Echo Soundings

Whistle

2012-01-22T11:56:00.002Z

Martin Figura's Whistle was part of the Wordsworth Trust's Art and Books Festival this weekend. I am so glad I made the effort, through heavy rain in the dark, to get up there to see him perform this show.

It is a story of his mother’s death at the hands of his father when he was nine years old. Told, reviews said, in an uplifting and restrained manner.

Martin stays stationary throughout the show, using slides to provide the visual element. And someone has had great fun making up the slides. Figura is a photographer, so I presume he had some input. They use old family photos, cartoons, pictures also of memorabilia and magazines to recreate the time period, provide something other than Martin to look at (which he agreed was a good thing - for both the audience and him!). Sometimes it felt as though they were a bit too flippant (cartoon creatures added to the photos, for example), played for easy laughs, as very occasionally the text also did - "I'll protect their [an uncle and aunt] identity by giving them false names" ran one intro before revealing their true (maybe) first and surnames. And the performance really didn't need these add-ons of humour. His manner is so charming and the horror played so straight, I smiled just at the boyhood perspective and prioritisations.

The voices: poetic and narrative (as in the book, poems are interspersed with prose) are distinct and I enjoyed the variation between the two. There is an awful lot of material for him to get through, not a lot of pausing or space between the episodes, so the rip-roaring energy created by the differing rhythms helped [my] concentration. I would have liked more space though, to allow us fully to register the emotional impact of what was being said, add our own imaginative responses as the story unfolded. Thankfully Figura doesn't dictate.

The third voice is that of his mother - reading letters written to her father during courtship and as the relationship unravels. Introduced as a scouser, I was initally surprised she didn't have a stronger scouse accent, but this perhaps was a 'good thing', removing easy catagorisation. And maybe the mother didn't have one. What I struggled with was her monotone delivery (also quite fast). Whether she was declaring love or protesting at his withdrawal she sounded the same. A missed opportunity for me for some subtle drama.

And so the horrific incident is revealed, or not - as the boy didn't witness it, carted off by the authority of adults. Adults who are by turns distraught, dealing with their own grief, then saviours (a remarkable neighbour). The boy Martin takes in his stride, as child are wont to, moving between Benedictan boarding school to orphange, becoming more concerned with dealing with the rules of various institutions, while visiting his father, separated from sisters. A gripping story, yes. And carefully, senstively handled. Boundaries clearly defined between father and his teenage son.

I just wished it had stopped earlier. Moving into adulthood (including wedding photos) meant a loss of focus for me. And I wasn't really sure why, what this 'proof' of his current happiness proved - a belief in marraige, despite everything? - the comparison of two generations of weddings? - The fact he was standing there, delivering this beautifully redemptive story, was proof enough of his survival, compassion and understanding.

As a piece of live literature I think it'll (and porbably has done already) act powerfully in the service of poetry. It was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for New Poetry, which has that ethic at its heart. I can imagine people coming for the story - what a draw - and witnessing the power of economy and restraint that poetry offers. Figura used few metaphors or rich language. It is perhaps unnecessary to embellish such a story with them. Ultimately it is the remarkable spirit of a boy and how his adult self relates to him that makes this piece of literature so worthwhile.

The Buddha would Have Something to Say ...

2012-01-10T11:27:00.002Z

Low clouds all day, making visibility less than three miles. Intermittent mizzle. That sly cold that stiffens fingers. Mud.

All creating this at the day's end.

Chainsaws: when to use them and when not

2012-01-02T12:29:00.000Z

Inspired by Dave Hartley's amazing list of achievements for 2011 on his blog, I thought I'd consider mine.

The condensed version (ie, my top two):
I survived four weeks on retreat at Hawthornden Castle, which, during week three seemed extremely unlikely, and yet managed to come away with a whole stack of rough drafts which have formed the basis of the year's hothousing/incubation period.

I learnt to use a chainsaw. Fortunately this was after the month at Hawthornden (otherwise there might have been bloodshed). I have yet to decide which I find more scary: sawing the wood myself or supporting the wood on the sawbench as someone else welds the machine. I can't seem to rid my imagination (when the machine first starts) of visions of deep thigh cuts or the saw kicking back to slice my head in half.

Tenacity underpins both. Maybe the wind's getting to me.

Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
DHLawrence

Winter solstice

2011-12-21T10:05:00.000Z

Overwintering

2011-12-12T16:27:00.000Z

So the boat's being stripped back in readiness for winter.

Winter's a more subtle season on the coast. We lost our leaves about a month ago and the saltmarsh stays greenish brown the year round. It's just the increasing winds (although last May was ferocious) and shift in light that flags up the change. I don't know whether you can actually see further on a clear winter's day than in midsummer but it certainly seems that way. And while we lose daylight, the sun (even behind clouds), reveals a fantastic smelting of metals: platinum, silver, aluminium, pewter, all the cliches you can imagine hammer their way across the sea and sky at this time of year - even if it is blue enough, sun shining, the message never quite gets through to the water.

And of course winter is announced by migrating birds. Now is the time for huge flocks of geese to cut across the sky, the waders are loud and in party mood at twilight, curlews everywhere, and starlings schooling from early afternoon branch to branch.

And the same subtly happens around the boat too. From the pontoon it almost looks ready to sail, to a passing glance, but look closer, and the sails are off, engine decommissioned, cushions out from below, all the charts and nav gear are tucked away from the cold and damp. It is stripped back from all our comforts to its essence of hull: fibre glass and paint, and bare rigging. Bouyant but unsteerable. Cold and unappealing. It has become the sea it sits on. Maybe it always is, but in this sharp light its uncreaturely nature is more evident than when prancing through waves. A nautical hibernation. Not really a hibernation, not a sleep so much as a shhh

The Turner Prize, Art and Emotion

2011-12-05T11:34:00.001Z

Tonight the Turner Prize is announced and in an uncharacteristic spirit of relevance, I'm bloggin about it. Well, not the prize, but the shortlist.

I went to see the four shortlisted works last month in Newcastle, more out of curiosity than enthusiasm. I wasn't expecting much. Which is always a good way to enter any gallery, or open any book...

First room: Martin Boyce: my hightlights were the strangely greasy-looking paper aeroplanes scattered on the floor and beautifully wrought air vents in the wall (reminiscent of Moroccan design). These and the other objects in the rooom were formed from the same structural form. Askewed repetition, endless geometry. Art for mathematicians?

Second room: Hilary Lloyd: video installations just don't hit my x-spot, but the room had a great view eastwards over the Tyne - a huge widescreen realtime player that drew most of the people who were int the room when I was, so turning us gallery visitors into Big Bro.

Third: Karla Black: Untamed plastics and paint. Multi-coloured sheets made for a kind of fly tape entrance. Another world. The hanging knotted plastic sheets, lightweight and glacial in colour was beautiful but also reminded me of a little girl who suffocated in the mounds of plastic waste in Darjeeling in India.

Fourth: George Shaw: Urban landscapes / wastelands painted in model paint which gave them a not quite real not quite surreal quality. I loved this not being able to put my finger on what wasn't 'true'. My favourite was the bent railings, as if someone had slipped through them, a very small someone or a very strong force...But there was nobody in the picture.

All these works have no evidence of people in them - I couldn't even really see people from the third floor window of the Baltic. How is the emotive content, I'm told is required in art (include poetry in this catagory), created, if there are no 'characters' to relate to?

How does the viewer (reader) connect? Where do we find the emotional resonance in a plastic bag? Or some bent railings? Or, more personally, in a boat, or the sea? Is there something visual art and poetry can offer that negates the need for protagnists? And if so, do we, the viewer/reader, always need to supplant our own into it? Are we so egocentric to always need recognisable life in art? Be that from our own back catalogue of experience if the artist has kept one (themselves) from it? And if there is no discernible emotive content what do we seek instead?

Addition: Stephen Burt answers many of these questions in this issue of PNReview

Steve Zissou? In Lancaster?

2011-11-28T15:13:00.001Z

No, he wasn't, but the Friends of the Maritime Museum were treated to a great slideshow by Gordon Fletcher yesterday, with him chatting (uber-passionately) about his sightings in dives around the Bay and west coast of Scotland.

It was only a 40 minute talk but packed with fascinating facts, for example did you know the barnacle has the largest (relative to body size) penis of all creatures? It was a risky starting fact, but loosened up the (mainly male) audience.

I loved his extreme close-ups of fish eyes, in which you could see galaxies of light and colour. The photos of brittle stars were just as divine, their filaments combing against the fat cushion starfish: an otherworldly version of Laurel and Hardy. But perhaps favourites were at the end when he showed a sequence of photos of the water surface as he was resurfacing.

The sea is a lens, he explained. Multiple lenses, really, created by wavelets on the surface that either focus or dissipate light under the water, and the objects near the surface, so cliffs and clouds viewed from metres below the surface became post-impressionistic forms, ice-creatures, mythological landscapes that have disappeared from our lives.

Transcendental. And it surrounds our island...

Anticipation v Anxiety

2011-11-21T10:02:00.001Z

And so it was Spotlight on Friday, where I had been asked to take a ten minute slot. I like the monthly event - a friendly audience, a wild mix of work/performers and it's local.

It's very much a known event. I've performed all sorts of work there - solo, with my old collaborative trio 3dV, as Hymas & Lewis, straight, big, old and new. So it took me by surprise to feel so nervous. I'm not sure why since I always feel nervous before getting onto a stage. I thought at first it was when I had memorised work, for the obvious fear of forgetting stuff. But latterly it seems to be for whatever I do.

In part Friday's nerves were down, I'm sure, to my decision to read new work. I find it very useful (if challenging)for the editing process to take work to an audience. There is a new 'collective' ear brought to each poem.

I wonder if a part of me (the bloody clever clever subconcious me) recognises the value in having this anxiety (the flip side of excitement, after all): to prevent complacency, sharpen my ears, insure a connection with the audience - not to take for granted the position of telling people my work - and to hold each poem carefully as it deserves as it's being told. Basically, it seems, there is no getting away from the fact nerves serve the energy of my performance. It's a shame the experience is akin to swallowing staples.

I gave, what I considered to be, a quiet rendition, fairly stationary, so I could best hear the new work. People listened. I listened. I changed some poems mid-recitation. I stepped off the stage ultimately happy with the experiment, relieved, looking forward to the next one.

Listed

2011-11-14T12:52:00.001Z

With readying the boat for hibernation, I've been scouting around Glasson Dock, on foot and in books, and recently found this great aeriel photo of the place, pre 1960s, when the graving dock was still in use. (Found in a great picture book compiled by Nigel Daziel and Sue Ashworth)

What I find most fasinating about this picture, however, is the custom house just visible on the far right hand side of the frame. An inauspicious building especially in comparison with its relative in Lancaster that is adorned with porticoes, columns and double-sided steps.

I think what's particularly interesting is while Lancaster's custom house was built on the cusp of the shipbuilding heyday of the city, and so reflects all that hope and ambition, it is still regarded as a important historic monument, and accordingly it houses the maritime musuem. Glasson's custom house was built as the industry was declining, Glasson Dock, itself, was a last ditch attempt to cling onto shipbuilding/ship repair. So the custom house is appropriately more conservative, cautious, perhaps. And sadly is now inaccessible, encased as it is (preserved by being listed, I suspect) by warehousing built with a neat square indentation that edges round two walls of the house.

What was once the gateway to a place, the house that made the money to keep the port running, is lost to hawthorns, corrugated iron and breeze blocks ...

This place of order, accounting, lists and registration has crumbled away into something I am now repiecing with new lists and new accounting to make sense of what it was, what it is, a rebuilding, an honouring in language that has no financial value whatsoever! And right now, that feels positive...

Reading David Tait

2011-11-07T11:01:00.001Z

A selection of David Tait's poems were featured in An Elastic Sky, Flax022 last year, so I was thrilled to hear he'd won the Poetry Business's pamphlet competition this year. His pamphlet, Love's Loose Ends, was published last month and I got my mitts on a copy a wee while ago.

So, what did I think? Well, I am biased.

As the pamphlet title suggests, the thread throughout is love: tender love, locked love, quiet love, obsessive love, silly love, sexy love... I have to come clean and say it's not my favourite subject (what a grumpy mug, I know, I know) so I'm baised again(st); however, the lightness of touch gives a sense of almost carelessness rather than intensity, which drew me in. Not to make his poems sound insincere, because they don't. Their genuineness and compulsion is evident.

And then there are all those fabulous images used. David's been very reserved with images; the language is more literal than metaphorical, so when they do come they enrich the poems, and, by default, the sequence: a neck rippling like an accordion; another neck sprouting hands; a cello playing the wind; a herd of pylons; breathy headlights; words like poppy seeds. The pamphlet progresses between moorlands, restaurants, home, the DLR, bed, a computer screen, skies and the cinema, so by the time I reach the end cover, I've been taken through a huge spread of life and experiences. Leaving me with a sense of new friendship, a declaration of trust and honesty from this voice and its tender heart.

So I'm especially looking forward to the April Poets event this Thursday, cos he's reading at it and I've not actually heard him read (he couldn 't make the Elastic Sky launch). Plus Alan Dent, of Penniless Press, who is also a new one for me - always a treat. And however they both turn out, old fave Jenny Copley (the 'domestic gothic') is reading. It's a win win.

All Hands All Hands

2011-10-31T11:01:00.000Z

The World Famous asked me a wee while ago to write some words to go with their new show All Hands, a firecracking shipbuilding performance of dazzling ingenuity and precision engineering... So I said yes.

And was given some mp3 files, a storyboard, a brief and a clip to the previous show - they were already performing it as a work in progress.

