[Reading] It Was Like Watching by Danny Hayward

We are delighted to welcome you for a reading of It Was Like Watching by Danny Hayward (The Last Books, 2026), a book-length poem that moves between the failure and necessity of language. Charged by emotion and memory, It Was Like Watching is an affirmation of tenderness and companionship, and a refusal of "the desire to be something other than who you were." 

Schedule

19:00 Reading by Danny Hayward

About It Was Like Watching

A voyage in the insight which comes as a kiss and follows as a curse, made after you ran out of things to say.——first halting efforts at mutual understanding——love letters from twelve years ago. journal entries from fifteen years before lick at the edges like flames. Opaque coloured shadows, projected in three dimensions——of a——future that——has. never ceased to exist and which——Doesn’t——.——.——arrive to speak about their fears.—— Beginning with a naked bathroom selfie. 

An attempt to live nonjudgmentally and without fear, against the desire to be something other than who you were, as a basic form of class hatred, a fear of the common and of everything that happens there, near speechlessness, trailing off, only sometimes coming back to life again, shame dies so that everything else can be saved, and everything else remains present against the background of this absence, beneath the harsh overhead light, as you pull on the pathetic, unassuming string of the pullcord. 

Dedicated to one person, written by one another. “Poems written by / different poets / are my nakedness.”

About the author

Danny Hayward is is a poet and critic based in London. His books of criticism include Wound Building: Dispatches from the Latest Disasters in UK Poetry (2021) and Training Exercises (2024). In 2022 he published Loading Terminal (the87press), a collection of poems and essays circulating the relationships between politics and knowledge, and between poetic language and speech. He runs the archive of out-of-print and inaccessible/DIY poetry Free Trials at www.pxxtry.com. Danny is currently editing a posthumous collection of writings on Infrastructural Critique by his partner Marina Vishmidt.