Category: Thoughts

Behind the scenes at a workshop

IMG_0148Last Wednesday I gave a workshop to the writers’ group at Hartlepool Library, as part of my role as poet-in-residence at the Heroism & Heartbreak WW1 project, (latest poem now available here) which was a lot of fun to plan and research. So I thought I’d tell you what I did, in case it’s useful for anyone.

I knew that the group were split between poetry and prose writers, with some of the prosers habitually reluctant to try verse (which can seem daunting even to those of us who are poets by temperament). So I thought I’d trick them all by doing a session on prose poetry!!! Mwahahaha!!! This entailed me researching what the hell prose poetry is, which I did by reading stuff online and an anthology about The Great American Prose Poem (thank you Degna Stone for the loan). About four hours of this, on and off, on trains, et cetera, and I had selected four prose poems that I thought were accessible, memorable, full of interesting formal devices, and related to themes of war. The poems I chose were The 12 O’Clock News by Elizabeth Bishop, Monument by Mary Ruefle, No Sorry by Catherine Bowman and The Most Beautiful Word by Linh Dinh.

The workshop featured an intro to prose poetry, where I went off on a bit of a passionate rant about how they are fired by a similar impulse towards documenting the subjective experience of modernity as also powers many early twentieth-century visual movements like Dada, Cubism, Vorticism, and how the fragmentation and re-configuration of form, and therefore meaning, is common to all of them, and I may have totally made all that up…

Then we played a game I made up called ‘The Prose-Poetry Venn Test’, where I had made a load of cards saying things like ‘humour’, ‘formal rhyme structures’, and ‘true stories’ and everyone had to decide if they were features exclusive to prose, to poetry OR…..wait for it….could be used by both! In this way we laid the foundations for a world where poetry and prose were almost entirely overlapped.

After that, we read the four poems out loud and discussed them, which was GREAT, love a bit of controversy! At this point I was massively over-running my lesson plan, and everyone’s brains were dribbling out of their ears, so we had some tea and came back for two short free-writing exercises. In the first one, I read out Carl Sandburg’s WW1 poem ‘Iron‘, but line by line, with each line acting as a prompt for 45 seconds of free-write, which rolled on line by line to a full time of about 10 minutes. Then we immediately did 5 minutes free write in response to a variety of prompt questions inspired by my looking through the online archive. Then we had another 8 minutes to edit one or both of our source writes into a prose poem, which I assigned the arbitrary ‘rule’ of a 100-word limit.

I pushed them hard, really hard, but the final pieces when we shared back were uniformly excellent. As usual, I just have to remember that what I tend to plan for a 2-hour session is invariably 3 hours-worth of activity….

A Teensy News Round-Up

IMG_0024Hello everyone! I haven’t said anything for a while, even though I’ve been thinking Thoughts. So here is just a bit of humblebragging about places you can check out my work…

So I have a poem in The Fat Damsel #4. This is a great online magazine set up by the very talented Jane Burn, with guest editors. You should absolutely follow them, they’re fellow WordPressers. This is ‘my’ edition.

I also have a poem about to appear in Magma #63, which has the theme of ‘Conversation’. I’d never submitted anything to Magma before, as it’s One Of The Biggies, but I happened to have three poems that fit in with the theme, so I gave it a go. I’m extraordinarily proud not only to have got in (with only a minor editorial cut of one line), but to have also been asked to read at the launch. I will be one of many contributors doing a quick 2-poem set, in an evening that features headline poets Jane Draycott and Daljit Nagra – HUGE! If you’d like to come, it’s at 7pm on Friday 30th October at the LRB Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL

Other gigs coming up are wildly varied! I have been asked by the lovely Jeff Price of Radikal Words if I would enter the Great North Slam at Northern Stage on Thursday 5th November, which is swiftly followed by me zipping down to the immensely posh Stowe School to deliver a private performance of my show, The Moon Cannot Be Stolen, to their sixth form English students. (Preceded by a three-course meal, not sure if that’s going to work in my favour…) Sorry, no public admittance to that one! But you can come and see me as one of eleven ‘alumni’ of the fabulous Free As A Bard nights in a big celebration gig happening on Sunday 29th November at The Jam Jar Cinema in Whitley Bay. Many thanks for the invitation to fellow WordPresser Elaine Cusack, who co-programmes the night with Pete Mortimer of Iron Press.

