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When your mother calls you smart she doesn’t mean it as a compliment

9 Oct
Mona Arshi
embarrassed daughter

Mona Arshi was really pleased to be at Poetry Swindon Festival. ‘I wanted to come here for so long,’ she said, looking around at the Tent-Palace, ‘This is beautiful.’

She brought her husband and two daughters. The older of the two also looks smiley-faced but the younger lounges on a pouffe with her coat mostly covering her face. Mums are meant to be embarrassing but when your mother is a poet who dedicates her work to you, that’s another level, ‘When your mother calls you smart she doesn’t mean it as a compliment.’ Continue reading →

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The one that didn’t get away

8 Oct

Ken Evans.jpg

Ken Evans – 2016 Battered Moons Competition Winner

I am the wastepaper basket under the desk of a tired poetry competition judge and I’m full.

I’m waiting for the black bag to come again to release me from this heavy weight of 40% hope and 60% despair that has me brimming over. 

But this time it’s different, I can sense a poem being uncrumpled, flattened out and reconsidered.

It is, of course, the winning poem and I am glad to give back for once.

Daljit Nagra hasn’t got to where he’s got to without being a disarmingly honest and funny bloke. Continue reading →

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‘She wasn’t an easy person to work with wasn’t Hylda’

8 Oct

That’s Hylda Baker of course.

Well it is according to Keith Hutson who staggered onto the Arts Centre stage on the wrong end of a theatrical push.

With a writing career encompassing Les Dawson skits and Coronation Street episodes and an enthusiasm as contagious as a double entendre titter, Keith read poems delighting in the days of Music Hall.

‘Tom Platt and his Talking Pond’ got an early mention, a mention that needs mentioning more often,’Tom Platt and his Talking Pond’ ponder that.

When will we hear the like again?

‘A lot of their acts were bloody awful but that made them all the better’ says Keith, whose brilliant delve into the nether regions of a simpler, more complicated, life, earned its own wolf whistles and guffaws.

There were tales of everything, from the tragic to the tremendous; Lottie Collins who literally danced herself to death, Ronnie, whistling, ‘in a state of grace’, to Marilyn Monroe.

The tragi-comic nature of Keith Hutson material coupled with faultless delivery, showcased a brilliant sequence of poems which scored a direct hit on both heart-strings and funny bone.

Keith Hutson’s Troopers took place at Swindon Arts Centre, 8 October 2016, part of Poetry Swindon Festival.
His poems have just been released in the pamphlet, Routines, published by Poetry Salzburg.

Chronicle written by Michael Scott.

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More exposure

8 Oct
Andrew McMillan
Simon Kirwin

I really liked Simon Kirwin’s poetry (his Sleeford Mods introduction, Lion the f**king cellar Lion, the political circus clowns – honk, honk!) but all I can think about is Andrew McMillan urinating. Okay so not him, exactly, but well. Continue reading →

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Ourselves and the Shoemaker

8 Oct

file_000Anybody who thinks poetry is a load of cobblers should listen to Linda Black and Carrie Etter, the poetic inhabitants of very different worlds but each with their own sparse word outlook.

Co-editor of Long Poem Magazine and a brilliant illustrator, Linda Black read first from her Shearsman collection Slant and took us on a dazzling trip into the dark woods of language alongside Elizabeth Bishop and Virginia Woolf.

With footwear that evidenced a special relationship with the Shoemaker himself, Linda led us her way. Continue reading →

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MUM STOP HERE

8 Oct

Erotic poetry workshop.

So, I got this. This ain’t my first rodeo.

Then Carrie Etter threw a suckerpunch, not happened since the Man for a Day workshop.

I’d been asked to write about a part of my body in an erotic way, a loving way, give it magic powers and turn this into a poem. Continue reading →

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Are you a florist?

8 Oct

 

Alison Brackbury and Anna Saunders at Matthew Caley’s reading.
Mark receives instant inspiration from Matthew Caley

Matthew Caley told us, ‘There’s a lot riding on you as an audience.’

It turned out he wanted a florist in the audience. As he suspected there was not; there never is. He concluded that florists don’t like poems. This was a big build up to a tiny tanka, a haiku with obesity he said.

He and Alison Brackenbury gives the kind of confident from-memory reading where the subject matter is a kind of bonus; it’s a pleasure to listen to their voices and intonation.

Alison opens with a unexpected tribute to Swindon. Not because she doesn’t like Swindon but because I didn’t expect that poem – about rock and rollers who died in plane crashes – to end that way.

Alison talks about horsey love, climate change, the spring at a Roman villa, extinction. And. No.

‘Happiness bored you most of all,’ she said.

Matthew Caley and Alison Brackenbury read at Poetry Swindon Festival, 7 October at Richard Jefferies Museum.

Chronicle by Louisa Davison

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A brush with Kim

8 Oct

We started with an American sentence – 17 syllables – with an encounter with a person.

It’s like an extended Haiku, and for someone who tweets for a living, a fun challenge:

– I ran across the road avoiding a car; the driver shook her fist.

– Jumped into Coate Water to save a child, but it was just a coat.

– The human condition, the past, another country in his diary.

As someone said later, Kim Moore, poet-in-residence, worked us hard in her workshop, Encounters and Collisions, with the right balance of poems to read, discussion (without too many tangents) and work created. It’s amazing what 17 syllables can bring out from a bunch of writers – cockroaches and Cathedral cheese, cockney Albino, friends for life, squaddies and shoe-buffing dogs, phagocytes. Continue reading →

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STICK IT IN YOUR PANTS!

7 Oct

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The night before at the Ruth Stone House Party – also featuring lots of poets – the intros seem to go on f.o.r.e.v.e.r. and basically a long list of publications.

Thankfully the point of Quiet Compere was for the audience to decide if the 10 poets x 10 minutes were any good by listening to their poems. And so our first half host, Sarah L Dixon, read a couple of her poems and introduced poets by way of their name only.

Sarah’s The Source was probably the muckiest poem I’ve heard about a marriage breakup – a horrid smell leading to a cloth in drawer for a collection of, ahem, male excretions. Continue reading →

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Loss into growth

7 Oct
Ruth Stone is looking at me

Ruth Stone

Poet Ruth Stone lived to 96, transforming all losses into movement, into growth, so said Stone-enthusiast, Chaucer Cameron who edited Salt on the Wind: poetry in response to Ruth Stone. She lived in a little house in Vermont with no running water and wrote about the everyday and her family, and science, civil rights and even horror. Continue reading →

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