Getting Nearer

Here are a few more contenders for my Nearing Forty challenge. A fair few short poems amongst them as I'm trying to be kind to myself. I did think about adding 'The Loch Ness Monster's Song' but I figured that might be a bit too tricky so I've gone for Edwin Morgan's beautiful 'Strawberries' instead. 

There are some poems that haven't made it on to the list as I can't find copies online (Jacob Polley 'The Tree' and Andrew Waterhouse 'Not an Ending'). I'm going to try and find a few more before my birthday and then begin the task of selecting the final forty.  

I should probably add a couple of out and out performance pieces too... a quick trawl through the Apples and Snakes list of poets might be good place to start.

How to Cut a Pomegranate by Imtiaz Dharkar

For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

Jarrow by Carol Rumens

Judith by Vicki Feaver

In My Country by Jackie Kay

You’re by Sylvia Plath

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by WB Yeats

Fear by Charles Simic

Darling by Jackie Kay

Strawberries by Edwin Morgan

A Note by Wislawa Symborska

Harlem by Langston Hughes

Memory by Ruth Stone

Although the Wind by Izumi Shikibu

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poem by Simon Armitage

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

The Dug-out by Siegfried Sassoon

Nearing Forty...*

I turn 40 soon.

I know.

I think I was more fussed by move from my teens into my twenties so I'm not stressing about it. Instead I'm distracting myself by thinking of 40 things I can do when I'm 40.

The first thing I thought of was to learn at least 40 poems by heart - partly inspired by the Poetry By Heart programme in schools and partly by being reminded of Invictus by William Ernest Henley following the death of Nelson Mandela. I reckon it can't be a bad thing to have an arsenal of poems to draw on for any situation life throws at you. The poem I have by heart (and yes, I know it's only four lines long) is Epilogue by Grace Nichols.

Anyway, I asked some of my friends on Facebook to tell me their favourite poems. The ones they've held in their hearts since the moment they heard them and they came up with some crackers. Some poems I already love and will enjoy learning by heart and some I'd not come across before. A couple are probably a bit too long to make it to the shortlist of 40 but it's been great to read. I'll be flicking through my poetry collections and anthologies over the Christmas holidays to add to the list but here are the poems that have been suggested so far...

After Long Busyness by Robert Bly

Everything is Going to be Alright by Derek Mahon

I Go Back To May 1937 by Sharon Olds

If We Must Die by Claude McKay

Indelible, Miraculous by Julia Darling

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Machines by Michael Donaghy

Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden

On the Grashopper and Cricket by John Keats

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

Prosepoem towards a definition of itself by Brian Patten

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The Identification by Roger McGough

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

The Moment by Margaret Atwood

The Mower by Philip Larkin

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Sun is Rising by John Donne

This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

I'm probably going to blog about my approach to learning each poem (that will be another thing to try when I'm 40 - keeping a regular blog!). And I'm interested to see if I'll still have all forty poems in my head this time next year. We'll see.

*About six years ago I came across the poem Nearing Forty by Derek Walcott and now here I am...

Poeting at the Lit and Phil, Newcastle

I have a new pamphlet coming out next week. It's called ˜ and ►, which you might think stands for circle and triangle or you might know stands for record and play. A couple of poems in the collection have those old fashioned tape recorders in em and I just liked it. 

Anyway - I've left Facebook until they get a handle on all those dodgy rape and domestic violence pages so I'm just using this post to let you know about the launch event at the Lit and Phil on Wednesday 17th April at 7pm. (It's free and there will probably be wine, there always is when there's poeting going on). It's a joint launch (a jaunt?) with the poet Ric Hool whose work I'm very excited to hear. Although that does mean that I have the usual doubts about how my work will hold up in comparison... Never mind though, eh? So, there you have it. If you're in the toon next Wednesday and you fancy a spot of poetry please pop along.   

http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/SquirrelEvent.html

Whistle by Martin Figura

Okay so it's like a billion years* since I actually saw this performance and wrote the review (for my MA in creative writing at Newcastle university) but better late than never. You can find out when Whistle is next on by visiting Martin Figura's website.

Whistle by Martin Figura

NCLA event at The Culture Lab, Newcastle

Thursday 26^th April 2012

A picture of a smiling young woman taken at some time in the late 1940s is projected above the stage as the audience take their seats. She has one hand on her hip, the other on her head. The show begins. A prologue, a poem as ritualistic chant, bleeds into the love story of Figura’s mother June and his father Frank. Her letters to her ‘Darling Frank’ are interspersed with poems about their courtship and romance. We get to know her, and like her.  

