Tag: psychogeography

Soul to Newcastle

11.01
Northbound, the song of the rails
And footie fans

Bright tongue-punch of tamarind –
I’d go miles for pani puri

New builds on brownfields
Fennel glades, teazels, finches
Unhomed

Kestrel’s cliff scraped clean of roots
Bloody cranesbill

Street food, not sawdust
In the covered market; ghosts…
Skinned hares, white tripes

Kittiwakes scream from the bridge
No-one wants a terraced house

Everyone is fine
Talking to thin air these days –
Pods. Buds. Our blue teeth.

Shop fronts like cast shells
Waiting for crabs

Guts hanging out
Sliding doors wedged open
Cataract windows

The Laing’s a drum, deaf with rain
Paintings sign to each other

Bloodlust and faith
Objects in oils and suspense
Gilt-framed

Gulls after a lightning strike –
The Age Concern social group

Do you paint? Used to.
But the girl I showed them to
Never loved me back.

Sap green
Scorched earth

Where you see a storm
I see a girl tucking in
To a ham sandwich

Things, alone in their thingness
But, a field of attention

Smashed rainbow
The old snooker hall windows
Be Gay, Do Crime

Three white clouds; the blossom trees
Next to Manors car park

Tall cakes, short coffees
In your head, they’re still fighting –
This cafe has changed

The basic anatomy
Of buildings eludes my pen

I am surprised
By the skyline we worked for;
Its absences

Ten years in the mirror
That body is lost to me

The hotel shower –
Skylight in a downpour
Headful of pictures

Looks like she ate all the pies
Exhibition in a bathtub

Close to shame
Wouldn’t do that one
(After grabbing)

Shit on the pigeon netting
Echoes fall down Dog Leap Stairs

Cities are dreams
People too are mostly dreams,
New builds on goldfields

The waters of Tyne…
They run between me and me

Continuing experiments with renga, though this doesn’t really count as not many people believe a single poet can write a renga – you need at least one other person with whom to collaborate. Let’s say this is me collaborating with the ghosts of former selves as I take a writing day around Newcastle, where I lived and worked for twelve years.

I’ve now lived in Hartlepool longer than I lived in Newcastle, but of course with it being just up the road it’s still very current for me, so the disconnect is not as strong as I might find going back to other old haunts in search of psychogeography. I filled half an old journal with sense impressions and random free writes over the day, then pulled these fragments out. Like emptying your pockets after a foraging walk.

Workshops – during and after

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

justforwomen_4

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…

Freewrite in workshop
Edit 1 in workshop

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.

Edit 2 at home
Edit 3 at home
Edit 4 at home

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.