And a fortnight to come up with some words... A little exhilerating in prospect, but I loved the concept of the show. To quote from the brief:

"[The World Famous] share a belief that human beings deservebetter, and that we are capable of achieving better, but are often held back byour isolation, by fear of change, by the system, by vested interests, and bythe lies of politicians and the media.

The show is a celebration of collective human endeavour andthe power of connection."

And the central image they used was that of building a vessel, raising sails and journeying together - which is why they approached me. And how could I resist that?

I also loved the music, composed by Kuljit Bhamra and David White. It reminded me a little of Nitin Sawhney, of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but distinct. Hugely energising. Kind of dance/trance. Anyway, I listened to the tracks over and over until their rhythms were pulsing out of my fingertips. And wrote.

They took the words, read them, we talked and tinkered with them. And the plan is now for the who to tour again next year. It's been funded as part of the Cultural Olympiad so I'm hoping to ctach it at some point over next summer... Menawhile, here's a snatch

Black Flood and other Phantoms

2011-10-24T10:59:00.001+01:00

The Dark Matters exhibition at the Whitworth, part of the Asian Triennial, was an excilleratingly physical experience. While I was awed by many of the exhibits (facing a slow-mo pixelated version of myself, courtesy of Daniel Rozin, at the entrance forced a switch of internal gears best suited to wander the rest of the space), the one that moved me particularly and really got me thinking was Black Flood by Barnaby Hosking.

Four carpet screens of about four metres high, a metre wide, create a square container to stand in. Projected black 'water' rises higher and higher on them and so around you. Firstly you get the (to me) soothing effect of being immersed: the hypnotising roll and surf of waves at the upper edge, the surface of the water, from the inside or beneath them. It's a kind of dry swimming pool. And dark. The water has a mercurial thickness. As the water slowly sloshed upwards and its level rose, and I watched (probably swaying with it) I realised it wasn't (technically speaking) the water rising but the lights that represented the sky above it that were diminishing, narrowing over the black water. And this is where my brain kicked it. I got excited. We think we're looking at water, but it's the 'sky' that's governing us.

How else is water so often seen but through the sky above it? I seem to be regularly preoccupied by this in my writing, starting in Host and now seems to figure in most of my current writings:

("This pitted stream smudges a version

of grey clouds hammering anvils.

Its glass distorted by air.

Wind made visible by water. Held briefly." from 'The Three of Us')

The definition of things through their relationship with those around it is another way of looking at our interconnectedness, which seems to me to be one of the functions of poetry: making connections between things that may otherwise seem separate. What (or who) are we looking at when we look at the sea?

And in the case of Idris Khan's work: what are we looking at when we look at a piece of text? He'd have us look at the entire book:

His photos (of the Koran, the Bible Art history books and many others) are images of every page stimultaneously bound as one. Each word holds the resonance of the word preceding it, the page preceding it, and the book preceding it. I imagine my brains looks a little like this. It also hints at the overload resulting from quick accessibility provided by ebooks/Kindle/iPads, but that's another post.

Guesting at Bean Photography

2011-10-18T09:47:00.002+01:00

The wonderful photographer, Jonathan Bean,
bigs up Tailormade Poems ...

http://beanphoto.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-tailormade-poems.html

Work Work Work?

2011-10-12T12:17:00.002+01:00

What do I like most about working at the French House Experience?

Never knowing who's going to turn up for the four day writing course? This year we had six varied participants: experienced novelists, experimenting poets, would-be short story writers and playful speechmakers. They worked as barristers, film-makers, positive thinkers, child-minders and retirees.

The food? Let's face it, I'd be happy eating French bread and cheese all week, but the salads, quiches that make up lunch are fabulous, fresh and extraordinarily tasty.

Working with Moira Martingale? The host of St Raymond is a relaxed, charming and ebullient companion for me during my time there - nothing seems to be too much bother for her to make sure our workshops run smoothly, which is great for someone used to working as a solo tutor. And she's very good for a laugh!

Getting a swim in everyday? Forty laps of the pool just about works off lunch in perparation for dinner.

Sharing favourite work? This year I took along Jen Hadfield, Cormac McCarthy, Luisa Valenzuela and Julia Darling amongst others of my favourite writers to hear what people made of them. We never all agree, which is what makes things interesting.

The space? We all get picked up at the airport and brought to St Raymond, a large converted farm/grounds near Pexiora, where there are no street lights, no intrusions (unless you want wi-fi with you), odd noises of vixens in the dark, a huge stretch of sky almost 180' over us, the Pyranees in the distance, protected by a fence of tall cypruses to block any wind and lead your eyes up up up.

The Limoux? We generally meet on the patio every evening for an aperitif of a Limoux - a sparkling French wine, locally made, which is just scrummy scrummy scrummy and oh so civilised...

Hearing the variety of work? It never ceases to amaze me how many different responses people can write to the same stimulus. Give a man a fish and s/he'll see cod, pollock, shark and whitebait... Imaginations are infinite.

Coming home? While it is a great wroking week, and obviously I love it, I also adore rolling up at my front door, and being surrounded by my things and feeling very stimulated and ready to get on with my work. There's nothing like reading and talking about good work to fizz me up for writing my own.

Here's to next July!

These Boots were made for Walking

2011-10-03T17:28:00.000+01:00

Flax029 is all coming together:
map, tick; audio files, tick; ebook, tick; webpages, tick.

Well, when I say 'tick', I mean started, almost completed, enough to feel like we'll have something to launch on Sunday 16th October at the festival.

And when I say something, I mean a very special Flax something - three walking tours wrapped up in a delicious map and audio poems, spread along the curious streets of Lancaster.

Not that we'll be out in those streets. For the launch we'll be peering into their nooks and crannies via the eye of Litfest's own Jonathan Bean (aka Beanphoto) - yes, a slideshow of beautiful images will provide the backdrop to the poets reading their work.

All three poets, Martyn Halsall, Elizabeth Burns and Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, will be taking us on their particular tour of Lancaster - through a timeline of faiths, walls or personaliaties, respectively.
I am especially looking forward to the event for two reasons:

1. I've never been involved in the making of a map/walking tours before, and it's been a bit hairy and devilishly tricksy at times, but am proud of what myself and Gareth Dennison at Morph Films have managed to come up with.

2. This is my last Flax publication. Although my last is someone else's first ... while I'm leaving Flax and Litfest I have every confidence that its work is not done. There are too many talented writers here in the NW of England to not continue to publish, support and encourage with their ideas and work.

It was hard to make the decision to say goodbye to this wonderful job that has offered so much freedom and inventiveness for celebrating literature. I have thoroughly appreciated that freedom and, perhaps more so, the community of writers that has grown up in the last five years.

Walking in Circles, Flax029, was an invitation to all those writers to submit ideas for walking tours in Lancaster and we had some great ideas. I'm sorry not to get the chance to produce them all. But I sincerely hope that with the map and mp3s being available at Lancaster VIC (from 17th October), more people, than possibly those already keen on poetry, will be introduced to these three writers and maybe some of their colleagues, via the Litfest website. The informal nature of the poems, the relevance to the city and its visitors, hopefully give Walking in Circles a chance to prove the value and delight of poetry to those unsuspecting non-poetry fans...

Launch details: Saturday 16th October, 2pm.
at The Auditorium at the Storey, Meeting House Lane, LA1 1TH.

It's free so you can just turn up, or for our nerves it'd be lovely if you emailed flax@litfest.org, to let us know you were coming.

LIPPfest the Lipping Festastic

2011-09-26T12:59:00.001+01:00

This Saturday just gone saw the first ever LIPPfest at the Carriageworks in Leeds. An astonishingly ambitious event created by three poets (Daivd Tait, David Thom and Ian Harker) who had never done anything like it before.

I sincerely hope they do something again. While I wasn't convinced the Carriageworks was the best venue, with events spread over three floors the buzz that was created was dissipated, but there was a great energy all the same. And unsurprisingly since there were 25 poets reading throughout the day.
Sadly I was only able to stay until 4pm, so only caught two of the readings. The first being the Cadavarine reading which featured poets under 30. While I already knew the quality of Kim Moore and Andrew McMillan, it was a delight to be introduced to Suzannah Evans and Rachel Allen. Suzannah read a great poem about breaking into Leeds International Swimming Pool, because she never had. A lovely askewed take on autobiography. And the rest of her set was similarly playful and unexpected.

Rachel Allen was equally as unexpected, and entertaining: energetic, direct, funny and knowing. In other words, stunning. I hope I get to hear her again. She runs Clinic, a poetry night in London, which has got to bode well for poetry nights in London.

The second reading was an introduction to familiar and new voices. I very much enjoyed hearing Gaia Holmes read from her forthcoming collection, due out later this year from Comma Press. She has a delicate ear and sharp voice - making for an interesting combination. New to me were Andy Fletcher and Ian Parks (soon to be a fellow Waterloo poet) - very very different poets: where one was irreverent and witty (Andy), Ian was expansive and tender. Making for a great combination. This difference is absolutely necessary to keep your ears fresh for so many readers. Just in those two readings there were twelve readers. A lot to digest.

As one of the poets involved the other side of the mic offered a chance to remind myself of what a great community I belonged to. We are colleagues (at least that's how I see myself) but a strange remote set of colleagues, so it's great to run into familiar faces I hadn't seen for a year or more, to catch up, laugh a lot and hear their new work. It's warming, inspiring, and just lovely as crumpets, but much much more stimulating.

Thanks due to David, David and Ian. And hats off.

The Joy of Not-Sailing

2011-09-12T11:49:00.002+01:00

The remnants of Hurricane Katia (although no hurricane since our waters aren't warm enough) are hitting us now. Walney Island has recorded winds of 47mph this morning so far. It is no day for sailing.

There's a Charlie Brown cartoon in which he reckoned the secret of happiness was owning a swimming pool and convertible: when it was sunny you could ride in your convertible, when it rained, at least it was filling the pool.

I feel a little like that now. Owning a boat inevitably makes you consider the wind direction and speed more And right now I look out to sea and feel so relieved and gratfeul that I'm on hard ground.

It isn't always so clear cut.

And of course when you're walking downwind it doesn't seem half as bad as when you're walking into it, just so with the tide - incoming with the wind it rolls lustily but nothing seemingly insurmountable. When the tide turns and ebbs against the incoming wind, the extent of windpower is evident.

It's like the whole world as dipped itself inside a Dyson hand-dryer. I prefer paper towels, really.

New Review

2011-09-07T11:19:00.003+01:00

Mark Burnhope had this to say about Host on Ink, Sweat and Tears:

"I recommend the collection, especially for readers looking for a fresh slant on the domestic lyric, or just a very enjoyable verse narrative. Host is well worth their while, and bodes well for Hymas’ future."

You can read the entire review here

Moby Oh Moby

2011-09-05T11:54:00.006+01:00

I haven't written much about other poetry for a while here because I have been reading Moby Dick, which is rich in its own very idiosyncractic and long-winded poetry. I'm still not finished (like Ahab), and while it is a tremendously slow read, it is very very enjoyable.

If, at times, overwhelming. Like sperm whales themselves.

Favourite bits so far:

a line of rope has "sundry mystifications too tedious to detail"

sailors suffer from " the spell of sleep induced by such a vast sea"

on philosophy:
"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ear capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or shaper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilise it."

aesthetics:
"Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic."

biology:
"But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face."

mortality:
"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul."

And a most astonishing fact about sperm whales, that Melville has yet to mention (but I do have another 70 pages to go): They can dive for an hour and half, during which their heart beats 1 or 2 times a minute.

Tailormade Poems kick off!

2011-08-29T11:50:00.006+01:00

Last Wednesday saw the real launch of Tailormade Poems, which I know I've already blathered about to some length but we wanted to go tah dah! and have an excuse for some fancy coffee and delicious cake.

And because we're just a small affair with a low profile (for now) we thought the best place for such things was the Music Room in Lancaster, a spin-off from the coffee merchants, Atkinsons. So all good and delicious.

You may remember from the invite in a previous post, we asked for commissions to write for the launch. Lovely that people took it upon themselves to get us busy... I was asked to write one for a friend on the event of Arsenal's Champions League qualifier, fro his Arsenal watching buddy. Yes, a football match. Yes, for Arsenal. I know little about football. Even less about Arsenal. Not so by 4pm Wednesday 24th August.

Nerve-wracking to read such new poems - the second one I read was one I was commissioned to write for a Munroist - who had just finished them last week after 19 years of walking up and down them... But they seemed to go down well, so I thought I'd share the Arsenal one here. It's not a work from great depth, but then that wasn't the brief. I was asked to write a poem that voiced the 'brotherhood of suffering', that 'it has come to this', which is what I tried to do.

I like writing in this very different style to my usual work. I think it's a very helpful conterbalance: the need for a clear through-line, consequential narrative and simple, cohesive imagery. And there is something hugely rewarding writing stuff for people for particular occasions, directly to them. And those people seem to like it too.

Arsenal v Udinese, Champions League Qualifier, 2011
for Nick

Whole lives can begin again in August,
when ninety minutes promise to repay our loyalty —

despite not winning a trophy for six years;
despite last year looking like we were in line for all four big ones;
despite drawing four all to Newcastle
when we were four nil up with half an hour to go.

Even you, with that half hour to go, almost relaxed.
Now nothing is secure: I've joined you on the edge,
exchanged my sofa for a nail bed.

I've terminated my Red Membership
but can't shake my commitment to the brotherhood of suffering.
I'm on a waiting list for a waiting list to sign up to Lancaster City
but —

tonight's Champions League qualifier is on terrestrial.
For once we won't be watching together.
Plenty will be: we're everyone's second favourite team.

But three weeks in and we're looking worse and worse:
we've lost our two best players;
three defenders injured; three more disciplined.

Our collapse continues, and I cannot distinguish
between we and I. Our spirit, my emotion.

