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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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Exposing yourself

7 Oct
Little Usherette

Little Usherette

So I had a quick nap in Hilda’s Lounge, as you do, then back to the tent-palace, as you do. But this is Poetry Swindon Festival and things can get way more surreal.

Jill Abram and Jinny Fisher were the warm up acts for an ‘industrial strength poetry evening’, according to host Cristina who tripled up as heckler and cheerleader.

Cristina told Kim Moore, joint poet-in-resident, to read the one about the scaffolder. This one is a ‘psalm’ to her dad as it turned out. Her one about the Trumpet Teacher’s Curse (she’s just quit after 13 years to do a Phd) made me laugh and nod as she listed her primary school students’ crimes against brass instruments and the subsequent list of things to inflict on them, such as practicing for hours without improvement, then perform at an empty bandstand in the cold and rain. Kim told us she read it to her mum, a shoe factory worker, who said, ‘that was my life for years’. It took a moment for the inference to ripple to the back, but I laughed right away having a mum who sometimes failed to plaster a smile to her face during school concerts (and being a mum myself). Continue reading →

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The Spirit of Keats

4 Oct
Tess with Dog
Paul Turner and Vivien Munday

Great idea. Keats poetry set to music, threaded through with ghostly story.

The first drama was how my friend Tess could avoid the rustling of a bag of Haribos during the performance. We didn’t think they’d appreciate this added sound effect. She solved the problem by emptying the sweets into her handbag. (I hope she found all of them. Few things worse at the bottom of a handbag than old sticky sweets; perhaps bruised pears and spare toddler’s pants that fly out in a meeting when trying to find a pen – but that might just be me.)

If you know anything about poetry or remember it from school, Keats is almost certainly in the running order, so this came at it from a fresh angle.

The singing was impassioned, the piano beautiful but the story left me a little cold. Continue reading →

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Open to interpretation

3 Oct

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‘I’m on that team
That says go forward
With a Head Full of Steam’

Martin Malone cut through the dark of a busy Central Community Centre by announcing the results of the meat raffle; prize a lamb shank.

Mysteriously no-one had the winning ticket, I’m sure that a prime bit of topside made its way back up north with Mr. Malone too.

Martin is a poet at home in a Swindon skin and there was a two-way warmth between performers and audience on the night, poetry the go-between, The Interpreter’s House the common denominator. Continue reading →

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What if you threw a poem and no-one came?

2 Oct

trump

Dada Generators at the Museum of Computing

Sometimes no matter how great that you think an event is and is going to be, it doesn’t work.

Coming from the background of ‘why don’t we just try it?’

I am very used to my imagination colouring in the feverish excitement of eager punters in the build up to the event.

Only to find that come the great day I am talking to someone who thought I was the Tuesday Yoga teacher.

Or my audience is a drunk straight out of an all-day bender in the pub.

So there I was feeling welcome but uncomfortable, admiring the amazing innards of The Museum of Computing with no lithe bendy leotarded companion or beer breathed bore for company, just me and Dada, some computers and the marvellous Simon Webb, resident hard drive and RAM of the museum and all round hero, pfft. Continue reading →

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Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, In, In, In

2 Oct

maggie-harris-pic

Photograph © Jennifer Berry 2016

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 →

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Worksocks

1 Oct

glass-half-full

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 →

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I hear voices, I see visions

1 Oct

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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 →

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