Work continues in my voluntary role as Poet-In-Residence at ‘Heartbreak & Heroism’, the current project from the Hartlepool History Then And Now online community archive. I’m attending their library roadshow, listening to people recounting their family’s connection with military and merchant naval activity during WW1. The next roadshow is coming up on Friday 9th October at Seaton Carew library, 10am – 1pm. I hope we get some stories as good as the last one, all about a lighthouse keeper who had his leg torn off by a dredger, and who sent his 10-year old son into the Merchant Navy as an apprentice just 2 years before war broke out. Watch this space for the poem, when it gets posted up!

The other huge project is the finalisation of the manuscript for my first full collection, coming out with Burning Eye early next year. We have an internal structure, we have some choices for cover design (beautiful circular motifs designed by my talented father-in-law, and coloured in the best clashing style by designer Monica Tuffs), and we have some amazingly generous big-up quotes from my fellow poets for the back cover. What I also have is a growing idea for a residency + show tour, which yesterday I pitched to some likely venues at the very helpful biannual Meet the Programmers event. I am very excited to say that I have definite interest from The Witham in Barnard Castle and Jabberwocky Market Festival in Darlington, so yes, you guessed it, I can feel another Arts Council bid coming on…

Some Advice On Editing Poems

None of the advice below is written by me – it was given to me at last week’s Wolf At The Door retreat, by one of the retreat leaders. I have no idea if Vishvantara wrote these points herself, but if she did she’s a genius. I hope and trust that she won’t mind my sharing them on.

IMG_0059

Fifteen Ways Of Working On A Poem

  1. Take an unfinished poem of twenty-five to forty lines or more. Remove half of the lines (whichever hand-picked lines you choose). Now cut it in half again. Scream as loudly as you like.
  2. Take a poem of ten or twenty lines and make it forty or fifty. Stretch it, milk it, pad it, free-associate, spider-diagram it and repeat things in Spanish if you have to.
  3. Find the energetic points. Where are the ‘hot’ areas? Put one as your first line. Put another as your last line. Rearrange the other lines or verses in between.
  4. Divide your imagery into ‘heart’ and ‘head’ and cut out everything not heart-felt. Where there used to be ‘head’ imagery, try using simple language that doesn’t compare anything to anything else.
  5. Make sure you consider cutting your last line and the few above it as well. Where does the poem itself want to end? (Beware of the ‘it’s not over until the fat lady sings’ feeling). The end must come as a surprise to you as you write, not be the one you started out thinking you must have. Have you strained the poem into finishing where you want it to go? Poems often delight in stopping midstream, taking off, drizzling away or turning around and biting us playfully. Only rarely do they delight by ‘the moral of the story is’ or ‘so this is how it all ended up’.
  6. Find a phrase or a line or two that you are a bit complacent about, a bit of writing you think is quite good, and rephrase it noticing how attached you are to the previous version. Ask a friend which is the better option.
  7. If you are writing from or about a memory, insert a detail from you present experience. If writing from or about the present, include a memory.
  8. Imagine that at a certain point you rose a hundred feet into the air and looked down at the tableau vivant of the poem. What is its gesture? Can you somehow include this in the poem?
  9. Imagine that at a certain point in the poem you became very tiny and sat within a phrase that you had just written. Write what you see around you.
  10. If you have too many little prosy words, articles or linking words, try re-writing those phrases with fewer small words.
  11. The word ‘of’ is a poetic cliche, so delete the ‘of the’s, e.g. ‘the gate of the mind’. It should be ‘the mind’s gate’. Also beware of any words you wouldn’t use in conversation – e.g. ‘aplenty’.
  12. Try translating your poem for the benefit of someone with limited knowledge of your language.
  13. Try explaining your poem to a philosopher. Add some of this explanation to the poem.
  14. Always keep you original draft – that’s very important.
  15. Put your poem in a drawer for three months and start something else.

Poems I Have Been Reading… Forugh Farrokhzad

In English we say ‘out of the mouths of babes’, meaning that children often say out loud the unpalatable or indiscreet truths that the adults all know but are trying to ignore. We say it with a hair-ruffling air of indulgence, the implication being that children can get away with statements that would be embarrassing or even dangerous when made by an adult.