Fabregas and Nasri can walk away
for something like £160000 a week each —
the rest of us can't transfer our allegiances so easily.

We're suckered in, abused
by the monstrosity football has become.
I am an idiot. We're both tense, anxious idiots.
We're all idiots together.
And together, apart, we'll watch the game tonight, hoping
against hope, as we always have done.
As we always will.

footnote: Arsenal won 2-1
Last night I didn't write a poem for their subsequent match. They lost 8-2 to Man U.
Arsne Wenger... a poem's not expensive

The Art of Sailing is...

2011-08-22T10:15:00.007+01:00

not sailing ... to paraphrase Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.

And it's probably one the hardest aspects to become proficient in (see his six pack?)

I didn't mention in my post about sailing in the Clyde we were stormbound for four days. What was particularly difficult was that it wasn't that stormy: only blowing 25mph ish - not impossible to sail in, especially if it's behind or alongside you. But the level of the crew's experience made it too windy. What's the point of taking people out for their second only trip when you know it's going to be stressful? When everything will need to be done quickly, efficiently and with strength?

None.

It's a holiday, not life or death, or honour or any of that Bruce Lee stuff (see my one pack).

It got harder every day. We didn't know on day one that it'd be day five we'd be sailing. We were hoping it'd be day two, then day three, etc, meanwhile listening to the coastguard's updates morning, afternoon and evening, watching any flags, checking the sea state for wind strength, while also trying to make the most of the sunshine - it was blowy but also gloriously sunny - and let go of sailing being the focus of the trip. Tough when there is three of you on a 29 footer.

We tried to laugh. Did quite a good job of that. Spent time practising knots and recalling names of bits of the boat, as well as eating ice creams.

But as the days rolled on, the pressure of that first sail with a new crew grew. Everyday I had to remind myself of our capabilities, experiences and the reliability of the boat, and, most regularly, visualise who would do what when it came for us to slip our moorings (see previous post about foresight...)

It reminded me of the preparation I make in advance of what usually becomes quite a good poem - the thinking and rethinking of ideas and their connections, gathering images that spring to mind and flower into new ones, letting the original ones slide. Although with the sailing, I always brought it back to the starting point - or departure point - to run through it all again. And again.

Needless to say, we slipped off day five, without incident. Although the shift in wind direction meant we followed a slightly different course of action, but having gone through the original plan so many times, my brain was limbered up, responsive to the new circumstances - like an athelete's warm up, like this blog for my poems, like not doing stuff for ages before you do it.

The trick is to eventually do it.

Fancy a Limoncello with that?

2011-08-16T15:39:00.007+01:00

Tailormade Poems are launching their eco, boho personalised greeting card service on Wednesday 24th August 2011.

Come to the Music Room Cafe, Sun Square, Lancaster at 5.00pm and help us celebrate.

While you choose between Limoncello, Cider Brandy and Jerez Sherry to add even more chic to Atkinson’s award-winning coffee, we’ll tell you all about it.

And if you want proof we write only poems of charm and complexity (no doggerel, no dodgy rhymes, no schmaltz) send us a test brief to Tailormade Poems (tailormadepoems@me.com) and we’ll read out the results on 24th August.

S P A C E I S L I M I T E D S O P L E A S E, P L E A S E R S V P
tailormadepoems@me.com

Nocturne

2011-08-10T10:59:00.005+01:00

My six word short story We buried the whale at night has been transformed into a six minute opera, which is being performed at the Tete a Tete Opera Festival Thursday and Friday night this week at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London (circumstances allowing).

It's set to music by composer Phillip Cooke, to become 'Nocturne'. His opera, 'Progeny', which was performed last year, is shown here (about 12 minutes in)

Six Word Operas from Tête à Tête on Vimeo.

It's the second time I've inadvertantly written a libretto. The first was Flocking, for Steve Lewis... Maybe one day I'll get down to writing something intentionally. All the same, it's very exciting.

Grow! Grow! Grow!

2011-08-06T12:28:00.003+01:00

Sometime, before the sea, wind and boat washed most things from my mind, Flax commissioned a film from Maya Chowdhry, which I absolutely adore.

It's a stop-motion haiku, written, sown and filmed by Maya Chowdhry, with inspiration from Flax026ers, Mollie Baxter, Carys Bray, Jane Eagland, Norman Hadley, Claire Massey and Carla Scarano. And plays with the idea of growth...

Sea Time

2011-08-01T14:44:00.003+01:00

Time spent at sea is a strange, amorphous thing, which probably added to my engrossment of Christian Marclay's The Clock, when I sent to see it in Glasgow between crew changes the other week.

Not only is the film a breathtaking work of commitment and craft, but completely compulsive. By editing clips of films that refer to time, the pieces, generally, tended to focus on characters waiting or rushing. And yet when set alongside each other, became inconsequential. Or at least every scene was laden with impending consequence - anticipation or adrenalin - which never materialised, just segued into another scene laden with more inconsequential consequence. So each climatic point carried high tension never to be resolved. No emotional tail for the viewer. A cinematic version of a Kafka novel, perhaps?

It was showing at the CCA in Glasgow, but sadly I'd missed the 24 hour showing of it so only got to see from midday to 4pm. Being in there for four hours was a heady experience. Which I'm sure was exaggerated by having been on the boat for a week. Being on a boat is the opposite of inconsequentiality ... absolutely every action has a very obvious reaction, and one of the requirements of being on board is being able to think at least four events ahead: if I let go of that rope, the bow will do this, the stern that and the crew another, then me some like that ...

This foresight of cause and effect is the main intellectual activity of sailing since most of it is physical and instinctual, or at least has become so after years of doing it, making my responses automatic. This is great - for me. But has a downside when there are others on board, who might not have the same experience. Since I was unable to explain to others in clear concise points how to steer, tie bowlines, fend us off from pontoons, reef sails etc etc. And with having two weeks of inexperienced crew on board I had to go back to my verbal drawing board (is there such a thing?) and find the words and intelectualise the procedures for virtually everything I did in response to the wind, sea or boat.

And so what joy to indulge in four hours of nothing mattering, except in a minute's climax and watching actors be old, then young, then older again within an hour (Meryl Streep and Anthony Hopkins were particularly evident between 12-4pm). It was a bit like taking on the perspective of the sea: witnessing panic alternating with patience and having no real concern over what might happen next. Perfect viewing for a 24 hour passage.

Sail Away

2011-07-08T09:45:00.005+01:00

I'm off on the annual three week sailing trip, which contrary to most people's imagination, as indicated by their dreamy-eyed delight when I tell them, is more stressful and absorbing than lying on a deck trailing my fingers in the yacht's wake.

It'll be three weeks of meteorology, mathematics, jargon, oceanography and claustrophobia. That doesn't take into account the possible rain, gales and seasickness. But it does take my mind off everything else in life. And offers me sky, blues, air and physical dexterity.

Back online in August.

Marketing Guide

2011-07-07T08:46:00.004+01:00

I wrote this guide for Nawe's Writer's Compass earlier this year. It might hae some useful top tips on how to sell your book...

sarah hymas marketing
Marketing – an errant guide to promoting a first poetry collection
Sarah Hymas is a poet, performer, editor and coach. ...

www.nawe.co.uk/.../Marketing%20an%20Errant%20Guide.pd...

and if that doesn't tickle your fancy, there are a whole heap of other guides available for free from the Writer's Compass resourses

Live: Dead and Alive

2011-07-04T12:05:00.006+01:00

I love this find on the beach - the flower (I think it's a danewort, but please someone correct me if you know otherwise) growing out of the well-rotted sheep's carcass. The washed wool reminds me of lava with the erupting flower standing proud, it's a mini Iceland out there ... with less impact on holiday makers.

I would love to be able to slide seamlessly and cleverly from this life in death image to the Mouthtrap gig on Friday but it's Monday morning, after a gorgeously lazy weekend in the sunshine, so am not going to even try.

Although I did also thoroughly enjoy Mouthtrap's turn on Friday at Totally Wired at Storey Gallery it wasn't really a life in death experience or even a death in life experience. It was a wholehearted engagement in listening, watching, environmentalism and old fashioned fun. The acoustics in the gallery were astounding, especially when we were un-amped and in separate corners, our voices curved around the whole ceiling, as if the place became one massive lung.

We improv'd off a villanelle of mine about lighthouses. Although I was the only one to use words in the event, and then only a few repeated lines, more phrasing, which seemed appropriate to the films that will also curving around the huge walls - we were harmonious, dischordant, pacy, expansive, menacing and probably a whole bunch of other stuff that I wasn't aware of at the time and have now no sense of at all.

Elswhere, we were treated to some fantastic jazz, a hurdy gurdy folksome threesome, gorgeous harmonies, intense films, wierd shit and a sense of being in the right place along with 130 other people. Cracking start to the weekend.

Mouthtrap at the Storey

2011-06-27T10:14:00.005+01:00

This rather wonderful photo of Mouthtrap was taken by Richard Davis of Totally Wired, when we all met down at Cockersands, the other week. I love how the stones take up most of the frame - but there's still a bit of flotsam - wirey stuff to the left; I love our three poses - connected, but very idiosyncratic, which reflects very neatly exactly how we operate/perform together; and there there's that wonderful elastic sky behind us.

Richard also shot some motion film of us mucking about, and I was hoping to stick a short recording of a rehearsal onto it, but once again I was reminded how improvisation is really live art, and doesn't benefit from being pinned down digitally. The recordings didn't capture the spirit of expansion, wit and tenderness that I think comes from our three voices.

So, if you're interested, you'll have to come along to hear us at Storey Gallery, Friday 1st July, 7.30pm, as part of the Totally Wired cabaret, when we will have some massive films playing behind us as we perform.

There'll be other art, spoken word, music and short films during the evening, filling the fantastic space of the Gallery with a spectacular mix of visual imagery & sound.

"Many of the images on display highlight the incredible landscape which surrounds us in the Lancaster area. A host of talented musicians, playing in a variety of styles, will accompany the films: Jazz, Folk, Electronic, Classical & Experimental.

Bands/Musicians include : Turnstone, Huevos, Mouthtrap, Deep Cabaret Trio, The Ealing Electricals, Therese Standish/Jeff Barnes (From Dan Haywood's New Hawks ), Marc Nellis & Eleanor Denvir on spoken word."

Should be a corker
...And here is what happened

Tailormade Poems

2011-06-21T10:17:00.003+01:00

Finally, six months after our public debut/commissioning, Tailormade Poems has a website, contact form, sample card, examples of previous commissions and general all-round sense of being in the world...

Alongside the wonderful Elizabeth Burns and Rebecca Irvine Bilkau we're offering poems: whatever the occasion, whoever the recipient, we'll write the poem.

So, spread the word, dip your own toe in the water... we're up for anything (grab us while we're still fresh!)

Flax: Three Launches in One Day

2011-06-13T16:55:00.008+01:00

On Saturday Flax made the brave move of launching three new titles in one afternoon. It seemed such a good idea way back when... Fortunately we had the gorgeous space of the Music Room in the Storey in Lancaster to provide a spacious and sunny backdrop to the proceedings, and set up three separate stages for each publication

Flash Mob, Flax026 is a flash fiction anthology of eleven new stories from NW writers. What I love about this anthology is its chape: from surreal/unsettling to tragic to classic comedy. It's mood shifts tremendously and the flow of ten of the eleven authors reading back to back kept that high energy.

A Book Tale, Flax027 is the ebook of the commission Litfest made last year. So the bewitching fairy tale is now available to read from the Litfest website, iBooks or Amazon, and we got another chance to hear Claire read it - in this amazing dress, made by Jennifer Pritchard. When I showed one friend this photo he asked if she was real...

And finally, although running throughout the afternoon, Flax028 - a stopmotion haiku. Made by Maya Chowdhry, with inspiration from several Flax026ers, this is a haiku sown in sprouts, filmed over the week of their growth and then turned into a wierdly absorbing stopmotion film. The poem's about growth, which is why we put it in an inside-out garden shed, what these people are huddled around. I'll get the film up online in the next week or so and add a link then.

So, an exhilerating afternoon of literary entertainment, and a great showcase of that can be achieved in very few words - a testament to the power of words. I'm happy.

A Dialogue between Past and Present?

2011-06-01T15:35:00.004+01:00

The title is a quote from DH Carr's What is History (my question mark) and I'm considering it a lot while working on all things maritime. I have thought for a while that historical poems have a responsibility beyond being historically accurate or emotionally true. Or at least that's I want to do more than that in my work. I think the Bedrock sequence did that on the level of historcal sweep.

So what am I driving for now? How can I bring to bear the same perspective in a different way? Obviously there is a massive unconscious element at work whenever something is written, but I am also interested in a more conscious approach to contemporary/historical writing. It was what I loved so much about Wolf Hall - what got me through the book, really - how Hilary Mantel's reframed a historical personality.

Take, say, the buddhist perspective of the past being present. Perhaps there is nowhere more evident of that than the sea. Despite the growth of windfarms, it is an unchanged scape, unike much landscape. The tides work to a monthly cycle, but that month then repeats itself ad infinitum (unless there is major land shifts). I constantly find that incredible.

One way of approaching this dialogue is through the inevitability of social structures. I am a result of the present society/ethic/politic, my written language reflects that compression of time - using contemporary patterns in writing oute past, my selection of images recolour the past. I love Paul Farley's redrawing of rural subjects through urban imagery. His skill is deftness. And confidence. Awkwardly handled, this could easily pull a reader out of the intense experience of the past. Which is also a delight of strong historical poems - to reconjure a time/place, focusing on a detail, an angle otherwise overlooked.

It comes back to purpose and intention. What is the point of historical fiction/poetry? Beyond remembering the past. What can poetry bring back to life that a good history book can't?

