Tea & Cakes with Maggie Harris
Maggie Harris had already proved to be a warm and enthusiastic workshopguru at the Savernake Social Hall, what could make it just that little bit better? Nothing at all? No, tea and cakes of course.
Reading a broad selection from her extensive back catalogue, Maggie treated us to poetic insight into her forty years living in the UK and her constant exploration of her Guyanese roots. Continue reading
Maggie Harris Workshop
I’m not a fan of workshops; they are usually just an excuse for me to buy a new Moleskine which I will then abandon the next day.
I’ve been to some great workshops, but I’ve also experienced four-hour sessions of Poetry By Numbers which have made me want to chew my arm off.
So it was with some trepidation and a clam shut mind that I racked up to the Savernake Social Hall for two hours with poet Maggie Harris. Continue reading
Elephant’s Footprint – Poetry Films
Bringing life to life is more difficult than it looks.
Who is the reader, the listener, the viewer and really so what?
The way I look at life is different to the way you look at life – I would imagine; I can send you a print-out of my browser history to confirm this if you like.
I would bet my bottom Euro though that we both review life as a sequence of images with an extremely unAttenborough totally unreliable narrator intoning apparent fact ad nauseum.
Poetry Films make the voice, and the visuals converge, and the results hint, suggest and deliver a particular type of poke in the ribs that they couldn’t do on their own.
The films made by poets from Swindon and the elsewhere that exists beyond the town were of high quality and obviously the result of some hard graft coupled with effective mentoring from Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron of Elephant’s Footprint.
Unfortunately, I was buttonholed by my unreliable narrator two poems in, and he just wouldn’t shut up. Continue reading
Last night, the Valley Press Poets shrugged off poetry’s sometime image of daffodils and pretty birds and found the fun in Gothic horror and time-travelling violence.
Kelley Swain from Rhode Island USA, for instance, is very well travelled in the nude.
I’m not being rude.
She’s a life model, immortalised on many walls in paint, pencil and charcoal (or forgotten in a dusty attic or moldering shed). How many versions of her are there? Up it sticks a couple of graphite fingers to selfies, anyhow. Continue reading
Those China eyes are staring at you again, well one of them is, the other gazes sideways at someone on the other side of the room, an admirable bit of ocular multi-tasking for an inanimate object.
A China paw gloved by a China shoe pokes from the folds of a China robe as if this Swindon Sphinx has once more lost the straightforward pathway.
But this is not a straightforward place, nor is it a dark wood, it is Poetry Swindon Festival being five years old.
You had an unusually hectic Wednesday night, you left your phone charger on the train, you feel washed out and tired, your mood dial is flicking its eyelash in and out of grumpy.
Like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn, a great friend appears at your side, you met her through poetry, and she has held you up when the mood dial mires in the red.
She offers you the clothes of a poet and you put them on, you don’t want to be a Spaceman or a Medieval Knight today, you want to be a poet.
You wonder where these clothes will take you? Continue reading
Day four of Poetry Swindon Festival
Events take place at Lower Shaw Farm
10:45. Arrival. Hellos, how are yous, coffee, rush (late) to poetry mosaic workshop with Lynette Thomas of Artkore. Manage to cobble together something that started out as ‘life is fun’ and ended up some dark comment about fashion models. Chronicler Pete later says it looks like a bunch of random words and magazine pictures. Other (more enlightened people) say ‘oo I like that one’. Admittedly their favourite thing might be a bunch of random words and magazine pictures.
The sun is shining, gracing us with its warm presence, autumn is only a state of mind. Behind us is the old cow shed converted to event room, and accommodation rooms. In front of us is the covered play area with mattresses and hammocks. All around are flowers, somewhere to sit and chat; ducks and chickens peck round. A fox gives them the willies. Continue reading
“I’ve judged a lot of competitions,” said Battered Moons poetry competition judge, Pascale Petit, “and this was of the highest standard.” Big praise at the Battered Moons finale, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery part of the Poetry Swindon Festival, coming from this year’s chair of the judging panel for the TS Elliot prize.
700 entries this year. The seven winners must be well pleased with themselves. Cristina Newton, co-judge and organiser, said, “You don’t know how happy you [poets] made my summer…and so challenging.”
Here are the poems and comments, summarised Robert Vas Dias, parataxis-style*: Continue reading
“I discovered my Englishness through living on a boat,” said poet and canal dweller Jo Bell, who has recently finished a three year stint as canal poet laureate.
We sat on Dragonfly, a boat on the Wilts and Berks canal just a mile long and slightly curtailed due to bridge renovations, for All Afloat! part of the Poetry Swindon Festival.
Swimming happily (I guess) alongside was the teenage offspring of Mr & Mrs Swindon, adult-sized but still-grey cygnet. Recently Mr Swindon was sick. Canal enthusiasts clubbed together to send him to the swan sanctuary for six weeks to recover. Meanwhile Mrs Swindon found a new love and Teenager was born. Chris, our boat host, explained this is contrary to popular opinion that swans mate for life. Mrs Swindon now divides her time between Mr Swindon and her lover (Mr Wroughton? Just a suggestion) I think this is unfair to suggest Mrs Swindon is feckless. It’s not like you can sit a swan down and explain her hubby is off to hospital for a month and a half. She probably thought he was dead. Though the mourning period was arguably a little short. Continue reading
Robert Vas Dias in the Cow Shed at Lower Shaw Farm
A lesson in perky reading, I had to remind myself that although he sounds American, he’s lived in England for a long time. So it’s not weird that he writes about teapots and their murky colour: ‘A brown that insults taste but forestalls criticism.’ Continue reading
This morning at a workshop at Poetry Swindon Festival, poet, publisher and teacher Robert Vas Dias had us creating a poem through the powerful blending of a Nigel Slater recipe and a Guardian news report.
Some lines were picked by pre-randomly generated numbers (each line on report and recipe were numbered), some – like the one below – were picked by way of a roulette wheel. Continue reading
Festival Chronicle 