A small hello from me, with a collage of my current and recent reading material…oops, missed out Bunny by Selima Hill, which I’m re-reading for the poetry book club I go to. Ah well, you’ll just have to imagine a cover for that one.
Hello! This is for anyone who would like to know what kind of stuff happened in my recent creative writing workshops for The Forge in Stanley. It’s also a bit about how poems might develop after such a workshop. If that’s not for you, then no worries, see you later xx
I recently ran two versions of the same workshop, one as an open public 3-hour workshop for Northern Writes Festival, and a shorter 2-hour version this morning for the Just For Women group. The basic structure was the same, but with 3 writing exercises in the longer version, 2 in the shorter session. In both, we start by drawing a map of somewhere we knew well as children. Over 30-45 minutes, we add on layers of details – street names and nicknames; people, animals, significant trees; places where stories happened to us and to others; urban legends; colours, sounds, textures and smells. It’s incredible how much detail you can recall using the technique of mapping.
Then we read a couple of example poems. I think of this bit as a choice between ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’. The poems I’ve been using have been The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop, and Jean by my friend Jane Burn. We talk for a while about images, how to make them vivid, how to make verbs work hard for you. (Jean’s hair doesn’t curl, it ‘fizzes’, for example). Then we free write a landscape or portrait of our own, using the maps and their memories as our inspiration.
In the longer workshop I also ask people to try a short prose-poem or piece of flash fiction telling a real or imagined anecdote, and hand people some examples of ludicrous but real headlines to get them going. (One person in Stanley used this one – Ghost Hunters Stumble On Graveyard Porn Shoot). At some point we have tea. At the end we give our pieces a bit of spit-and-polish, talk about what editing we might do at home, share the bits we like so far. And then…
Well this is what happened to mine – huge frustration, followed by a couple of edits that got me quite close to a finished poem. It may not be brilliant, but it’s more interesting than versions 1 or 2. In my opinion.
Blackbirds
Sleek among the rotten
leaves are blackbirds
dandily stabbing
swallowing small things
whole; should a brother
wear a white patch
volleying pecks at him
(naturally to death)
other as he is to the Race
and Nation of Blackbird,
that reaches in the dark
to the outermost edges
of the next bird’s song.
A big thank you to the lovely folk who came to see my show at Alphabetti Theatre and at Acklam Library recently – here are some of their mug shots for your viewing pleasure. I’m glad so many people are made happy by simple, achievable things, but I am a little concerned for the person who said ‘watching neighbours’ made him happy – I think he meant the Australian soap opera….
Penultimate show of this year’s tour is 7.30pm, 30th September as part of Jabberwocky Market Festival in Darlington – tickets here!
Hello! Small visual reading list before I do another few posts for The Trouble With Compassion (next performance dates coming up soon!)
Here is my summer reading, past, current and a couple that I picked up in Edinburgh which I haven’t cracked open yet. The Vahni Capildeo is stunning, and I can happily re-read both Judy Brown and Vishvantara.
An hour is a fair length of time to listen to spoken word, even when there are films and funny bits. Which is why, halfway through my show, we all take a break to listen to some music from my tracks-donated-by-the-public Compassion playlist while we draw happy stick-people portraits of one another. Oh, and it’s sort of about getting to know strangers so you can feel kindly towards them.
Here are some of the magnificent drawings produced by the compassionate punters of Hartlepool on Tuesday, complete with doodles representing what makes the sitter happy. May they be well, may they be happy, may they be free from suffering!
The last Teesside show is tonight at ARC, Stockton – 5.30pm, pay what you decide, buy a book for a tenner. More coming next month in Newcastle and Hexham.
I filmed the second of my two Imelda poem-films for the show today.
This is Imelda before:
And this is a chocolate cake:
And this is the aftermath:
Imelda is my alter-ego. She’s the troll under my Bridge of Sanity, she’s a mostly-dormant sub-routine, she’s development so arrested she has a rap-sheet. Little id-dy creature, she is not me. Except when she rises up from the depths like Godzilla, and eats me whole, with her slappable stupidity in matters of the heart.
She gets her own slot in the new show, because compassion starts at home, and the trouble with that is – who here really likes all of themself? But I don’t want to ‘be’ her when I perform, so I plan to hide under the table while I play a film of her poem. Luckily, I know a very talented film-maker. Laura Degnan and I will be spending a couple of days this month out and about in Hartlepool and beyond, making two of my poems into films for the show. In preparation for this I have bought the following items: a ‘High School Sweeheart’ curly wig in strawberry blonde, a vastly oversized pink floral nightdress, a vastly oversized fleece cape with a sleeping-cat-head hoodie bit, and an enormous chocolate cake. Now, doesn’t that make you want to see the show?!!