I'd love to read some new (to me) poems by poets who play with reframing historical narratives, who are incessant in that conversation between now and then. Any suggestions? Any other views?

The 3D of Poetry

2011-05-23T11:06:00.005+01:00

With my current maritime project well under way I'm reading all things sea.

The most recent being Jean Atkin's Lost at Sea (Roncadora Press) on left. Although I'm not convinced it's strictly a 'read', being a wonderful collaboration of text, texture and visuals. The poems focus on the Shetland Islands, their geology, their inhabitants, sailors, drowings and survivors. A subject made all the more visceral by the mashing of the paper's texture upon which the poems sit.

Which got me thinking about the spaciousness of poetry, what it is and how it is perceived. This may have been prompted by John Fuller's article in The Guardian this weekend about the riddles of poetry, or hearing about Bob Dylan's squirming under labels, preferring 'poet' to anything else - for its versatility. Although I'm not convinced his lyrics, taken bare, make such great poems... To me it seems the addition of music is what makes them poems - or how he delivers them...

Anyway. This illustrated book/pamphlet highlights to me the beauty of this flexibility. The block printed pages could be described as poetry themselves. Poems are two-dimensional sculptures, which, like a magic-eye paintings, grow a third, and possibly fourth, dimension upon reading. After years of writing fiction (short and long) when I landed on poetry being the best form for what I wanted to say (and how) I instantly felt at home in poetry. It was a homecoming - to a home I didn't fully recognise, but which had formed the peaks of my childhood landscape as an avid reader of poetry, nursery rhymes, Struwwelpeter, etc etc. Like Eliot's And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time ... except it was the start of my exploration...

As 'poet' I can continue to persue my eclectic practice. Making the films to accompany Host last year was a visual way of exploring the poems, a rewrite of sorts. Working with Mouthtrap stretches my musical muscle. Sailing brings out my artisan poet. Basically I get to muck about.

I love this meeting point that pulls such diverse strands together, and sends them spiralling apart - like a prism. It's this patterning possibility that excites me about working on multifaceted approach to one subject, or form. And by 'working on' I mean reading about too. So I welcome any suggestions for artists/books/films about the sea...

A Thesaurus of Readings?

2011-05-15T10:51:00.007+01:00

Two readings in one week is a rare occurrence for me. The first, up in Cumbria, with the wonderful friendly and attentive Poem and a Pinters was a lively evening - with a great spread of poets - open mics included Mike Barlow (reading his 3rd prize winning 'Mack' fresh from Strokestown) and Jennifer Copley, whose pamphlet Living Daylights (Happenstance Press) is a eerily fascinating and oddly funny response to death. I was billed with Graham Austin, whose relentless humour kept his set upbeat and me wondering why I had to follow him.

The same was true for the second of the two readings - at University of Cumbria, with the very marvellous and dry Andrew McMillan (pictured left, looking the relaxed and engaging performer he is). Andrew is an interesting deliverer of his work, in that he punctuates his elastic, insightful and often tragic poems withan irrepressible and irreverent wit. The result is unsettling, demanding attention and rewarding in a crystal sharpness. And the rest of the audience clearly found it so since they'd laugh at what seemed to be a punchline of a poem before their cognitives caught up with the jaw muscles and they realised they were laughing at loss or pain. I'm working with Andrew on his second pamphlet, due out from Red Squirrel Press in the autumn, and it was great to hear him read some of its poems out alongside older ones - the leap in confidence of form and breadth is thrilling.

And, yes, talking of leaps. I used both readings to test out a few new poems from Hawthornden. Always a nerve wracking experience - such fresh poems, but they're from the sequence that is rooted in The Bay, so I thought the audience would be at least interested in a perspective of their locality. Made more jittery given one of the poems is a villanelle - needing to be because of its subject matter - lighthouses - but written, rewritten and read with Donnie P's disparagement of villanelle's loud in my memory. And a quiet fear he might be right. So, all the more gratifying was the positive response to these newer poems - the audience being the true gauge of your work - and encouraging the continuation of the rigorous rewriting I'm filling my spare time with. We shall see how they're received further afield...

A Poem and a Pint

2011-05-03T09:41:00.005+01:00

This Saturday (7th May 7.30 pm) I'm reading at the Malt Kiln Bardsea, near Ulverston, alongside Graham Austin with music from Demix.

I don't often get asked to read to the north of here. So it'll be good to head in a different direction on the M6. Although it does mean I won't get to see this beautiful bridge as a signal for being Nearly Home.

My fellow poet, Graham Austin has been prolific: Fuelling Speculation (HappenStance, 2010); Poetry for Blokes, Volumes 1-7; Free Verse Tales from The Home for Historical Personages (2009); Golden Boy and Me, 1 & 2 (2004); and Not a Word (2004, containing the interesting silent performance poem). He's also published two booklets, Considering Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock (2009); and The Joker Playing Card (2005).

Demix are from Rusland, with "distinguished pedigrees in the world of rock, blues and folk, their music is distinctive, Sarah’s gorgeous jazz-inflected voice beautifully supported by Rod’s inventive guitar".

I'm looking forward becoming part of A Poem and a Pint's lineage. Its back catalogue includes Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie, Michael Symons Roberts, Helena Nelson, Christopher Reid, Clare Shaw, Andrew Forster and tons of other admirable poets.

The Annual Forgetting

2011-04-26T14:42:00.007+01:00

As I wrote out this title it struck me as especially pertinent since today is the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Is it part of our survival mechanism that us humans have crap memories? As if too clear memories might cripple us with fear for doing anything again. It's often the horrific stuff we wipe from our brains.

And to swerve in dramatic fashion from global horror to personal stupidity - this post is actually
about boats.

This weekend we recommissioned our boat and took it for its (and our) annual pilgrimage to Piel Island

What astounds me every year I get back on board after a winter overhaul is how much I look at and wonder what the hell is that for? It's like I've never seen certain ropes and blocks and pulleys before, as if I've not spent weeks tinkering, inching and hauling the wretched things for hours on end - sadly that was over six months ago and all I've done since is paint more antifoul on the hull, service the engine, clean and buff the topsides, measure the anchor warp and fart about with lowgrade general upkeep that makes me so grateful there are others to do stuff too - namely the electronics, which my brain baulks at.

Luckily once it's all back in place - some ropes checked and rechecked that they are in the right place - the actual handling of it seems remarkably easy - especially when we've light winds and an empty enough bay to enable us to sit on a mooring for the night rather than at anchor.

Which comes round to my old bugbear of muscle memory (instinctual memory) as opposed to intellectual memory (requiring a greater need of analysis). I do something often enough and it becomes part of my nature. If I don't do it that much I'm dealing with what therapists call conscious competence...

This analysis slides neatly enough across to writing. Listen to enough music, read enough poetry and the instinctual feel for rhythm becomes part of putting one word next to another next to another. While at Hawthornden I wrote a couple of poem drafts in iambs. I couldn't quite bring myself to go the whole hog into pentameter (more often averaging hexameters but not particularly consistent in that). I've read over the years of several poets who claim not to know where to end a line if they aren't writing in i.p. (which seems like a weak reason to choose that form, but who am I to judge?). Anyway, needless to say it was hard - cranky and simple language ran out along the lines, and yes, it sounded like someone talking. But I generally ask for more than that from poetry. One of the joys of rhythm for me is how it changes, swoops and stops short. It was good exercise I could see that - just as rerigging the boat is good exercise in remembering what all the lines and blocks are for, even if I don't use them, so I can coast out.

Really I just want to go sailing - on water or on irregularly lengthed lines. And really I want to write like Theolonious Monk plays ...

The Autumn Myth

2011-04-18T13:24:00.001+01:00

The Autumn Myth, by Joel Lane is a book for the brave. In it he reveals a country, its cities and people without soft focus and smiling faces. It is a raw vision. And truthful. His passion and concern for what lies around us radiates from each poem. The discovered skull in the first poem 'The Refugee' sets up the tone of what to expect: a frank and lucid description of someone stumbling upon a human skull that blossoms into a startling shaft of compassion and perspective: "It had found its way out of trouble… taken its place among rocks and stars."

The Autumn Myth is divided into three sections: the first focuses on the wider city and our social movements; the second is a more tender, slightly hopeful journey through relationships (though there is harshness here too); the third reveals the ghosts that occupy these first two. So the thread leads you round from actuality, to hope to longing, through wastelands, crowds, absences, reunions and quiet observations of behaviour.

But it's not all brutality. Lane dances between tragedy and delicate beauty (think Muhammad Ali). His world is not laden with metaphor, rather he writes in a straight and simple beauty ("a cobbled street ended in a broken ledge – "; "They had two children, both madness."; "and no-one has much to drink") that powers his stories, characters and beliefs.

His message is stark, his language accordingly hammers this home. It is this stripping away that makes reading the collection so compulsive. Each person, encounter and view rubs up against another, so the poems spit and crackle like fire the more you read. The outrage and quietness ensure you don't know what subject you'll read next, but it will invigorate. It is a most relevant book, illuminating how and where we live now.

Scissors, Paper, Stone

2011-04-14T11:28:00.003+01:00

I've not said anything yet about the ACE cuts - which have withdrawn 100% of funding to three Lancaster-based arts oganisations: Litfest (who I work for), Storey Gallery and Folly. More widely, four poetry publishers have lost all their ACE funding, as well as two national literature development organisations, a poetry festival and the award-giving Poetry Book Society. Of course other literature organisations have stepped into the spaces: newly-funded publishers, writing development agencies and festivals. It will be a new landscape. There is a part of me that is excited by the new contours, the new horizon (and I'm someone who really doesn't like having change enforced upon me), blended with a deep sadness at losing well-loved institutions. I think what's particularly hard as a Lancasterian, is that we've [potentially] lost our easily accessed, embedded arts scene. But not all of them. And we still have a vibrant, active population.

Carol Ann Duffy set this out in a poem commissioned by the Guardian on Saturday - focusing on the losses for literature. Another poet, Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, sent me this one:

Model citizens
A long view on the cuts to Arts Funding 2011

We trained years for this, strained
our groceries through austerity measures
till they were piquant with our pride

and self-doubt, we mastered our passions,
kept children where we could afford them
best: un-conceived and we anticipate

our rewards, we economise on dancing,
pare back on poetry, paint only the colour
of money and we do it all because this

is cutting edge patriotism, this morality
with a lazy eye. Our names died,
because nothing was done in them

but our legatees will never be confused.
The bankers will balance the deficit left
by every mark we let them stop us making

selling the few we dared. The profit: theirs.
This is the new patronage. Art from those
who can’t afford to eat is marvellously rare.

News yesterday that Zadie Smith's campaign to save Brent Library has lost. I wonder what the building will become used for? Such losses feel irreversible.

Unlike the arts. They don't need buildings. Bricks and mortar might help an organisation's identity, as much as it might restrict it, but the artists that feed and fill the rooms are not tied to particular spaces, and will continue to produce regardless of these organisations/buildings. Finding places to exhibit their work, to reach audiences will be harder. Not impossible. And maybe it will force the creators to embrace new ways to present work

Perhaps the work produced will be more urgent, more insistent, more challenging to the imbalance of government support, more eager to present the economic, social and individual values of art. More committed to reaching people and spreading the word.

Review

2011-04-11T09:21:00.004+01:00

"... excellent at capturing social and religious codes of behaviour, with the acuity of Austen or Alice Munro ... Host is a tactile and muscular collection, rooted in the complexities and textures of the physical world. Hymas has created fresh and exuberant work that, at its best, captures the awe of being alive."

Sarah Westcott reviews Host on Eyewear, here

Thank you, Sarah, and Eyewear

Hawthornden

2011-04-05T13:18:00.022+01:00

It was an intense and fruitful month including plenty of exhuberance, concentration, poem productivity, exhaustion, talk, crises of confidence, walking, thinking, reading, pudding eating, learning. But all you're going to get (for now) is pictures:

the castle from the south side of the Esk river

from the Lady's Walk

from the west

from the driveway

a particularly characterful rock

view from the study library (with our one day of snow)

we had a couple of weeks of daffs

caves beneath the castle

from the boot hall looking into the 'courtyard' (once the banqueting hall). It's a stone stag with antlers. Although plenty of deer bounding about the estate.

the front door (locked at 1030)

Bronte's door with previous occupants listed. Other names used to identify writers' rooms were Drummond, Milosz, Herrick, Evelyn, Boswell and Jonson. I was very happy with my allocation. Assuming it was Emily.

inside Bronte room

view from Bronte

mystery Wellington boots (very natty)

other fellows (l to r):Veronica Bennett, Jonty Driver, Colin Donati and James Brookes (with a front view of the stag)

Be Careful What You Wish For

2011-03-01T17:22:00.005Z

I co-wrote a live literature piece on this subject, back in 2003, when I was part of a collaborative writing trio, called 3dV. It was a playful, historical story about desire, fate and neighbours. The initial idea came from group member, Mary Winter, but since then the refrain rattles about my head on a fairly frequent basis.

The loudest was when I bought my share of the boat three years ago.

The most recent clanging has been set off by my imminent departure for Hawthornden Castle. I can't remember when or how exactly I heard of this place, but for many many years I've wanted to go. With the publication of Host last year I applied for a place there to work on a maritime project I've been researching. I was thrilled to be accepted. Now I'm just about to go.

For a month. Without internet. With four other writers. In silence (at least, from 0930-1830).

I have no idea how this will pan out. I don't have a clear ambition for the month, except to think, read, hopefully write something and walk.

I've just finished Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence, which was good, if accidental, preparation.

And so, until April ...

The Floating Man

2011-02-14T12:48:00.002Z

According to Ben Wilkinson, the best poems in Katharine Towers' the floating man are the ones about music. I wouldn't disagree, but I'm not sure I entirely agree.

