Tag Archives: poem

Naked Violence Travels – Valley Press Poets

30 Sep
Valley Press Poets Jonathan Davidson, Kelley Swain, Melane Engelund Photo (c) Jennifer Berry
Host Sam with Dog Photo (c) Jennifer Berry
Kelley Swain the Naked Muse Photo (c) Jennifer Berry

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 →

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Alone unwatched?

30 Sep

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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 →

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Youth Slam!

7 May
Yellow Zebra ©Calyx
Trembling With Confidence ©Calyx

Chronicler Milo (9) reports from Swindon’s teenage poetry competition, Youth Slam.

Continue reading →

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Battered Moons at the Swindon Festival of Poetry

7 Oct

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This year’s poetry competition didn’t quite go to the moon and back but they certainly made it to the other side of the world.

Judges David Morley and Cristina Navazo-Eguia Newton both took the entries on their travels. On the plane to Australia, David shared the poems around the passengers and asked them to read the poems aloud. Cristina took hers to her native Spain.

A good proportion of the winning pieces were about birds. “I’ve got a feeling some of the entrants researched my interests,” remarked David who’s into ornithology. Continue reading →

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Imagined Sons with Carrie Etter at the Swindon Festival of Poetry

4 Oct
Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter

Quite an emotional day yesterday, beginning with Robert Peake and then Carrie Etter. Not to mention the film There is Nothing in the Garden with its toy babies in toilets on day one of the Swindon Festival of Poetry.

Carrie read from her third collection, Imagined Sons. It’s a surreal package of work about ongoing life trauma / serious stuff to work through about giving her son up for adoption at the age of seventeen.

Poetry might be wonderfully cathartic to write but it’s also an invitation to talk openly about traumatic subjects. I had no compunction in talking afterwards to both Carrie and Robert about both their losses knowing that it was almost certainly okay. There isn’t the embarrassment of the unknown, of how they would like me to act, the worry of causing emotional upset – I already had a heads up on where their heads are at. Continue reading →

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There is Nothing in the Garden at the Swindon Festival of Poetry

2 Oct
Helen Dewbery
the dress

I can see why the Swindon Festival of Poetry organiser, Hilda Sheehan, invited filmmaker Helen Dewbery and poet Chaucer Cameron to present their poetry film, There is Nothing in the Garden.

To the founding editor of Domestic Cherry and the creator of 1950s housewife persona, Mabel, There is Nothing in the Garden would seem happily all over the woman’s perspective. Continue reading →

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Erotic cupcakes – Swindon Slam! in Swindon Festival of Literature

12 May

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So it was Swindon versus love tokens in the final of the 19th Swindon Slam!, on Saturday night.

Bit of a brave decision, dissing the hosting town in your bid to be crowned King of Slam. I’ll admit I quite liked Robert Garnham’s* rhyming of ‘Billie Piper’ and ‘hyper’ and comparison of Swindon to Philip Scofield. I can see where he’s coming from. But whether this counted against him or whether Tina Saderhome’s* domestic tale of love tokens was better, I’m not sure. In case you were wondering, love tokens are those things which really test a relationship – not when your spouse/daughter is kidnapped to ensure you commit a presidential assassination**, no we’re talking about leaving the toilet uncleaned after, ahem, a bowel movement: ‘I didn’t realise you’d literally leave your shit lying around’.***

And – in the bit I was there for anyway – there was *breaking news* no poetry about sex. Unless you count the erotic way cupcakes were described in one stanza, and Fozzie Bear in another (‘Wear the Hat!’). Okay, these were the two poets that slammed in the final. So, actually, if you do want to win a slam, make sure your poetry is loaded with smut.

*This spelling is probably utterly wrong.
**Sorry, been watching all eight series of 24 again.
***This is an appalling paraphrase.

Words by Louisa Davison. Photos by Calyx Pictures.

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Exciting poetry coming down a slip road – Swindon Festival of Poetry launch

5 Sep

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The great thing about being a chronicler is that on the one hand I can write whatever I like (as long as it isn’t defamatory and all the words are wrote proper) but on the other I feel part of the team.

So going to the Swindon Festival of Poetry launch today at Swindon Arts Centre was a chance to catch up with wordsmithing friends. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – Being Human

11 Oct

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Having the same title as one of my favourite TV shows was a big point in favour of Tuesday night’s Swindon Festival of Poetry Finale.

Okay so Being Human didn’t have werewolves, ghosts and vampires in it, but both are about the stuff of life – life stages, its ordinariness, the rubbish things that can happen, the amazing things and how we each deal with all of it.

Taken from the Bloodaxe Books anthology of the same name, Being Human is a dramatisation of thirty-four poems from different writers performed by three fantastic actors, Benedict Hastings, Elinore Middleton and Barrett Robertson. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – Is it Nearly Christmas?

11 Oct
Collectively writing

Collectively writing

Is it nearly Christmas? I wrote a seasonally related poem at Matt Holland’s ‘Poetry and Life’ workshop on Tuesday, the final day of the Swindon Festival of Poetry.

I can’t take all the blame/credit. It was a joint effort. After reading and discussing other poetic works and how they tackle life – and how ‘language can free you and bind you’ – and how poetry differs to prose (‘Poetry can mean something different to what it says,’ said poet Robert Frost and ‘prose is obliged to mean what it says’ said Matt) we collectively tried our own work. Continue reading →

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