On Tuesday evening I went to a workshop on Iranian poetry led by Javaad Alipoor, from theatre company Soroush, and we looked at a poem from the mid-1960s written by iconic female poet Forough Farrokhzad. It was written in the voice of a young girl, and with devastating simplicity it lays out all kinds of unspoken truths like open palms – what it is to be poor and to want things, what it is to mix up desires and needs, what it is to live in fear of police in your own homeland, what it is to put your faith in a messiah. It is wonderfully subversive, all the while wearing the pigtails of innocence. I loved it.

You can read it and find out more about Forugh by clicking here.

Forugh’s brother, the equally iconic poet, broadcaster and singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad, is the subject of Soroush’s new play My Brother’s Country, which comes to ARC Stockton on 23rd and 24th February – but I believe 23rd is sold out already, so you’d better get your Wednesday tickets sharpish! Click here for information and booking. It falls under ARC’s new ‘Pay What You Decide’ initiative, so really have nothing to lose.

Blog-hopping across the universe…

I have been tagged in a big ol’ blog-hop intended to plug you, my readers, into a vast galaxy of writers writing about writing. I was tagged by this lady:

Valerie Laws#8 (2)Valerie Laws (www.valerielaws.com) is a crime novelist, poet, playwright and sci-art installation specialist. Of her thirteen published books, 4 are currently available as ebooks. A mathematics/physics graduate, she devises new poetic forms and science-themed poetry installations and commissions including the infamous Arts Council–funded Quantum Sheep, spray-painting haiku onto live sheep to celebrate quantum theory. Much of her recent work arises from funded residencies with pathologists, neuroscientists, human specimens and dissections. Another quantum haiku on inflated beachballs in Hackney Lido featured in BBC2’s Why Poetry Matters with Griff Rhys Jones, and live at Royal Festival Hall, London, and her installations have toured all over Europe. She performs worldwide live and in the media.  Her many prizes and awards include a Wellcome Trust Arts Award and two Northern Writers’ Awards.  She is disabled and lives on the North East coast of England.

And here’s my answers to the questions on everyone’s lips….

1. What am I writing?

As usual, several things at once. I am one of a vast array of poets who have been commissioned to “respond creatively” to the Bloodaxe Archive, a collection of manuscripts, correspondence and ephemera recently donated by Bloodaxe Press to Newcastle University. The brief has proved dauntingly open, so I have several ideas in various stages of (in)completion – a selection of fragmentary documents from a lost archive of a dream nation; a performance poem about Tony Harrison, obscenity and the objectification of women; a sci-fi dialogue between a digital archive interface and a memory-user; and a text-based visual print. Typically, it is the two pieces featuring foul language that have made it almost all the way through to the submission deadline on Tuesday.

I am also editing a short series of poems written for a local WW1 project, which are due to be anthologised in December. I’m also both editing, writing and re-writing around 35 poems for a second-round submission to Burning Eye Press, in the hopes that they may decide to publish my first full collection next year. In and around that I’m trying to write short ekphratic pieces responding to art exhibitions I’ve attended recently (especially Louise Bourgeois), and I’m also testing out some review-writing skills by blogging about spoken word shows I’ve seen at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. I will soon be writing theatre reviews in a semi-professional capacity for the North East Artist Development Network, so I’m trying to keep high-minded whilst in actual fact I am mostly doing short humourous Facebook reviews of Ryan Gosling movies.

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Bloody Nora, that’s an intense question, presupposing I have a much wider knowledge of my contemporaries than I actually do. On stage I think I’m characterised by musicality of language and delivery. I was described by Sabotage Reviews as having an “intense lyrical talent”, which is nice. Thematically, I’m more Buddh-ish than many out there. On the page I think I still have a long way to go if I’m to establish a really unique voice. My recurrent struggle seems to be to write something that doesn’t bore and infuriate me with its polite striving to be another frigging poem. I’ve also recently developed a delight in shifting randomly from male to female pronouns – I think I may be interested in constructed gender identities and their relationship to sexuality. Possibly.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Poetry is my natural gait, I can’t help the way I walk.