I loved the vibration of piano and violin strings that resonate through this collection (recommended to me via FB - oh the sometime usefulness of the place - by Polly Atkin, thanks P) and the sense of light fingers at work.

But the poems that really drew me in were the archaeological ones: 'Amber' ('so frail a thought/ to hold against the slipshod years'); 'First Word' - of the digging up of a woman's body in Ethiopia; 'Found' - of stones 'we've wintered in the earth'; 'The Floating Man' - another unearthed body. I love that view of continual life, the profound belief in our heritage. In this book it's a world heritage, a historical interconnectiveness between us that's tremendously exciting.

These dug-up people are the main characters in the book. There are others, a 'you' and a 'we' here and there, but the life is in these ancients. A little like the vitality John Crace describes in Being Dead. A little like the buzziness of stillness - that monkey mind we all possess. There is, it seems, no escape from this pulse, this energy that surrounds us - wherever you are. Katharine Towers says she livs in the middle of nowhere. Her nowhere is everywhere, a continuous everwhere. She might be low in tone, but she's sparking with static.

What I also admire about the poems is just how subtle they are. A subtlety I can't even dream of. I am a tram-crash, multiple-house-selling, malfunctioning-glasses kind of dreamer. And as such the same kind of poet. A huge part of writng is accepting what you write. There is only a limited control you (or rather I) have over it. Sure I can work on improving, developing and stretching myself, but I only get to play the cards in the deck.

Which is why it's so good to be introduced to poets at the opposite on the of the spectrum to yourself (on many levels, I might say in this case). I don't want to write like Katharine Towers - a good job since I can't. But she has reminded me of my quieter aspirations. The joy of a quiet unpacking - like another Picador poet, John Glenday. I wonder what they were like as children at Christmas.

Cake

2011-02-08T15:05:00.004Z

Carrot Cake, in fact. The second issue. Slightly delayed due to leaves on the line, snow, gales (gusts of 50mph here over the weekend) bankers' bonuses and a missing cat called Tibbles. Available here.

It was launched last night in the rather wonderful Peter Scott Gallery. Always a good place to have a reading, especially for those of us who arrive alone. I especially enjoyed the exhibition: Conversations with the Collection. Ah yah yah rhubarb rhubarb, I said and it said Purple murple, churple churple. And we just got along famously like old friends amusing ourselves until the readings began. Or maybe not quite.

Staff at the uni had been asked to select a painting from the colelction and pair it with some possession of theirs. Simple. Fab. I think my favourite pairing was a Patrick Caulfield and Coco the clown (toy), but there were some great meditations on the security of a door (with a painting of a bricked in doorways) and the ever returning hope of allotment growing (paired with a surrealist image of apples tumbling out of wallpaper). So you're pulled into lives of others (through their writing/object) and then thrown out of it and given some kind of new 3D glasses to look at it again with the painting. Very absorbing. And as I said, perfect for the solitary poetry goer.

And then the entertainment...

Emily Bagshaw read 'Skinned Alive' - a quietly nasty love poem that reminds me of Cronenberg's Crash (this is a good thing).
Jacob Silkstone didn't read 'A Fall, as seen through footprints', his contribution to the magazine, but chose instead to share a laconic obituary that rolled around the sand and grit of life like high water in a spout hole.
And me, risking a brand new poem prompted by hearing on the radio that morning that 44000 books on Amazon are about the end of the world. 44000 books.
Are they all wild spectulations to pique curiosity? self-help/how-to survive guides? New mythologies? I bet there aren't many apocalyptic recipe books among them.
Jamie's missing a trick there.

Continuing on Artifice

2011-02-02T11:37:00.006Z

I went to see Zosia Wand's new play, Quicksand, at the Dukes in Lancaster last night. It's billed as a love story, in fact a tale of 'forbidden love', which I don't think does it justice. For me the most interesting relationship in the play was not between the young 'lovers' (which was touching then startling) but between a middle-aged woman and her 'home help-cum-companion". The dependency between them was subtle (the actress who played the companion was the shining star of the production) and uneasy, complex and poignant. Maybe it's a sign of my age, but the burgeoning love between the younger man and woman didn't engage me hugely.

Or maybe it's a sign of the actors' ages. It's a far greater stretch for younger actors to embody characters convincingly than older actors with more experience to draw one. Perhaps as my companion suggested the younger the actor the more they are relying on talent rather than acquired skill/experience. Talent being a far rarer thing.

The other element that grasped me was the difference in power between the internal scenes and the external scenes. The internal ones held all the drama, the intensity that I love in theatrical productions. The neat use of the round - switching from one 'corner' to the other to flick between kitchens - heightened the entrapment. It didn't work so well when we were asked to be outside: either on a hilltop or at the shore. The expanse of the Bay, its dangers and history, were all explained to us through the courtship and subsequent scenes, but I didn't feel it. Maybe the round wasn't the best device for this, maybe the set didn't allow for it. Maybe the switch between the realism of kitchen/table/mixing bowls and the abstraction of rock/floor tiles/picnic rug couldn't take us with it.

Which got me thinking about theatre and artifice. My tastes leaning far more towards the awareness of artifice. I like being asked to engage with a story through surrealimsm or obvious pretence, so that declaration becomes part of the emotional impact of the performance. By revealing artifice it is removed. I'm sure someone somewhere else has been far more eloquent on that. If so, please let me know where...

It brought up my thinking/feeling towards puppets and physical theatre (as discussed yesterday) - and how much easier I find that is to engage wholeheartedly (and I use that word advisedly) with a performance when I am projecting stuff on to it rather than just receiving an actor's interpretation. There's something strenuous for me in fusing that distance of stage and audience. Physical thatre and puppetry (spoken word stuff to an extent) don't allow my brain to engage; they require a far more visceral/emotional engagement, the medium is some how more direct, by requiring me to play part of the conjuring.

Which feels unfair to put in a post about a play. A little like comparing a piece of music with a poem.

So I'll end by repeating what I began with - the older relationship was the Quicksand. The kitchen table the island. It's worth seeing to watch the two women cling to their raft as the tide turns.

What's animation got?

2011-02-01T16:12:00.004Z

Last year was a bonus year for animation. What makes a truly great animiation for me is how it could not be humanised in anyway. Or to humanise it would be to lose something essential to either the story or characters. Like puppetry. And like puppetry it pulls in a greater level of investment from me to animate it than 'real life' stuff does. I think it must track back to my cave-living ancestors: that need to imbue everything with our image. It's putting to a good use our inherent need to humanise everything, our egotistical drive...

And so last year's pick of the bunch:

The Secret of Kells was beautifully drawn. A French Irish collaboration, it called to mind Scandinvaian design more than anything. The horror was terrifyingly delicate. T fecund nature more tangled and patterned than anything 'real'

A Town Called Panic was an hour of absurd mayhem; non-stop panic which I could not have coped with if there'd been a real person anywhere near it, but from a plastic horse, cowboy and indian it was just silly and more silly.

Mary & Max pulled off a touching, near-sentimental friendship with a grotesque love. The greyness of the claymation adds to the characters' intensity. More pain than laughter but I relished every ouch

How can such enegery be directed into poetry?

How many hats?

2011-01-24T11:28:00.006Z

This is my most recent business card. The wonderful Design Jack designed it for me. In fact he made it all from scratch; back when we worked together I asked him if he'd design the card and when I couldn't think what to out on it, he came up with Poet, Performer, Editor, Puppeteer. Seemed resonable. Accurate. And the design in total was so perfect.

Last year I needed more cards and was ready to add Coach (as a good indicator of a new strand of work). Which we did.

Now it's been so long since I've stepped out the house with a puppet I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable with that label on the card. It's veering towards fraudulent. My intentions are there. Mr Puppet is almost ready to start rehearsals, but to have that stated up there with poet/editor isn't entirely accurate. I'm a puppeteer on sabbatical.

I had to write a personal spec for a mentoring project I'm about to begin, and came up with: editor, commissioner, writer, digital publisher, producer, coach, opportunist. But I'd need a bigger card to include all of them. And they're not all relevant for business, more a description of my professional character. Which is how I see puppeteer at the moment - it is wildly important to me as a poet, and hugely inspirational to consider movement and animation as I write, but it isn't necessarily accurate as a business descriptive. Plus, I've always struggled with it coming directly above coach. The connections aren't good there ...

Freelancers need to cast a wide net, which is fortunate since that's my nature. I'm a multi-guy-roped girl: tons of string keep me anchored to the world. There is, however, always mileage in distinguishing between professional and personal labels, even when they start wrapping around each other. I need to do a bit of unpicking.

Or get my act together with Mr P and see what he can do

The Writing Smithy

2011-01-17T16:07:00.007Z

The Writing Smithy is a new venture I'm embarking upon with novelist Jenn Ashworth. Cue trumpets.

It's a mentoring and manuscript appraisal service for novelists and poets. And I'm all of a shiver about it for a few reasons:

1. Working with Jenn offers me a supportive, enthusiastic and professional partnership. And so I hope this will get passed onto the writers we work with.
2. I'll be at the coal face of writer development. It's one of my favourite jobs to work alongside writers on their writing, so it feels great to be setting out in that as a commercial enterprise.
3. It's a chance to work over a period of time with individual witers. For Flax I work with the writers we publish intensively over the period publication and then we cross paths every so often after that. This is a more continuous exchange.
4. I get to use my editing and coaching skills in one package, which feels like a creative opportunity.
5. It makes me feel intrepid in a way I've not been before. Always a good thing.
6. I love our logo: combining the flourishing nature of creative work with the hard labour of a smithy. Geddit?

Flash Flax

2011-01-10T18:19:00.004Z

Flax is dipping its toe into new waters for this year - beginning with 'Singles' in March - three separate e-chapbooks of short fictions, authors to be unveiled shortly - and an anthology of flash fictions coming out in April.

We're still accepting submissions for the Flash anthology and are doing so until the end of Jan. Details on this page of the Litfest website.

And then we're working on special commissions for the next few publications. But the biggest deal (for me) is that we're moving into e-books, which I'm sincerely excited about for the fiction, but a little more anxious about for the poetry and how we manage line breaks ... Watch this space

Grilled

2010-12-16T09:55:00.002Z

... by the Paxmanesque Jenn Ashworth
http://www.lancashirewritinghub.co.uk/2010/12/in-conversation-with-sarah-hymas/

Taropoetics

2010-12-13T15:12:00.010Z

I was drawn to Taropoetics by Anna McKerrow (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2010) because of the description of "an ongoing pschyopoetic landscape". For a lover of dreams (and occasional tarot card reader) this idea appealed enormously. It'd be like reading the cards, drawing narratives and dreaming all in one.

I had come across Knives, Forks and Spoons Press earlier this year through Adrian Slatcher's Extracts from Levona. A strange, oddly compelling book. It's a small press that specialises in 'linguistically innovative poetry'. You could argue that all poetry should be liguistically innovative, but let's not.

What you wouldn't argue is how gymnastically innovative Anna McKerrow's landscape is. The Tarot works to cycles and so it's apt her book works to the cycle of a year - weekly readings form the basis of the text. She spent another year collating the weekly pieces to produce the poems in the book.

Not that the pieces feel constricted by rewrites, deadened and deanimated by cutting and tinkering. They pulse on the page. Each respond to five randomly chosen tarot cards, and each create a bauble of shadowy images, filched from streets, the natural world, the body, art, religion and mythology in a bubbling chemistry. Together they make a crazy make-believe laboratory, full of vapours and coloured liquids I was a little wary of at first.

It took me a while to adjust to this world, to learn its language to get over the culture shock of unfamiliarity. I'm a lover of narratives. And this book, a cross between Jane Graverol and Carrie Ann Baade, requires a double take, a step back, a step forward.

Then a slow sinking under, a relaxation of comprehension and an open mind brings a different consciouness, a change of light:

"heart sink/barb cruel/soft eye risk/shadow sword stack cut/glass words/cut like a cat/thick pane/even the strongest men/soft spooled/fur will rip/dire musicality..."

Sensuous, edgy and funny. The path these poems take is narrow and foggy, in the sense that I didn't really know where I was going at any given point in them. This makes for a destablised read, but also a vital one, my senses fully alert as to what may rear up.

Because of the Tarot element, there is also a sense of the imperative:

"...buried skull/space waits to be filled/jewel cries victory/through rubble/ignore naysayers/their mouths are stopped up w/rocks/exploded/rare sunset..."

- a commanding overview, the seer remaining hidden behind the images. Again this distance is unnerving, but it somehow it feels safe enough (once I've accepted the jamming and spacing of punctation that inhabits this lawless landscape). Safe, if I am safe, that is. Reading and rereading the unpredictable scape made me feel exposed to suggestion, imagery and connections I don't normally make within my own life experiences. Stumbling between play and dance, I get the feeling Anna wants us to open new pathways. It is one of the roles of the Tarot.

Anna has managed to balance between the spiritual and domestic, the unsettling and safe, so keeping me reading through her year. As a lover of narrative I did feel the absence of shape to the book, but this is not a collection interested in creating form, this is an expansive book, its form is bound by our Gregorian calendar, but even that isn't evident, there is no neat seasonal references as we pass through the year. The expansiveness is generous in its welcoming spirit, calling you to enter.

Go on ....

Tailor-Made Poems

2010-12-13T14:26:00.002Z

A week ago myself and three poet friends sat behind a paper-decked table at Storey Gallery's Vintage Winter Fair and gave rise to Tailor-Made Poems: Whatever the occasion; whoever the recipient; we can write the poem...

We had a steady stream of customers throughout the day, wanting poems for their daughters, sisters-in-law, partners and wedding anniversaries. The deal? We asked them a ton of questions, elicited a bunch of information, went off to write it up into a poem, they got the chance to change a line or up to five words if they wanted before the poem was printed off onto a card with matching envelope ready for them to give to whoever. All for the bargain price of a pound a line. That day all our profits when to Amnesty - over fifty squid, so that was good feeling enough.