The style of the show incorporates animation and audio to accompany Figura’s assured performance,which takes us through the stages of his childhood. His birth is depicted using imagery that is at the heart of this piece. The camera and the image. Freezing moments and looking back at them with an eye that knows more than the subjects could see.

I am a boy

skin

slick as celluloid

my first focus

an iris

an aperture dilating

a click

The balance between pathos and humour is established early. The history that Frank tried to conceal (his time with the Hitler Youth and as a soldier in the German army during the Second World War) is revealed in the prose sections that link the poems. The darkness of the piece is never far from the surface and is present in the black and white stills of the young couple in love, the sweetheart letters from June and the idyllic family photographs.

                                                                                             

Humour guides the piece away from sentimentality; it frames the structure, softens what is about to come or lightens what has been.  It reminds us that it’s going to be okay to laugh, sometimes. Frank’s desire for Figura to become a doctor is comically shown through the poem Fountain Pen accompanied by a suitably lo-fi animation. It is clear the boy is incapable of looking after it let alone any would be patients. By the time the young Figura  journeys to Poland the momentum taking us to the central event in the show and in Figura’s young life is unstoppable. Frank’s increasing paranoia is powerfully evoked in Litany, with its ritualistic chanting undercut by the sparse use of bells tolling as he repeats:

She is a Protestant

She is faithless

She is poisoning me

Sie ist protestantisch.

Sie ist treulos.

Sie vergiftet mich

There is a brief pause as we see an image of Figura and his mother outside a pretty cottage – the image fades as Figura says:

I could print this photograph

so dark, there would only be

her hand on my shoulder.

The brutality of June’s murder is unstated in the poem In My Parents’ Bedroom, it is implied in beautiful simplicity. The room becomes the only witness to this act “the dressing table’s arms are full/ of fallen objects, its mirror dumb.” The horror is amplified by the sparseness of detail, the seeming quiet that surrounds it.

This poem could form the natural climax for the show and the collection but this is not all Figura wants to say. The story isn't over; the child still has to grow up. In the brief Q&A that followed Figura said that it was like the Second World War had swept through his family twenty years after it ended and the same would be true for many others. Whistle is more than a document of personal family history; alongside dealing with the trauma of his mother’s murder and the subsequent break-up of his family, Figura writes about war, mental illness, society, growing up in 1960s Britain, fitting in, coming to terms, acceptance and love.

Whistle bridges the divide between page and performance poetry. The collection came first but it is clear that the production took as much craft and care as the writing had done. The combination of AV and simple staging produces a show with immediacy. The AV enhances, underlines and sometimes gives you something you weren't expecting. Like the picture of Frank’s sitting room after his release.The accompanying poem Record  is about a Dansette record player. You can see it in the photo. But what you can also see is the picture of June on the wall unit. The formal portrait with her beautiful black hair and the smile that we've come to recognise. The impact of seeing that picture in that sitting room is one of the many remarkable moments when the images work with the poetry in  unexpected ways. Go see it.

*okay so it's only eleven months.

The Golden Hour: Infused and Bemused

Right this post is going to be brief. The extremely excellent Ryan Van Winkle asked me if I wanted to do a poetry gig in a van. I knew I'd regret it if I said no. So I said yes. Even though I was a little unsure about how I'd handle the intimacy of a very small audience in a small (but ever so funky) van in the middle of the toon.

I have some themes to keep in mind when choosing and writing my poems - I have a couple already that I know will fit perfectly but I do need to crack on with rehearsing, writing, re-writing, whatever it's going to take to make this gig really special.

Check out  http://www.gorillaperfume.com/ to find out some more background about the tour (it's sponsored by those rather lovely people at Lush) and to find out more about the other venues and performers

Take a tour inside the venue - Click here to look inside! I think you'll agree it looks fucking amazing. So if you're in Newcastle town centre on Friday October 12th... Come!

River Runs

I'm trying something new here... actually blogging about something I'm working on whilst I'm working on it... novel, huh? The detail is a bit vague at this stage but I'll know more later in September.

