cocoa and Nothing with Maria Sledmere, Oberwildling with SJ Fowler, and Aquafaba in 2026.
His work frequently treats language as a social and material field. Consumer phrases, bodily feeling, friendship, visual art, cultural reference, quotation, awkwardness, desire, and comic interruption can occupy the same page. The poem remains alert to the way language arrives already shaped by systems of use and can be loosened through new arrangement.
Two Poems and compressed pressure
The two surviving archive titles from Herd’s earlier appearance preserve a poetry of pressure, rapid tonal movement, fashion, desire, bodily unease, speed, social performance, and intimate address. Their syntax moves through accumulation and sharp turns, allowing apparently unrelated details to create one emotional field.
Such writing gains force from proximity. A pop-cultural image, physical sensation, consumer object, private fear, and comic phrase can arrive within a few lines and change each other’s tone.
The archive’s guide to experimental poetry provides a broad context for collage, disjunction, tonal switching, conceptual procedure, and structures where meaning develops through adjacency.
too ok
too ok gives Herd’s early poetics a compact contradiction. “OK” suggests adequacy, agreement, emotional neutrality, or casual reassurance. Adding “too” creates excess inside that bland stability.
The phrase sounds conversational and conceptually unstable at once. Something can become excessively acceptable, over-normalized, or emotionally flattened through the language of everyday approval.
Herd’s poetry often uses this kind of small linguistic disturbance. Familiar speech acquires another pressure through repetition, context, typography, or placement.
Glovebox
Glovebox, highly commended in the Forward Prizes, takes its title from a small storage compartment built into a car. The object belongs to mobility, clutter, maps, receipts, forgotten items, manuals, and the private debris carried through public space.
As a poetic figure, the glovebox is compact and miscellaneous. It holds things whose relation comes from proximity and use rather than from a grand organizing theory.
This gives the title an affinity with Herd’s collage practice. Fragments can coexist inside a portable structure and gain meaning from being kept together.
Ben Mirov offers a neighboring route through poetry built from movable verbal units, urban fragments, collage, recurrence, and editing as a primary compositional act.
Click & Collect
Click & Collect borrows the language of contemporary retail and turns a logistical instruction into a poetic title. The phrase belongs to digital ordering, consumer convenience, collection points, interfaces, and the compression of desire into a transaction.
Such language arrives with a ready-made rhythm and social function. Poetry can isolate it, slow it down, and expose the assumptions surrounding consumption, speed, choice, and access.
The title also describes a poetic action. A click selects; a collection gathers. Digital behavior becomes a metaphor for composition through sampling and arrangement.
You Name It
You Name It turns naming into invitation and challenge. The phrase can mean abundance, uncertainty, willingness, or the limits of classification.
Naming is central to poetry because a word places an object or feeling inside a shared linguistic system. Herd’s work repeatedly tests how stable that placement remains once words move into new social and formal contexts.
The broader guide to poetry offers a useful context for how naming, voice, rhythm, syntax, image, and sequence create literary attention.
Collaboration as method
Collaboration is central to Herd’s practice. Oberwildling with SJ Fowler, Cocoa and Nothing with Maria Sledmere, artist books, exhibitions, conversations, and group projects all extend authorship into relation.
A collaborative text contains more than one compositional habit. Voices may converge, interrupt, answer, imitate, misread, or redirect one another. The result gains energy from decisions that no single participant controls completely.
Herd’s Auld Enemies tour placed collaborative practice at the center of a Scotland-wide project involving more than forty poets. This gives collaboration an institutional and geographic scale as well as a textual one.
Lindsey Boldt offers another route through poetry where collaborative scenes, performance, small presses, theatrical forms, and literary community shape the work’s social life.
Artist books and visual art
Herd’s background in visual arts and collaborations with Susan Wilson and Cat Outram place artist books inside his broader practice. An artist book makes material form central: paper, sequence, image, typography, binding, and scale become part of the work’s meaning.
Poetry inside such an object occupies visual space with unusual intensity. White space, image, page turn, and physical handling can change how language is encountered.
The site’s overview of modern poetry provides a broad frame for cross-disciplinary practices connecting text, visual art, book form, performance, and experimental publishing.
Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis — writing in relation to visual art — is one of Herd’s stated research interests and a natural extension of his own practice. The poem can describe an image, argue with it, enter its atmosphere, or use it as a trigger for another sequence of thought.
Visual art gives poetry a second system of organization. Color, composition, figure, surface, scale, and spatial relation can become verbal problems.
This cross-media pressure keeps description active. The poem responds to what an image does, as well as to what it depicts.
Oberwildling and Oskar Kokoschka
Oberwildling, written with SJ Fowler, engages the life of Oskar Kokoschka, bringing modernist visual art, biography, collaboration, and poetic experiment into one project.
Kokoschka’s career supplies a charged historical figure whose painting, theatre, public persona, and modernist context can be approached through multiple voices.
The collaborative form suits biography because a life is already mediated by documents, artworks, memory, criticism, and cultural myth. Several poetic perspectives make that mediation visible.
Cocoa and Nothing
Cocoa and Nothing, written with Maria Sledmere, places a warm, material substance beside absence. Cocoa suggests drink, powder, sweetness, comfort, color, trade, and domestic ritual. “Nothing” opens conceptual emptiness.
The title stages the tonal flexibility characteristic of both poets: sensual detail can sit beside philosophical vacancy and comic understatement.
Collaboration allows the two registers to remain mobile. One voice can alter the scale or emotional temperature created by the other.
Aquafaba
Aquafaba, published by Spite Press in 2026, takes its title from the liquid surrounding cooked chickpeas or beans. Usually treated as residue, aquafaba can become structurally useful when whipped into foam.
This transformation offers Herd a striking figure for poetry. Apparently incidental linguistic material can acquire volume, stability, texture, and surprising form through motion.
The book’s own description emphasizes collision, emotional residue, craft, sentiment, and language subjected to energetic movement. Poetry becomes a medium whose discarded or low-status materials can be aerated into structure.
Aleatory and ergodic forms
Herd’s research interests include aleatory and ergodic forms. Chance-based composition changes authorship by allowing procedures, randomness, or external structures to participate in the result. Ergodic writing asks readers to perform unusual work in navigating a text.
These ideas extend naturally from his poetry. Selection, collaboration, fragmentation, artist books, and conceptual procedures all redistribute control among writer, material, form, and reader.
The poem becomes an event produced through several forces acting together.
Glasgow and Scottish literary life
Herd’s work at the University of Glasgow and his participation in Scottish literary projects place him inside a dense contemporary field of poets, artists, small presses, events, and collaborations. Glasgow becomes both location and social infrastructure.
Editing the volume Glasgow with Ruthie Kennedy and Tommy Pearson extended this attention to the city as a collective literary subject. A city can be represented through many voices whose routes and experiences overlap without becoming identical.
Regional literary culture gains force through such multiplicity. Place emerges from relation among writers, readers, venues, publishers, universities, and everyday public life.
Reading Colin Herd
Herd’s literary identity emerges through collaboration, artist books, Glasgow, conceptual writing, visual art, humor, intimacy, consumer language, chance, and a sustained interest in how language changes through social contact.
Within contemporary poetry, Herd represents a strongly collaborative Scottish experimental practice. Poems, books, exhibitions, tours, conversations, and academic research form parts of one social and material literary field.
The strongest route into Herd is to follow transformation through contact. Notice what happens when retail language becomes poetry, when residue becomes foam, when visual art enters collaborative text, and when several writers share compositional authority. His work treats language as a medium continually altered by the company it keeps.