But I discovered two other great spin-offs from the experience:

1. The joy in 'letting go' a poem. We gave ourselves two hours to write the poem, so we couldn't get overly complicated, we had to keep to the brief, keep it tight and hold the essence of the giver's emotion in our care. All the poems we wrote we shared with another one of us for that objective overview before giving it back to the giver. All the poems did their jobs admirably.

2. The joy in giving poetry. When people returned for the poem, they were visibly moved and delighted by what they read - their words spun into a form; their emotion made manifest. It felt all the positive atributes of poetry were tangible in those few minutes. The weight of its value and power to connect.

We're planning more in the new year...

Anna McKerrow on Host

2010-12-05T12:23:00.002Z

Host has been treated a very contemplative review by the poet Anna McKerrow.

This is how she ends, but (and I guess I would say this) the rest of it is just as considered.

" ... These poems do not just host or reside; they make a connection, a highway of energy between the physical, the limits of the body and the indefinable other. The thing I like most about this collection is the so-much-more-than landscape they offer: more, they are a being-in-ness, being-of-ness, that I very much enjoy."

Thanks Anna

Watershedded

2010-11-25T15:28:00.005Z

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the diversity of poets participating in the Watershed Crossing Borders project last Saturday, we produced some wildly different collaborative pieces concerning the landscape we were in, and the borders we had crossed to get there.

Mike Barlow and Helen Mort were explicit in their meeting, walking from east and west to climb a fell, enveloping weather and sea, snatches of people and voice as they approached. Their images and voices overlapping eerily. Their piece rolled forward and then unwound as they described the descent, reading backwards through their work.

Clare Shaw was paired with Ben Wilkinson. Strikingly different perspectives. They had written in response to each other and bounced between political and lyrical, from humour to philosophy. It was a spiky piece that grew in energy as the contrasts built.

Steve Waling and Sally Baker were another bonkers pairing (well done to Andrew McMillan for thinking so tangentially on this!) - of the surreal and the linear narrative encounters of inhabitant and visitor to a small town. Steve Waling particularly feels like an inspired discovery for me.

And then me and Joe Hakim, from Hull. I immediately liked the idea of the coast to coast meeting we made, like the folding of the country so its edges meet. We walked for a couple of hours (Joe bravely in his city shoes) up the fell behind Mytholmroyd, then along the most muddy of muddy bridleways and down across fields to the canal, talking about what nature means to us, what made it natural (not a lot was the conclusion), the language of an area, and the fleetingness of it all - how nothing is constant. Great stuff.

We wrote separately but all the shared thinking and exchanged ideas came out in the subsequent pieces, which slotted together beautifully - a clash of concrete argument and metaphoric philosophy. We played a bit further about how we could develop that riffing of thought in the delivery. So there was a prologue of s/wordplay before the main event. I was pleased anyway.

Although once the heady excitement of fresh creation died down (ie, the morning after) I'm not so convinced by what I wrote, but in a way that doesn't matter - they were fresh, living things that we all created that day and then gave to the audience in the evening. Like the natural world, isn't it inevitable they withered a little after picking?

Watershed Landscape and other writings to order

2010-11-16T09:06:00.004Z

This Saturday I'm one of a team of Lancashire and Yorkshire writers (oddly it feels, I've been placed on the Lancs side; Dad will be turning in his grave) who are spending the day in Ted Hughes' boyhood home in cross-border collaborations to reflect, write and finally perform our responses to the very particular landscape of the Calder valley.

Naturally I'm nervous - improvising is never a piece of cake at the best of times and then to be riffing with a stranger - well, who knows what'll come up? But I'm also excited. For the same reasons.

Plus, the area is a second poetic home. It's where I first cut my teeth on the title of 'poet' - as Poet in Residence for Calderdale Libraries back in 2004. Part of which was to write a commission on reading. I spent a lot of time stomping about the hills and along the canal thinking about reading and books and looking at the steep slope sides there (upon which I still see claw marks).

I'm also interested in where I fit in the Lancs/Yorks geography. Born and living in Yorkshire until I was 18, but now living in Lancashire, and firmly attached to the NW ... Andrew McMillan (the lead poet on the project) has cast me Lancastrian. This doesn't sit so comfortably. In an odd way I feel more Yorkshire than I do English. And yet can't imagine moving back East.

And then there's that whole political sheenanigans with the upper reaches of Calderdale now technically Yorkshire but once Lancashire. How must they feel?

So I'm imaging some of the above and hopefully a lot more will shake out on Saturday. If you're interested in coming along to hear how, contact the Hebden Bridge Tourist Office.

This, in some respects, feels a breeze in comparison to what I'm up to on Saturday 4th December: being one of the Bespoke Poets in Residence at Storey Gallery's Christmas Market. Gulp. It was the Gallery's idea - sell poems as presents for people who have everything - poems about them.

The idea being we have a chat/consultation with the purchaser about the person in question and over the course of the day write a poem about them which we present later as a card. I have no idea how this will work out - if it'll be a string of arguments about what a poem is (rhyming and comic), if people refuse to pay for something they don't like, if I'll find inside me an endless source of responsive creativity, if people give us a wide berth ... But it'll be a new experience. And of course you're welcome. If only to buy a nice pair of earrings from another stall.

Quiet Houses

2010-11-09T10:22:00.004Z

Some time ago I wrote about making a poetry film with poet/artist Maya Chowdhry. Which so entertained me it sent me on a small film-making road movie of my own, celebrating and visualising certain poems from Host.

The film, Nothing as Quiet as a House, is now available. Yours for the snip of £2 (&p+p). Just email me with your postal details.

As is the synchronicity of the world, the week the copies of the dvd arrived I was given a poem by Wallace Stevens. (I am still reeling from the shock of not being that familiar with his work) 'The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm' is a repetitive yet developing meditation. Its beauty lies in its linguistical simplicity and conceptual illumination - for me at least. It is nothing like my poem.

But it has stirred an interest in me to find more poems about quiet houses - to think about all the different resonances of quiet contained in walls. Any pointers welcome.

An Elastic Sky

2010-11-05T10:11:00.003Z

Flax022 has launched!

As usual, the process was a twisty turny one: a worried sense of not getting a clear picture of the overall theme, but working on instinct; followed by close editorial work with the writers that sent me cross-referencing each poem to another one in the anthology; running parallel to that was hearing how the commissioned films were panning out; and then the launch. Which was a wonderful combination of live readings, film, scones and a capacity audience.

So, the end result: An Elastic Sky is an expansive anthology. Its poems orbit moon, kitchen tables, oceans, attics and football pitches. Throughout they show a tenderness and quiet ruthlessness for honesty in our disquieting world. It showcases new work from Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, David Tait, Michael Crowley, Ron Scowcroft and Jim Turner

You can read An Elastic Sky, Flax022 from the Litfest website.

As I mentioned we commissioned films to accompany the digital anthology. For me one of the main benefit of digital publishing is the ability to make multimedia work from the text. So, once again Morph Films were asked to translate a poem from each author into a film. These are the results:

Mark Strand on a Poem

2010-11-02T10:06:00.003Z

"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

Wasted on the Young?

2010-10-26T10:24:00.005+01:00

I've finished Wolf Hall. Yey! Whoop! Relief.

It was a far longer investment than I expected at the outset. Back in June. And while I am now free to tuck into the pile of novels on the bedside table I have already broken off to read Stig of the Dump, Treasure Island and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium - all these with only 100 pages of Cromwell's activities to go, because I just needed some fresh air.

Not that I didn't enjoy Wolf Hall. It was an intense experience, a delight to hang out with Thomas Cromwell's intelligence, and the scheming of Henry's court. But it was a little like eating a very thick, ery long piece of flapjack, made with molasses. I could only very small chunks at a time, which made the flapjack stickier over time.

So in the past fornight I've gobbled one of the latest Nightjar Press pamphlets and three novels: A Cure for Solitude, Now in November and Whisper my Name. Giddy. All these came to me from various sources and high recommendations. And all so different from each other: an intense eco-gothic thriller (a new genre, I wonder?); a drug smuggling thriller set in Prague, that despite some clunky writing was unputdownable; a Pulitzer Prize winner set on a farm in the American Depression of the 30s - drought drought drought, with equally pared language: "the heat was like a hand in my face, day and night"; a Victorian drama/mystery marketed for young readers that had me eating out of the palm of its hand.

So on reflection of all these it would seem I've rediscovered my love of books for 'younger readers'. Their appeal, I think, lies in the basic skill of telling a fabulous story, straightforwardly. No tricks or narrative gimmicks that jump out at me and get me involved in the function of devices. I also think all these books have clear, strong characters, that stand above the plot, that I empathise with: either their youthful confident derring-do (of Jim Hawkins), their confusion at the world (the grubby Stig), or their rather innocent selfishness (of the Victorian Meriel). All of these traits I can relate to, grimly accept and smile about as an adult that I probably didn't even recognise I had as a teenager.

I'm hungry for more. Any suggestions?

We buried the whale at night

2010-10-21T10:11:00.007+01:00

That, believe it or not, is the prize-winning short story of the Arvon Foundation's six-word story competition.

"The winning story was simple, yet memorable and enigmatic in its detail. It immediately conjured up a strong and unusual picture and by implication a setting.” Karen McCarthy Woolf

Random Acts of Literature: Flax Day

2010-10-18T14:55:00.015+01:00

It was always going to be a risky affair - although I don't think I fully appreciated the depth of uncertainty until the day itself.

Having asked all the Flax writers way back in January, or sometime last millennia, what they fancied doing for the annual Flax picnic I sifted through the various replies and came up with what I thought responded to virtually everything people said (even the translation suggestion if you consider a response to Storey Gallery's current exhibition as 'translation' - I know I know, Ian, that wasn't exactly what you meant...)

And then I went back to the writers and asked who would like to take part in scattered readings around The Storey, followed by lunch, followed by a collaborative writing hour, followed by a performance of whatever they'd just written. To my surprise 13 out of the 60 odd writers said they'd love to. The 2010 Flax Day was born.

Random Acts of Literature was advertised and we had a 'greeter' at the main entrance to The Storey to let visitors know what was happening in the building for the hour the (now eleven) writers were doing their stuff:

There were not so many visitors between noon and 1pm, but those that were innocently eating lunch or visiting the gallery seemed to enjoy what they heard. Bursts of appaluse bounced up the satirwell and down corridors.

And the writers did a brilliant job of supporting each other in what was a daunting prospect of guerilla readings, and a real sense of solidarity grew throughout the hour - or at least from where I was standing (or scuttling, organising lunch). Which I hadn't bargained for, but was a great foundation for the next stage of the day - writing something to read together at 3pm.

Another big deal. But again. They rose to it. And some told me afterwards - somewhat surprised - that they even enjoyed it. They'd selected words to all work from, including, moths (continuing the theme of pets, pests and prey of the exhibition), shabby and errr errr... well, I wasn't there.

So at 3pm I collected them from the writing and we trooped up to Storey gallery, where the artists of the exhibition, Uncertainty in the City (apt title for the day) were holding a symposium. We were due to slot into their afternoon teabreak, but had a few minutes to wait for this, so some took advantage to listen to more of the exhibition.

They slotted like moths slotted. Frittered and flickered between the eleven voices that read their pieces overlapping, then individually, and finally flutteringly, overlapping again. Tremendously moving, strangely. Or perhaps I was knackered. But the audience clearly enjoyed the performance (which unbeknownst to us was webbed worldwide live so lordy only knows who else heard it and what they thought).

For me, while this final performance was the natural culmination of three hours hard work, what was the real joy of those three hours was seeing writers who have all been published by Flax (and therefore very very diverse writers) come together, enjoy each other's company and collaborate on a small improvised project that was particular to that day, that place and those people.

Thank you, Elizabeth Burns, Mark Carson, Annie Clarkson, Kate Davis, Brindley Hallam Dennis (sorry you managed to completely avoid the camera), Rosie Garland, Cath Nichols, Gill Nicholson, Claire Massey, Carla Scarano and Ian Seed for being so game and positive and up for it.

And thank you, Simon Baker, for taking all these great pics of the day. And Sandie and Jan for being such superstar help to ensure everything ran smoothly.

an immaculate blend ...

2010-10-16T14:18:00.001+01:00

That's my poetic style and their superlative songs - according to the Southport Visitor

Lancs v Yorks

2010-10-11T11:09:00.008+01:00

This is my second 'vrs' entitled post. Suggesting what about my current state of mind?

But let's look outwards:

The boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire was the most apparent it has ever appeared to me on the M62 last Friday as I trundled over to Brighouse Library. I left Lancaster in bright sunshine, the radio talking of the 9000 pink-foot geese at Pilling (amongst which were 2 barancle geese apparently - some sure and steady observation on that), the Trough of Bowland sharp and green. M6, M61 blue blue skies making the motorway almost seem a pleasant place to be.

As the M62 rolled out before me, the Pennines proud either side,
the horizon changed.

In my rear mirror I could see the sun, the blue. Through my windscreen the green hills had been swallowed. Oncoming traffic glared full headlights. The white rose at the road side a little bleary in the muted landscape.

I entered a new land. Debatable as to whether it was God's own - depending which god ruled it, and your perspective on that god. But it, inevitably, had its effect on me. Athough not in diminishing my wonder at what I was driving through: glints of reservoirs were still visible through the low cloud, dim outlines of cars wheeled over the blurry horizon to my left. Everything seemed slower because of the rubbing of edges. Perhaps there was more caution around.