River Runs is a collaborative project run by Radikal Words (featuring Jeff Price, Alfie Crow, Kate Fox, Simma, Aidan Clarke, Ben Holland, Bridie Jackson and me). What with the whole MA thing I've not had a chance to have a think about what my involvement in the project exactly entails but I reckon immersing myself (see what I did there) in river poems can't hurt can it? I'm also going to spend some time getting to know the Tyne a little better - I've worked in a theatre alongside it for the best part of eleven years so I reckon now's as good a time as any to stop taking it for granted and properly pay it some attention. I should probably get down to ~Flow before it shuts shop for the summer too.

Anyway, here are a couple of the poems I've been reading.
Birmingham River - Roy Fisher
What the evangelist should have said - Kei Miller

So as I haven't got anything in mind I reckon I'll be defaulting to my usual free-writing to kick start the poeting bit of my brain. I shall also have to do something about the earworm currently on loop in my head - Drowned Lovers by Kate Rusby. (It is a mint song though.)

Deseeded Volume 2

Open publication - Free publishing - More andrew sclater

On not being ignored

So performing Amuse Bouche at the Durham Book Festival was not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. Yes, it was busy and yes not everyone there was dedicated follower of spoken word but that's kind of the point. It's a challenge. And although it was hard to know if people were really interested or if they were just listening out of politeness it was still good fun. And between AJ, Sky and me we managed to attract the attention of passers by and the folks already sitting down to eat didn't harrumph off in a strop. So not as nerve-wracking or as confidence-denting as I was anticipating. Looking forward to the show at Live Theatre on 16 November now.

The very lovely and ever so busy Sheila Wakefield was at the Durham Book Festival too and stopped by to watch a bit of Amuse Bouche. Not only was it fantastic to have a friendly-poetry-loving face in the audience but she also gave me a date for my Red Squirrel Press pamphlet publication - Yay! It's going to be May 2012, which seems as good a time as any. Now I just need to pull the rest of the pamphlet together in time for the mid-December deadline.

Verb New Voices - catching up at mac, Birmingham

Sometimes blogging feels like bragging. I don’t want to blog about random or mundane things  (I don’t have the energy for it) and I don’t have the desire to lay my private life out for all to see if it doesn’t have anything to do with anything I’m working on.  So that just leaves the stuff that’s happening in my poeting life, which feels like bragging. Maybe it’s because I always feel a pang of poet-envy when Poet X blogs about making the My Poetry is Amazing shortlist or Poet B blogs about winning the Bloody Great Big Poetry Prize. Or even when I just pick up a collection of poetry that has such a visceral effect on me that I’m left wondering if I can ever hope to achieve the same effect in someone reading my work.

But anyway, back to the point of this post. Today we met up with all the other Verb New Voices poets and the wonderful Erin Riley and Ian McMillan for a second time. To be honest the project is pretty nerve wracking, despite the fact that everyone involved is really supportive and approachable it is such a big deal for me (and I imagine all the other artists). Working on your own project, with an amazing mentor, the support of the Arts Council, the BBC, ARC etc and having the chance to perform on The Verb… THE VERB… well, it’s a bit overwhelming. And exciting.

The last time we met up was back in May and today felt like another real step along the way to creating a spoken word piece, although it’s going to be a much shorter piece than I’d first thought because the Verb only requires about 7 or 8 minutes… which is still quite a lot of air time to fill. I’m glad I found that out before I start work with my mentor Zena Edwards on Thursday though. (Which is another thing I’m trying not to get too nervous about. I’m failing. But at least I’m trying. I’ll let you know how I get on at the end of the week.)

Last time each poet performed an existing piece. This time we were reading from our works-in-progress so it was interesting to see what stage everyone was at.  

First up was Fatima Al Matar who is creating a dark tale of child abuse that gives voice to the survivor at different stages of her life; then Mike Edwards with his fictional spoken word supergroup The Poetry Bandits (he gives voice to all three members and the man filming a documentary of their rise and fall); John Osborne is working on a piece that travels the scenic train journey from Norwich to Sheringham; Bohdan Piasecki explores the dark world surrounding the death of his uncle (and namesake) in 1957 and Deborah Stevenson’s piece brings an insight into the characters of IG1. And my piece which is kind of about me, but also incorporates shit I’ve made up because that’s what the poems wanted to do.

It’s not really fair to single out a poet’s work but there is something about the way Bohdan uses language that makes me want to read more, to listen more closely, to become a part of the world that is being created – even though the subject is so dark.  I can’t wait to see where his piece for The Verb leads us.

After hearing everyone’s work we got into groups to give feedback, which is sort of useful to an extent. The questions we were responding to were open enough but it’s hard to comment on something you’ve just seen even when it’s finished, let alone when it’s a work-in-progress that you’ve only heard once and don’t have in front of you to look over and consider and re-read.  We offered feedback in groups so it wasn’t possible to incorporate input from the writers at the end of the discussion on each piece.