4. How does my writing process work?

Commissions aside, I usually write because an event, feeling or encounter has struck a note inside me and then another completely unrelated moment has come along and resonated with it. Sometimes the two notes are struck many years apart, but once they are ringing together then arcs of connective meaning spark out between them and a poem grows. When all goes well, the poem knows exactly what form it needs to take and I just follow it, praying I have the stamina to keep up.

I always have multiple drafts, I’m a fanatical believer in editing, and much of my editing is done through reading aloud whilst walking on the beach near my house. This usually means that once a poem is finished, I have learned it by heart and can go on to perform it on stage.

And my recommendations for your blog-reading pleasure are as follows:

James McKay – seen here performing at Other Voices, snapped by Fay Roberts.

james at other voicesPoet, traveller and classicist James McKay has been standing up and speaking in rooms, and helping others to do so, since the turn of the millennium: initially as part of Newcastle’s Home Cooking night; in recent years as a key team member and performer at Utter! Spoken Word events in and around London.

His vintage poetry-speaking show The New Popular Reciter was a late-night cult hit at the PBH Free Fringe in Edinburgh 2013, and will reappear in 2015 in a version directed by Matt Panesh (aka Monkey Poet).

Along the way, his poems and performances have appeared on the poetry-and-prog-rock album Follow On by The Morris Quinlan Experience (Round and Round Records, 2007), in his first published collection Quiet Circus (Vintage Poison Press, 2011), and at a bewildering variety of cafes, churches, small magazines, warehouse parties, weddings and miscellaneous spoken word events.

James has a wonderful blog in which he posts all manner of poems, interesting reading recommendations and travel tales – http://www.mckaypoetry.com/

Fringe review 3 – I Felt I Had Earned The Curry

Well that was a strange old day of shows missed and shows abandoned. Having delivered a command performance-slash-dress rehearsal to Sophia Walker in the basement of Forest Cafe, I proceeded to loiter on the wind tunnel that is the Royal Mile in a vain attempt to thrust my flapping flyers into the hands of Swedish tourists just looking for shelter. I then arrived at my venue ten minutes too late to exit flyer Tina’s show, and just in time to miss ‘Yeti’ by Gary From Leeds due to the pressing need to change into performance clothes, warm up, go and do last minute flyering, warm up again and do my first show.

I then went to see ‘Raj Rage’ by Charmian Hughes, which had the exciting premise of a personal pilgrimage to India following the footsteps of her great-grandmother, who escaped the Indian Mutiny and left behind letters containing a species of eye-witness account. Ten minutes into the show and we were still listening to tepid jokes about middle-aged women’s mandatory pixie haircuts and the tribulations of travelling with a friend only to be mistaken for lesbians. When the ancestor appeared it was via the theatrical device of a faintly Victorian looking headband, which was donned before the action continued with no alteration of delivery or language whatsoever. Are these letters real? Was Hughes’ forebear simply an incredibly dull correspondent with no epistolary panache? A thousand words of this painted no picture at all. I left, sadly before the human banana sacrifice promised in the blurb.

I then perched at the back of the Banshee’s torture chamber to sneak a peek at Rob Auton’s ‘Face Show’, which follows the now-familiar Auton format of drawing us in with endearingly awkward whimsy before nearly losing us in a slightly unravelled middle section and then finally approaching what he’s actually talking about via an extended emotional crescendo. In this case, he literally draws us in, as in, draws faces for a while. It’s charming and a bit funny. There’s some energetic facial workouts. It’s absurd and a bit funny. There are a lot of baffled silences. He makes them longer, until they’re a bit more funny. There’s something about mice and aliens, but I was getting a bit tired at that point and had to have a little sit down. Auton is a genuinely lovely and unique performer, and to watch him is to walk a tightrope between confused, bemused laughter and delighted, surprised laughter. Whatever he talks about – the wonderfully poignant interconnectedness of all humanity for example – he talks about from the bottom of his strangely vulnerable heart, often all but breaking mine. I wouldn’t bill him as comedy, though. Not sure it’s spoken word either. It’s Rob.