On reflection this change in mood - which remained as the mist for the two days I was in Calderdale (while Lancashire held on to the sun) suited my approach to the job in hand: a reading, a couple of critiquing feedback sessions/a writing workshop for the Calderdale Readers and Writers Festival.

Poetry, in all these manifestations, is a slow, often intangible process for me. I can't know the effect or impact of it either on me or others immediately. I can't entirely understand all of it (even what I've written) in any one moment. It does glint through blurriness at times. It's the glinting that mkakes me want to unpack it, reread, or rewrite it. But my thinking is so often muffled. It is a sense of something that requires development; perhaps I operate more in sensations rather than intellect, and poetry offers the chance to wed the two. For me, talking is the bright sure sunshine in a blue sky; where definite lines of shadows fall. Silence, the shrouded misty world of my interior, is far less certain.

Good to have the two. I think the three engagements in Brighouse and Halifax enabled me to share (although not so consciously) this with the people I met and worked with. Writing, like the driving over the Pennines, entering a new world of a new lumination, that cannot be shaped to any expectation, is best left to each individual to explore.

Good, too, to arrive home at 6pm on the Saturday to a fabulous sunset over the Bay where a low tide silked turquoise in the strangely sharp light.

On the Eve of My Mini Tour ...

2010-10-07T13:38:00.003+01:00

My mini library tour begins tomorrow and takes me through Brighouse, Accrington, Preston and Ansdell over the next few weeks - as part of Calderdale Festival and Lancashire's Family Festival. I'm looking forward to it. Although have what seem to be common reservations ...

Thanks for Jane for directing me to this.

Stop Press: John Denver is Alive!

2010-10-01T10:13:00.005+01:00

Well, in that I went to a read-through of the script on Wednesday night. It's been months since I've looked at the script - having presented it to Suzy (the director) back in March, so I couldn't really remember details of it. Although once they started asking me questions about them, the characters' motivations and quirks started to flood back.

So I settled in to listening. And how surprised was I? I hadn't remembered the humour in it. Not a poking fun kind of humour but the comedy that arises from two strangers meeting, coming from very different backgrounds, living with a very different set of codes, not entirely 'getting' each other, but connecting through one person (yep, Mr Denver).

It was a great experience to feel so removed from my work, yet recognising my intent in there as I listened, feeling these characters are very much separate from me, that the actors brought their own backstories and foibles to their speech and mannerisms.

And the cherry was hearing Chris Bannister sing the songs. I, as regular readers may remember, am not over-enamoured with JD's music, but Chris brings a stronger, perhaps rougher voice to the songs that moves me and - to coin a phrase Mr D might well use in a song - sends shivers down my spine. Which all serves to remind me that some of them are absolute classics. (And believe me, I can't quite comes to terms with having said that)

We're having an open session in December, playing more with the script and more actors so see what else can be drawn from it. The age of the characters are currently under scrutiny - one's in her fifties, the other in her sixties. One of theread-through actor's on Wednesday (24 years old) questioned how much she could bring to the role. She said she was fearful without having any experience to draw upon, she could provide only a stereotype. How is the company going to deal with this? When most of the actors in it are in their twqenties. Use them or invite older women to audition?

Personally, as I guess the audience will predominantly be older (a younger work-colleague, when I mentioned the read through, said to me, "he's a singer, isn't he?"), I'd encourage the use of older actors. Since we're looking at empathy between strangers. And one of the themes is death, dying and grief. Why shirk from that with younger faces? We get enough of them on the telly, in mags, ads for plastic surgery blah blah blah. It's the one inevitability and we're surrounded by images that hide it. I don't relish the prospect of being part of that. But (perhaps for the best) the choice is not down to me.

Audience v Sales

2010-09-29T08:47:00.002+01:00

October is full of library readings for me - it actually started in Bury a few weeks ago, and picks up again proper in Brighouse next week and then three more as part of Lancashire's Family Festival. The 'Bedrock' sequence in the book goes down every well with Library groups - playing on a huge interest in family research, life writing and social history.

And of course I love the interest in the poems and their speakers, wrapping them in a larger narrative that turns the sequence into a more tangible saga that always provokes questions about loyalty, existing family members, family politics and myths; the line between imagination and truth. A conversation most people are ready to join in with.

The other thing that characterises these readings is the low book sales. Some of the readings are attached to workshops on family research and people are coming for that primarily, others are attended by people who clearly aren't in a rush to buy a poetry book.

I've been interested in the shift in my perspective about this. Pre-book I loved meeting people and hearing their stories. I spent many years working with people on their life stories and memoirs and earnt a deep pleasure in being that resource and encouragement. Post-book I'm lugging a bag of them with me to these readings hoping that I might shift a few. And so am disappointed when I don't. And yet nothing's changed, not really. People still engage with my work. They're still provoked to talk about their own stories. They still listen to each other's memories.

So my disappointment is turning on my own attitude: while book sales are important, of course; surely the most important thing is the audience - and the privilege of hearing how my work spins off into people's imaginations and thoughts is huge - the candid talk I become part of is humbling. This might not be something my publisher can insert into a column, but surely it is my main reason for writing?

Elsewhere

2010-09-24T11:00:00.006+01:00

Tony Williams has featured me on his poetry blog here

And links to a film Richard Miles made of Godmother Tongue.

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

2010-09-14T12:58:00.007+01:00

The above is the cracking end line to 'The Snow Man' by Wallace Stevens, which I read for the first time last week. It jumped off the page of the book and punched me between the eyes, or perhaps not punched so much as boinged in a tantalisingly obtuse but deliciously lyrical fashion between my eyes, ears and brain.

And I thought the final line rather apt in regard to yesterday's reading in Saltaire. So in an attempt to behold the nothing that wasn't there and the nothing that was, I'll recapture the afternoon:

Beginning with a reduced duo - from trio - of poets. The absence of the third reader, amounting to approximately twenty minutes less, would, we decided hang in the air, giving more breath to what was read.
And so drove for two hours through siling rain and wind across the Dales to Shipley from Lancaster.
There are two Saltaire Bookshops: one a big bright shiny space in the Salts Mill that appears as much bookshop as parquet skate rink. (A new Olympic sport?); the other a smaller carpeted affair, in the mould of traditional second hand bookshop, on a major roundabout. Guess which one we were due to read in.
Not easy, since neither had posters or leaflets declaring the 2 o'clock reading.
One also had no customers.
Aha! Yes. Absence. Nothing.
The (embarassed) bookseller bought a book off each of us so covering petrol costs: a nil nil balance sheet.

A friend suggested it would have been worse if we'd read to a huge audience who hated us. But that would have resulted in a negative rather than nothing so not relevant to this story.

A Curious Shipwreck

2010-09-12T10:25:00.005+01:00

Steve Spence's first collection, A Curious Shipwreck, came to my attention for two reasons: it's shortlisted for the Forward First Collection award (what's it got?) and its title (oh no has he preempted my next idea?).

So I read it.

What's it got? Mayhem. A rolling stream of pirate activity, punk memorabilia, funny remarks on economics, playful references to Alice in Wonderland, great language, a strange coherence, huge references, and brilliant titles.

"When pirates can be recognised
by their beards alone, it's a sure
sign that they've reached cult
status."

Yet for all this there is also a flatness to the book. I couldn't find a shape to the sequence, or a distinction between poems. There is, by the end of the book, an overwhelming world I'd been drawn into but one with no holes or mountains. I guess this is part of the intention: the overall shape mirrors the individual poems - an intense layering of ideas that asks the reader to draw in their own connections, and for this I loved reading it but for this I also was left adrift. I do like the peaks and troughs of emotional variation, or right angles of perception, and was left without.

So has he preempted my next idea? No, thankfully. Although there is a part of me that would love to have written in this style. I love the drawing together of disparate texts, the gaps that made me stop up short and recircuit my brain. But while I love reading that, it is not how my brain works as a writer. I need some narrative, a story or connections of some kind. This style of disorder is tantalisingly difficult. For my brain at least. And as for subject matter, again no. His range is far wider than I could manage or am aiming for. Wider in that it brings economic theory, music, fantasty and myth together. The wideness I want to achieve in my next project is historical breadth, in the first instance, geographical in the second. Which isn't exactly true for the poem I'm currently working on.

Because of this meshing of history/geography I'm working on different forms I've not yet mastered: first off The Sestina: which involves the repetition of six words (as end words in a particular order) throughout the poem. Coo blimey. My first attempt was to go for chaos, for disorder and juxtaposition of elements (less historical and more domestic with a spread of geography). Which didn't work at all, as I found myself slipping towards cohesion and sense halfway through. Maybe the end words were wrong. Maybe I have to reconcile myself to narrative sense from the outset.

I've changed one of the repeating words. I've sat back and asked
Mr Puppet what he'd do in the situation (it may be for him after all). I've turned back to Treasure Island and remembered what it was I loved about the book (the voices/language in particular: "lively men, but careful" was one phrase I've repeating to anyone who has the misfortune to be in conversation with me for the past fortnight). I've put away the first appalling draft and gone back to large sheets of blank paper to rediscover what it was that brought me to the idea in the first place (oh the joy of random scribblings). I've promised myself not to tinker with small changes but view it as a whole. And now it needs to cook.

It will never be a pirate punk treatise, but I'm hoping it still has the potential to be endearing, askew and a tight contained world.

Cuckoo?

2010-09-10T16:55:00.003+01:00

As part of An Elastic Sky Flax022 we're working with Morph Films to make some poetry films to stand alongside the anthology. Partly to build on the films we've made previously - Finding a Language, Vanishing Act - and partly to encourage the poets to consider their poems from a different perspective.

All the poets have talked with the director James Harvey in the preproduction of their film to discuss images and where the emphasis lay in the selected poem, to hear James's take on the poem and throw their half-penny's worth into the mix.

One of the elements I love about film, is how its visual build offers a reinforcement or breaking of the established rhythm, which can create a wonderful tension that might have only been slightly evident in the original poem. Or, in the case of 'Cuckoo', a poem by Jim Turner, they're going for the fleshing out of the subtext of the poem. So, I'm imagining an odd juxtaposition of voice and visual in the final film.

So this picture should give you no clue whatsoever on the complete poem ...

Flipping Knickers!

2010-08-26T17:05:00.002+01:00

Ta Dah!

The next Flax anthology is shaping up very nicely - so much so that with the stunning cover image (thanks once again to Jonathan Bean) we've nailed that elusive title. Always one of the trickest elements of the production process once we have the writers and work in place. And invariably we go through some really bad ones - the penultimate suggestion for this anthology could have been a Bond film title I was told ... not entirely the tone we were looking for.

And so chocka with some familair names and less so - all providing strong and expansive work - we're delighted to be working with Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, David Tait, Michael Crowley, Ron Scowcroft and Jim Turner.

They'll be be launching the anthology, ahem - I mean, An Elastic Sky, Flax022 on Saturday 16th October, 5pm in the Storey Auditorium, complete with some films inspired by some of the poems.

It's going to be a goodie

On Brennan and Kinsey

2010-08-26T09:46:00.002+01:00

Guest reviewing elsewhere on a blog about books (try saying that after a chilled Rioja)

Anthologising

2010-08-20T11:23:00.002+01:00

I'm absorbed in my favourite period at Litfest over the next few weeks: anthologising and editing. We have finally made the choice of who will be in the anthology but not quite which of their poems.

My chief approach as editor is of cutting: both of the poems we select from original submissions, and of lines in those poems. I have a story about this, that when I heard made me feel quite benign in the scheme of things. Robert Crawford's latest book is called Full Volume. Because he had intended it to be a big fat volume of poems. His editor saw it differently. And now the volume comes from the potency of the poems' voice left in the book rather than their weight. Back to that old adage: less is more.

It is a tricky balance to strike - the poems are not mine, and nor do I want them to be. My intent as editor is to set a varied selection of work to rub up against each other, so illuminating the different voices that carry the reader through idiosyncratic landscapes and experiences. But I'd say a good editor enables the work to become more individual, more true to the writer's voice. Letting their light shine. And this means going back again and again to the poems themselves, and keeping myself out of them - asking how they stand alone, in sequence with each other and within the anthology as a whole. So it's a case of wood trees wood trees perspective. A merry dance in and out of the light.

And while I'm dancing (hopefully with the writers as fine partners) I'm also storing up images and ideas for the title and overall design of the piece. So far all our anthologies are pdfs and so allowed a lovely scape of images through the text, hopefully enhancing the onscreen reading experience, as well as exploring the underlying themes that hold the anthology together. The hardest decision is the title of the anthology and we normally have to go through a whole bunch of really bad ones before landing on the one that fits perfectly: in tone, image and poetry. Right now we have a sheaf of paper with a host of scribbled ideas - the bad ones that miraculously should transform into the all singing all dancing ONE in the next few days.

Wish them luck!

Brou Ha Ha

2010-08-16T09:44:00.007+01:00

Sunday I was in Crosby for its annual Brou Ha Ha, organised by Southport Arts. A summertime park arts in the afternoon type event.

I only found out earlier in the week that the audience was expected to be 'milling'. I should have checked that one out sooner. A milling audience is not necessarily going to be drawn to a bunch of poems. Especially when that audience is predominantly children.

See how much they're enjoying Mr Clown and his balloon act. My anxiety increases. I remind myself that in the booking I'd said my work is suitable for 14+, and try to ignore the average age of the current audience as 6+. All the same scan the contents list at the front of my book in case I'd forgotten I'd written some Roald Dahlesque funnies. Nope. Just a lot of religious stuff from lay preachers. I scan my set list instead. There are some funny ones, some peculiarities and some more straight forward narratives. Have faith, have faith, I mantra.

I'm aided by the MC who, when introduced to me says (in comforting Australian accent), "You mean the Sarah Hymas?" I am startled and probably look it. He goes on - "I Wish You Love is incredible, and I've seen your book. Oh wow... Oh great. I'm so looking forward to this."