After she has her moment in the spotlight, I will be asking the audience for words of kindness. In my opinion, what she needs is not tea-and-sympathy kindness, but some tough love, a little bit like these wonderful words of advice to wibbling narcissists everywhere. As one respondent to my teensy survey has said, when asked about kindness received in their life:
“Several good souls over the years have pointed out and guided me towards the truth of certain key situations in my life. Telling the truth hurts a little (like when you give blood and the staff say “Sharp Scratch!) but it’s best to hear it. Then you can make informed choices, take ownership of your life.”
The Trouble With Compassion will have its first outing as part of Crossing the Tees literature festival, with dates at Hartlepool Library, ARC Stockton, and Middlesbrough’s Rainbow Library.
Final NaPoWriMo prompt! And it is to translate a poem, but unfortunately there is no otter literature, so I have had to listen to the varied vocalisations of the giant otter and then make up some complete nonsense again. Giant otters have twenty-two distinct sounds, probably because they live in the largest and most complex social groups. They are also very stressed out by being in close proximity with humans.
I may not have lived among giant otters, but I have shared flats
with people I can barely tolerate. Their hastily-chosen, temporary
sexmates, on catching sight in a doorcrack of my solitary moshing,
have given just that strangled yip of laughter that would garner
a small dead fish from an alpha otter momma.
I have beaten wearily at floors and ceilings in the incoherent Morse
of the diurnal trapped among nocturnal experimental loop-pedallers,
whose weeeekrrrikkering dial-flip zzewstatic WAH interferenzzzzeee
resounded loud enough to alter the direction of hunting otter packs
as far afield as Lake Salvador.
I have nursed beers on window seats whilst macaw-hoarse flirters
make throat-back grokkle sounds in the crowded kitchen, tsip-tsip
their own drinks and then exit the yikkering, yipchuckling hodgepodge
to find a place to ‘be alone’. Through my wall I heard them,
little snouty buzzings, universal language of purr.
And yes, I have felt that wavering scream of isolation threaten
to come sailing out like a violin bow dragged ragged on a saw-edge,
though I have been habitually considerate and kept the noise down,
at most emitted a pup-squeak like a balloon-dog having its neck rung,
but no otter ever answered.
I was dimly aware of the nam
e James Williams because during this month of research various ads for his books on otters have popped up in my peripheral vision, but I had no idea he had been awarded an MBE for his conservation work, “for services to otters”.
I am slightly twisting today’s prompt, turning it from an ‘I remember’ poem to an ‘I don’t remember’ poem about James, inspired by the wonderful contributions on his memorial page at the Somerset Otter Group. What a man, how I wish I had known him.
I don’t remember James, with his cap and stick, and his little laugh.
I don’t remember him pushing down the barbed wire and legging over,
trotting back-heeled down the bank to check a turd – dog or otter?
I never ran into him under bridges, peering at dubious dark blobs
on known sprainting rocks, those infamous otter-loos he patrolled.
I don’t remember the anatomy of paw-prints he never taught me,
don’t think of eels because of him, still have no way to catch crayfish.
When I look at a riverbank, I see only the stones that are visible,
I don’t remember to follow my nose along the breeze, across the bend,
I don’t remember to see the land like a musk-talker, a scent-dweller.
Never have I bowed at his delicate request to sniff what otters leave –
“a sweet, wild, musky scent of pebbles and water weed and fish
and of the eternal untameable current”. But how I wish I had.
Off prompt today, sorry NaPoWriMo! Didn’t fancy writing a backwards story because I’ve been thrilled by accounts of otter fishing, still a living practise in the mangroves of Bangladesh, where generations of fishermen raise domesticated otters to herd fish into their nets, pups learning from their parents. I’ve taken inspiration, images and some entire phrases from this great eye witness account and also from this deliciously atmospheric website celebrating the Sundarbans.
You can watch footage of otter fishing here and here.
Otter fishing in the Sundarbans
damp-mouthed
the beautiful forest receives
the falling night
smears it kohl-black
along its starless, brackish
watervoids
where fish trace cursive
drowned comets
tinysilvertremblers
elders swung on a chain
of tailflicks like
heavy-flanked censers
in a bamboo box
a writhing otterknot
cacophonous yipping
piercing the slats
their whiskers and stench
of fermented mud
treacherous
the estuaries breath the tide
into their bronchioles
new islands breach
spines of giant crocodiles
midstream, middream
the mud shifts
whispers under
the paws of maneaters
the striped jungle
conceals its secret hives
its weapons
fisherman, release them
longleashed from the narrow boat
dogfaced snouting
fish from crannies
playful, frisking
fish from gullies
in swamps where
translucent women wade
neck deep dragging
nets through shrimp-seethe
and are eaten tiger-silent
down to their screams
this is the only joyful hunt
Kirsten Luckins 