I’m writing this post on the long journey back to Newcastle so I’ve had a quick read of the feedback for my work. Three sheets of flip chart paper look more daunting than they actually are. But even so, it’ll take me a while to digest and process the comments. Mostly positive with some food for thought.  

The only feedback I wasn’t sure about related to a glosa that I’m working on, the form uses four lines from an existing work as the basis for a new poem. Each line of a quatrain creates the last line of each stanza in the new piece.  The four lines I’ve used come from Epilogue by Grace Nichols - read it here, go on, read it. The trick is to incorporate those lines without them seeming alien to the poem and without the poem being overwhelmed by them. One point of feedback asked why I had used the “clichés” ‘crossed an ocean’ and ‘I have lost my tongue’ and what alternatives could I use. 

Once I got over the shock of hearing the word cliché in association with one of my favourite poets I realised that I’d assumed everyone was familiar with Epilogue and I hadn’t read it out before going on to the main body of the poem. Tsk, tsk. Anyway the answer is there are no alternatives because it wouldn’t be a glosa without those lines – I can’t change them. But maybe the lines that precede them (in the first stanza in particular) still need some thought… we’ll see.  All in all though, I’ve got some good questions to ask myself and it’s all prep for the scrutiny that the work will come under during the mentoring process.

We’ll see what Thursday brings.

Songs from Whenever...

and being on The Verb. That's right, I've just been on The Verb actually speaking to Ian McMillan. OK so I guess I should have mentioned before now that I'm one of the Verb New Voices spoken word artists. It's a spoken word development programme run by the BBC and ACE. Me and Michael Edwards are the poets working with Annabel Turpin at ARC, Stockton. It was great to hear Mike talking about the multi-voice piece he's working on - it sounds brilliant... Now I just have to remember that letting doubt creep in about my own project is counter productive... besides the very amazing Zena Edwards is going to be my mentor so it's gonna be belters! 


I should really find a succinct way of summing up what my show is about but my brain's not quite functioning at the moment so it'll have to wait. In the meantime, this is what I said on my application (so it must be true)...

Songs from Whenever will draw inspiration from song titles that link in with specific moments in my life. The piece won’t be pure autobiography, more a fabricated account of growing up based on my childhood and early adulthood;  exploring themes of memory, identity, education, disengagement, discovery and escapism.

Built around an event (most probably the point of leaving home or arriving in a new city), a point where the possibilities are still there, the choices are yet to be made… Each poem in the sequence will reveal more and more about the character, their world, the choices they face, the mistakes they’ve made and the things they’ve got right… or might get right, given time. 

Anyway, there you have it. And to give you a flavour here's an extract from my work-in-progress and yeah, I know it looks like a passage of prose but that's because it's a prose poem. (Incidentally, an earlier version of this was published in Sepia Souls anthology by ID on Tyne Press.)

There is something different in this hot school summer. I push the magnetic catch of the glass-fronted cabinet and reach for his records.  Selecting emotions and matching them to my own. I balance an album cover between skinny brown fingers. Against the white background two figures. A man. A woman. Each half naked, his torso/her belly, rump and thighs. The heat and sweat of my body distorts in the intense August light that still fills the living room. I place the record on the player, hold the arm delicately, careful to drop the needle in the groove not slip and skip and scratch. Relax. Outside, friends play in the dust of the estate, their shoulders, legs, arms bare.

thinking about structure

How on earth am I going to make sense of this? 

Deseeded's first online anthology

A couple of years ago I created a Facebook group as a way of staying in touch with the poets I'd met  through Polly Clark's Poetry in Practice course. The group is called Deseeded (if you want to find it) and every now and then I set  challenges...

New Year's Eve 2009  - write a poem a day in January... That was hard, I enjoyed writing every day but didn't like coming up with almost-poems-but-need-some-work poems. So on New Year's Eve 2010 I decided that the challenge would be to write something every day but you only had to write one poem a week.

At the end of the month I asked the group members to send me their favourites and here they are in Deseeded Vol. 1. It's my first attempt at editing and I'm really proud of the results. I'm also really thrilled to include a  poem from one of the original Poetry in Practice poets, Elly Nobbs - a gorgeous cinquain called Woodpecker.

The cover image shows a detail from a painting by my husband Daniel Stone.