But he is way way above the average age. The sock puppets are a resounding success. As is the drumming workshop and then I'm introduced. The MC resumes his enthusiasm and gives me probably the best and most sincere intro I've ever had.

And the audience applauds. So I do my stuff: funnies, fantasies, stories, weird ones, rolling along, focusing on those people (mainly adults) who are listening - or at least looking - and there are a few. Someone's even videoing me. Or maybe they're just watching the recording they made of the sock puppets. A few more kids come forward to sit at the front of the grassy auditorium just as I launch into Cold-Molded Wood, probably my favourite poem for performance. Which I love to end on - a sprawling ocean-going narrative that stops short of Coleridge but epic in its own way.

And the audience applauds. Again. And I sell a book (to an adult) and am asked for my leaflets (by children). So am heartened. Perhaps my poems can transcend, perhaps the movement, and rising and falling of voice can pull all ages in. But on the way home can't help thinking it would have been just the occasion for Mr Puppet and his unwritten show. Next year ...

Dog Days

2010-08-14T08:55:00.007+01:00

I don't know when the dustpan and brush were invented (answers below, please), but definitely before hoovers there were dogs.
Before hot water bottles.
Dogs.

For those two reasons alone, disregarding their ability to keep watch, be trained, their conversational habits, smiley mouths and loyalty, dogs would make fantastic crew.

Given my preference of sailing as one of three I'd pick Snoopy and Mutley as skipper and first mate.

I'd navigate.

There'd be a fair bit of derring-do, but we'd ride it and survive, maybe even get a few laughs, and not be particularly preoccupied by bravery or risk-taking.

I don't consider myself particularly brave. If a risk seems too great, I won't take it. Bravery requires a swallowing of fear.

And this is what I was faced with on the Isle of Man: no Snoopy, no Mutley, no crew whatsoever. I wasn't about to solo sail up and around Scotland. Considering the other option: stay at Peel on the west coast for the two weeks -

There were still risks to weigh up:
Aggressive gulls on deserted beaches
Excessive fish and chip shops
Preponderance of folk music
Marina chat
Turning into a disused railway spotting anorak

Offset by the comforts:
No tides
Reliance on a good knot
Buses
Footpaths

Trevor Matthews

2010-08-13T10:34:00.000+01:00

Sad news. Trevor Matthews, who Flax published in West Coast, North Hill, died last week.

His work was recommended to me by Mike Barlow and I immediately wanted to read more. As I did I decided he'd be a great contributor to the three poet book we were planning at the time.

As fellow poet Jane Routh says:

"As a writer he was gifted with something to say and the musical and linguistically ability to get it just right. He was overly modest about his own poetry, and I think you can hear this its quiet, poised and considered tone.

Thank goodness for the selection of his poems Flax published. Here is my warm-hearted and tender friend in 'My Empty Valentine'; here is his quiet wit and wry humour (‘September Harvest’); his careful observation, penetrating intelligence and sense of beauty. And here too, I see now, is a sense of premonition in poems about ageing and death.

'Lovely' is the title of a poem Trevor wrote recently (about meeting an aphasic); and that word becomes the implied answer to its last stanza:

And that is how it ends,
him gone, the river still speaking,
light leaving the fells,
the drift and shuffle of shadows,
and me wondering
if my language were taken
which one word might I hope to keep?

Trevor’s been a lovely friend with whom to share the pleasures of poetry. He read widely, delighting in language: we had many good talks about books. He recommendations were always apt."

Working with Trevor, as his editor, was a pleasure I won't forget. He was generous in his knowledge, open to debate about his writing and eager to support all we did to promote his work: recording Handing Down for Youtube and reading at the many events I arranged around the county. He was patient in the midst of my often over-enthusiasm and quietly adamant in the face of disagreement. Perhaps this was down to his long experience as a paediatrician. His passion for poetry, his and others, illuminated his work and I think his life.

If you would like to make a donation in memory of Trevor to his favourite charities: Water Aid and Smile Train.

Curiosity

The shelf held so many files, some of them labelled
Finance, or Gardening, or Income Tax
but the one that made me smile
was just called ‘Interesting Things’.

Afterwards I opened it, and there were
cuttings from newspapers, pictures,
little objects, stones, dried seed cases,
pages from guide books and obituaries,

things he would have looked into,
examined again, given the time;
at the end I found one, the black ink fresh
the last and lightest box of all

that read, ‘Still More Interesting Things’.

Trevor Matthews. 8 April 1934 - 3 August 2010

Breaking News: Mr Puppet has Hair Transplant!

2010-08-03T10:56:00.006+01:00

Yes, it's true.

Mr Puppet has ventured into the world of Robert Plant/Miss Haversham/Cher with his new hair-do.

When asked what the inspiration was, he said, "I was looking for an updated Stig of the Dump feel, a Robinson Crusoe with some glamour."

So, what's next for our unpredictable hero?

"Plastic shorts. Not Bruno-style, although I liked his braces ..."

We're on the edge of our seats ...

Review by Bookmunch

2010-07-31T11:27:00.002+01:00

Mr Bookmunch has this to say about Host

This Road We're On

2010-07-02T10:42:00.008+01:00

Another launch!

This time, the latest Flax anthology - number twenty one, key to the door, and all that ... This Road We're On is our first anthology that has a connecting theme - relationships, specifically the pot-holed journey that is our search for companionship, love and acceptance.

It wasn't intentional, just the best stories that rose to the surface of submissions all happened to be concerned with them, so we organised them into an arc and hey presto! The supremely talented Carys Davies wrote the introduction, raising the point that we're continually interested in how relationships work, or don't work and the communications that occur within them.

These stories offer a spectrum of interpretations, although, sadly, none are particularly positive. Is this tragedy/conflit an essential element of fiction? Do we, as some of discussed on Wednesday night, not want to read about people happily living together? Is it true that "all happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion"?

Read the anthology and let me know ...

Annie Clarkson, one of the contributors had this to say about the launch itself.

The cover photo is by Jonathan Bean and is of the old lancaster Regal cinema wall - the poster and the wall no longer there - to make way for a new Travelodge - make of that what you will. I absolutely love it. As ever, coming up with titles for the anthology was hard work, but once we'd landed on the notion of journey and then roads and then the slow rolling rhythm of This Road We're On, the designer, Anat Kaivanto, had little difficulty selecting this pic of Jonathan's. I love it - for the quality of image, for all its local associations, for its metaphorical resonance.

Host

2010-07-01T12:14:00.002+01:00

The title poem get the film treatment

French House Party

2010-06-28T17:02:00.006+01:00

While England were proving they're not a world class football team, I was wending my way along the Canal du Midi to work, every morning, peddling as elegantly as I could in the beautiful shade until I turned off the canal for the last five minutes towards Domaine St Raymond, HQ of The French House Party. Then I'd be in hard hitting sunshine, slightly delirious before facing the residents, my students, and our day of reading, writing and feasting ...

We had eight people this year - a mixed bunch as usual - ranging from 36 years old to 77. And naturally, considering the hugely diverse characters, they took a day to settle into their group dynamics and finding that they could get along just fine and dandily. I'm sure the fantastic food and local wines helped even the hardened independent to mellow into idle chat at the pool side.

And of course the writing workshop. Our beautiful classroom (yes, that's it to the left) meant we had the space to talk, stare into space, think, imagine and write. It's a beginners course, and I try to accomodate whatever people what to write, short stories, novels and memoirs - covering characterisation, creating atmosphere and plotting. Which generally works well, and opens people up to different ways into writing.

This was the third year I'd been there and the third year nobody was interested in poetry. And the third year I spent one morning bringing poetry to the table and while not asking them to write poems, at least asking them to read them and to consider what makes for the strength of language. By the end of the week, I had at least three converts to poetry writing and two more who wanted me to reccommend a good anthology. Ahh, the satisfaction.

And so, despite the 38' heat that meant I didn't get any of my work done in the afternoons (as usual I'd taken a bunch of paperwork, notes and books to work through), it was a productive week, meeting and getting to know people I'd never normally cross paths with, recalling schoolgirl French and eating the most fabulously ripe tomatoes.

This is what one of the participants made of it last year

Word Soup - with or without cheese?

2010-06-22T08:59:00.005+01:00

This is from the Word Soup first anniversary celebrations on Tuesday 22nd June

Extra Celebrations

2010-06-22T08:43:00.006+01:00

While I'm busy sending the book out into the world, another book is being emblazoned around towns ... Word Soup, the Preston-based live literature night is one year old and has published an anthology to trumpet it.

And to trumpet that they've been illuminating buildings with poems from it. It being midsummer I was tucked up in my bed by the time they shone out (needing the dark to do it) but the kind people sent me these pics.

And then to trumpet the trumpet's trumpet they've got an evening of reading with a whole host of bods featured in the book tonight at The Continental Pub.

And what I'm especially excited about (not so much the taking part - I've had more than my fair share of readings recently, plus I've a six o'clock plane to Toulouse tomorrow for my luxury is-it-a-holiday-no-it's-work-week) is I'm reading with a bunch of fantastic Flax writers, who've I've worked with over the years. It'll be a thunderous round of back slapping and wide-grinning for the evening. And some great stories and poems too. Of course.

Launched to the North

2010-06-18T13:20:00.009+01:00

A little like pictures of people dancing, photos of poetry readings aren't the most exciting, but I like this one cos it's got all four of us on stage. Naomi looking a little startled at what we're doing to her poem - the three on right of the stage are Mouthtrap riffing off and mashing up her poem as a cute segue from her reading to Mouthtrap's slot.

It was a subdued couple of numbers from us (probably because we'd had a bewildered reception on Sunday in Hebden Bridge), but beautifully paced and measured, lots of space and listening - by the audience as well as us. Lovely lovely. We were very pleased. As was I.

So that was the icing on an already fat, cream-slathered cake of an evening. A massive turn out (standing room only when Beth set the evening under way with two tunes) with people I'd not seen in years turning up, and people who hadn't seen each other in years catching up, and other people coming from all corners of the north to see people they'd never met. And everyone willing to participate in Steve Lewis's rendering of a couple of poems of mine, as requested. Bravo bravo for audience participation!

Between Beth and Steve was Naomi Foyle, who treated us to a short rendition of Grace of the Gamblers, a ballad of the pirate Grace O'Malley, as well as a bit of football (in a poem) and a trip around Sefton Park, lavishing us with the diversity of her new collection, The World Cup. Me too. Surrounded on stage by those who have been so important in my journey as poet and performer. Happy with my own selection that avoided all poems that might get me blubbering, although that didn't stop others ...

It was a gorgeously hot June evening, so the Maritime Museum's jetty was a brilliant outdoor space to spill out onto before and after the immaculately judged set. I couldn't have asked for it to be any different or better.

What support. What enthusiasm. What artistry. A great send off for the book. Bon Voyage! Good luck, you!

"It was such a lovely launch - I loved how all the different readers / performers fitted together... as important to you and your work and I LOVED Mouthtrap. I couldn't imagine what it was going to be like, but you all looked so happy and playful and pretty up there it made me smile. It sounded great and worked so well against Naomi's poem as well.
I want my book mouthtrapping now! I could have listened to you for loads and loads longer."

"We had a lovely time. Well-organised, and a showcase not only for poetic and musical skill and depth, but lots of warmth and charm."

"It'll look good to say on the CV to say that there were people queueing outside the door!"

"A great launch and lovely people."

Lost Keys

2010-06-14T10:49:00.002+01:00

Another film from Host. What fun I had with this.

Launched

2010-06-08T21:47:00.004+01:00

So, with the mesmerising help of Linos Wengara Magaya and Los Bonobos, Host and The World Cup were sent on their merry way into the world.

Barely proof, but a photo from the end of the evening: I look slightly uncertain, possibly a little overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and success of the evening, while Naomi is clearly still buzzing from being both mc and reader.

The Iambic Arts Theatre was jammed with people I knew (from years ago when I lived in Brighton) and people I didn't. Jammed and buzzing. As much before with anticipation as after - with satiated relish? It was the sort of audience you dream of - superbly attentive during and very vocal in what they enjoyed afterwards. So I had some good conversations about sailing and monologues and what makes for quality in both.

Very odd now, four years in the making and it's done, bound and separate from me. Time to hear what other people make of it ...

Neither Up Nor Down

2010-05-31T18:50:00.003+01:00

Not so much a film, but a treat from Mouthtrap's first outting back in March.

And Elsewhere

2010-05-28T09:03:00.004+01:00

Michelle McGrane, tireless promoter of literature, has featured me on her wide-ranging blog, Peony Moon

Host

2010-05-26T12:50:00.005+01:00

And it's out of my hands. And not yet in them.

I never enjoy the proofing stage as an editor, the fine toothcombing and blurring of sense that comes from checking over and over again for rogue commas, consistancy with italics and lah dee blah. All very wonderful things in their own right, essential to meaning and tools for play. But when it comes to signing off copy, saying all is absolutely perfectly as it should be, then I forget the wonders and go to jitters.

Make that tenfold filibrations when the job is transferred to my own work. You've already been through the poems a zillion times for copy edits and tweaks in their lifetimes, so to then bring the cool eye of the proofer to them is like asking an ice cube to help a polar bear get home. Pass the gin.

But done. With the help of the fabulous designers at Waterloo and thorough friend Catherine who just happened to be staying in perfect timing to check over my checks. It's back to relishing the accomplishment and promising myself not to open the book when it arrives at the only page with a missing capital or a misspelt reference. Not that that would be possible of course because everything is absolutely perfectly just so. Chink chink

Echo Echo

2010-05-14T17:57:00.002+01:00

Poem film number two, Echo Sounding, from Host.