A swift spell at JibbaJabba ensued, with sets by Jim Higo, Mandy Maxwell and a rather inspired open mic bit from a guy selling his services as a hit-man exterminator of stray helium balloons. Then back across Waverley Bridge to the Banshee for Stand Up Tragedy. An opening set form comedic storyteller John Harding was genuinely funny – it takes some tightly-managed delivery to tell a tale of explosive diarrhoea without being off-puttingly crass. But the next three acts left me and my companions cold, so we absconded in favour of curry, running the gauntlet of Niddry Street after the watershed, when all the people outside venues are suddenly aggressively flyering for shows called ‘Yank Me’, “Phone Whore’ and ‘Sex With Children’.

And now it’s tomorrow already, and I must get some sleep before seeing Jack Dean’s ‘Threnody For The Sky Children’, which may well have just beaten my ‘The Moon Cannot Be Stolen’ for the coveted ‘Most Pretentious Title’ award at this year’s Fringe…

Edinburgh Fringe – review 1

So yesterday I took a flying visit to the Fringe to catch a few things I would otherwise miss when my own run begins next week. This is what I managed to fit into five hours…

I started the day with The Good Delusion by Tina Sederholm at Royal Oak, a teeny, tiny, self-contained cellar room at a very welcoming ‘proper’ pub, with seating for around 20. I saw Tina last year at Banshee Labyrinth doing her previous show, Evie and the Perfect Cupcake. My first thought was that this year’s venue is much better suited to her style as a performer, being less gloomy, less gothic, less plagued by noisy, nosy walk-bys in the corridor. Sederholm is most definitely not gloomy, nor is she confrontational or intentionally difficult – she specialises in warm, charming and accessible poetic storytelling. The Good Delusion is more directly autobiographical than the upbeat moral fable of last year, and is maybe less honed as a narrative, using an episodic structure that sometimes seems quite loosely linked to the purported subject ‘being good’. But of course, this isn’t actually an in-depth exploration of a moral construct, it’s entertainment, and in that it succeeds with plenty of giggles and sherbet lemons – though ironically given the show’s conclusion, I suspect she’s still trying to be good enough for us to like her! And we do…

By contrast, Can’t Care, Won’t Care by Sophia Walker is a very demanding show, and rightly so as it deals with serious and important issues around the realities of working in the care system. The audience is cast in the role of jury as the poet/care worker is put on trial for the negligent homicide of a service user. Walker plays both the defendant and the prosecuting counsel, shifting the language of her speech and body rapidly between the two. It’s a strong performance, obviously springing from personal experience and personal conviction (no pun intended), and there’s no let-up to the pace and emotional pitch. It’s a lot to take in – the exposure of the unwieldy bureaucracy of the care industry that fails to recognise the context of individual needs, the savage and ignorant cuts to funding that have left front-line workers exposed to dangerous lone working, the grotesque injustice of their consequent culpability when things go wrong. And on top of this, the performer’s own expiation of a guilt that may really be hers, or may be an imagined scenario, but in any case is delivered full-force. A few more pauses for breath and contemplation would be a kindness. Definitely go and see this, but do what she asks at the end – deliberate, discuss, decompress over a coffee before you head off to your next show.

I didn’t decompress, I rushed off to do a guest slot at Get Put Down, an afternoon poetry cabaret hosted by Edinburgh’s own Max Scratchmann and Alec Beattie. They work well as a hosting team, in an ‘Odd Couple’ kind of way, Max being genial and self-deprecatory, Alec a bit grumpy and sardonic. After a quick set there I had to do the unforgiveable and run straight off to another guest slot at Other Voices, again a cabaret but this time run by Fay Roberts and featuring strong female performers. I was lucky enough to get there in time to hear a beautiful open mic poem from Miriam Nash, and a guest set from Jess Green.

In fact my next port of call was Jess Green’s show Burning Books, another poet taking a scathing look at the impact of government policy and cutbacks on a public service sector, this time the education system. Green recently went viral with ‘Dear Mr Gove’, a poem written from a teacher’s point of view as an open letter to the then Minister for Education. It’s included in the show, alongside equally eloquent, passionate and stunningly-written pieces from multiple characters – the library assistant, the teacher forced to go to a team-building session with a nightmare poet, the teacher with a coke habit. Green has always been an excellent writer and performer, but for me the great thing about this show is the maturity of vision and empathy she shows in stepping outside herself and into these convincingly realised voices. She has teamed up with a guitarist and percussionist to set the whole sequence to music, and I’m not convinced it adds much to the experience other than providing a click-track that helps her overcome a slight tendency to let her emotions accelerate her delivery. But having said that, there were others in the audience really rocking along to the beat, so what do I know?

The plan is to write something every day next week about shows I’ve seen – if my stamina holds up! These shows are all part of the PBH Free Fringe – there is no charge, so if you’re going to the Fringe please budget to make a donation and/or buy some merchandise. For example, I bought Jess Green’s CD of the show for £5.

The Good Delusion, Tina Sederholm, Royal Oak, 12pm

Can’t Care, Won’t Care, Sophia Walker, Banshee Labyrinths, 1.40pm

Burning Books, Jess Green, Electric Circus, 4.30pm

.

Koestler Exhibition – Reflections

Today and tomorrow is all you’ve got to go see this exhibition of artworks by prisoners and inmates of secure facilities, currently showing at BALTIC (at the back of the level 2 play area) and Gateshead Central Library.

Alongside the visual art, there’s a free anthology of creative writing – and I was honoured to be invited to judge this writing, awarding money prizes to the top three (top in my opinion, that is – totally subjective!)

I’d like to have some profound comment to offer you, but all I’ve got so far is – I like weird, dark, disturbing, unheimlich art. But in writing I also need quite a bit of technical skill to enjoy it, whereas in visual art I am happy with quite rough-and-ready ‘outsider’ techniques, so long as the image itself makes me feel the shivers…

Perhaps I will try to write some pieces myself in response to these, my personal favourites…2013-11-28 17.16.38 2013-11-28 17.16.57 2013-11-28 17.17.21 2013-11-28 17.18.38

Envy – A Rant

I try to keep my envy as a pet, sometimes a lapdog and sometimes a brass-clawed basilisk the size of a bendy-bus, but always a snarler. I try to keep it on a leash, but it often tugs me sideways when it catches the spoor of someone else’s success. I find myself hurtling along in its wake, until we both sink panting onto our rumps and concede that it is a futile chase. Better to console each other picking fleas – I am too old, too lazy, too busy, too ordinary anyway to ever catch the tail of that other person’s achievement.

Because it’s all about the other person, isn’t it? Where would envy be without comparisons? There is the shining example of what could be, and there is the brutal judgment of the self by the self. These are outward- and the inward-looking faces of Envy, the gatekeeper god. Not a pet at all, but maybe a guide. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself – whose success do I envy the most? When does it turn into the flaming hulk blocking out the sun? When someone else gets a novel published, or receives a 4-star review, or starts their own imprint? Whatever it is, that is the aim you should be working towards for yourself, that’s the gateway to self-knowledge that Envy is signposting for you.

Note – working towards, not receiving without effort as your due for being alive. Note – for yourself, not for the chance of standing room on the bandwagon.  Not sure where your double-headed Envy is really looking? Have you become so habituated to feeling envious that any accomplishment by anybody can rouse a niggle? I wouldn’t blame you – we’re all products of an educational paradigm that quantifies and rewards success in terms of comparison to others.

My lovely best friend Georgina is passionate about educating her children in Steiner schools. One of the reasons for this is that the Steiner pedagogy does not believe in using praise, which is thought to turn children away from their inner authenticity and outwards towards external sources of esteem. Have a quick read of this short link and see if you agree.

http://www.tarremah.tas.edu.au/primary/just-a-dash/

Do you think that substituting encouragement for praise may help us transform envy? One of the extraordinary things about taking a show to Edinburgh recently was the plethora of opportunities for feeling envious. We poets were offering them to one another like hoops to poodles – how is your show? How many people, how much money in the bucket, how many reviews, how many stars, how many re-Tweets?

My only stated aim was to survive a week without either forgetting my words or suffering an eczema flare, both of which I managed.  But still a week after my return, I watched my disappearance from the Twitter feed with a sinking heart; a month later and I wonder if I should just check to see if someone did review my show unbeknownst to me….oops, is that a tug on the lead? Or a god clearing its throats?