Flying the Albatross

With the launch of my new collection approaching at pace, it was good to have a mini dress-rehearsal at Riff Corner Poetry Open Mic Night in Clevedon at the beginning of September, despite it taking me nearly an hour to drive the short distance home from my place of work through extensive roadworks, and then a return journey via Tickenham Hill and Failand in mist that was verging on fog. All hail autumn. 

Nevertheless, it was an interesting evening in good company. Open mic-ers currently get a little longer to read than at your average open mic session, and it was good to hear two or three poems, rather than the usual swift single, although this might have to change at some point as the evening was well attended and is clearly gaining in popularity. Thanks to Tim Burroughs for inviting me to read there, and for the above photo. 

Thanks are due also to Ben Banyard for asking me to read at Portishead's wildly successful ArtPort festival at the end of September. We'd been due to read alongside Bob Walton, but as he was still convalescing, Sue Hill, the other half of The Write Box, stepped into the breach. It was a lovely event, again well-attended and one I hope will be repeated next year.

 

 

My journey to Trowbridge Stanza on the first weekend in October was eventful, as someone drove into the back of my car by the Downs in Bristol. I was a bit shaken, but managed to complete the journey without further incident, and thoroughly enjoyed reading on the same  bill as Saili Katebe. We'd been due to read alongside each other back in 2020, as part of the Bristol Lyra Poetry Festival, which had been cancelled at the start of the pandemic, so it felt right and good to finally do that.

My penultimate autumn gig was in Bristol, as part of the Ten Bristol Poets event running at the Bristol Literary Film Festival in aid of St Peter's Hospice. It was a privilege to read alongside the following poets: 

TOP  1. Tim Burroughs  2. Jan Swann  3. Charles Thompson  4. Kaz Michael  5. Martin Rieser

BOTTOM:  6.  Helen Sheppard  7. David Punter  8. Me  9. Bob Walton  10. Melanie Branton

I enjoyed the opportunity of reading a few of my Bristol poems, from my collection 'Learning Finity', for a change, including one about my grandmother, who died in the care of the staff of St Peter's Hospice. Here's an earlier recording of it: 

 

My last autumn gig is Sunday 24th November and it's not necessary to leave the comfort of your own home to hear it, because I'm guest poet on West Wilts Radio's The Poetry Place at 3pm or any time you please, as it's streamable worldwide here.
 

Finally, it was great to have a poem from Love the Albatross in the latest issue of IDP's The Dawntreader ...

and also here, in the issue 4 of The Fig Tree.

Reviews of Love the Albatross can be found in Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip and Tim Fellows' Substack.

A MAd dash to Manchester

I wore my bee earrings to my graduation ceremony in Manchester, as Chris Palmer and Jinny Peberday of Skyravenwolf had given them to me and I probably wouldn't have even enrolled for my MA at Manchester Writing School without Jinny's insistence I'd regret it if I didn't. So it was important they - Chris and Jinny - were there with me in some form yesterday (along with The Satchel of Poetry, which they also made and which was carrying a pair of comfier shoes for when the Northerner and I got lost walking back to the car park, which we did, hopelessly, despite the Northerner being Northern and having lived in Manchester for several years in the late 90s and early 00s). (It's changed a lot, apparently.)

Deborah means 'bee', of course, and when I'd put them on, I wasn't thinking of the fact that bees are important for Manchester too. In fact, they're everywhere as a symbols of defiance post the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and it's good to see them.

Rochdale Canal

Canal Street

Manchester looking simultaneously like its 21st-century self and 1920s Berlin

First stop, the Midland Hotel to enrol and get togged up. It was great seeing my fellow-students, Tina, Liz and Cherry, in the queue as I'd never met them in person, having followed a distance learning course via Teams. (Although it was all distance learning anyway during the worst of Covid.)

Then we proceeded across the concourse to the Bridgewater Hall, where the ceremony was taking place.

There was a lot of clapping to be done, of course; important to keep clapping as you yourself have been clapped across the stage for that brief don't-fall-over moment in the bright lights. (The Northerner did some whooping too, which proves you can't take him anywhere, not even up North.) As a bonus, the speeches were pretty good, as these things go, especially the one by Letitia Jones, President of the Student Union, whose mum got a clap as she was simultaneously getting her PhD 'somewhere down the road'.)  

Oh and at the end of the row behind, a glimpse of Mohammed, who was also on our course, and the swish of our superlative tutor Kim Moore in passing as she exited the stage, all very pleasing.

(I'm really quite proud of both of us for getting all this studying done in our old age.)

Unfortunately we couldn't hang about and socialise afterwards, as we'd been up since 3am in order to get to Manchester comfortably by 8am, and despite a marathon dog-sitting session in the middle of the day by Son the Elder, Cwtch the Collie was waiting patiently for us in her crate back home. (Although since there was someone getting her doctorate with her dog in her shoulder bag, I could have tried stuffing her in The Satchel of Poetry, I suppose.)

A lovely, if exhausting, day ... and meanwhile the poems I wrote during the course continue to make their way in the world, with one of them being shortlisted for this year's Plough Prize and another being Ink Sweat & Tears' pick of the month in April. Thank you, Manchester and the Manchester Writing School. 

Poetry in the lengthening days of spring

After my trip to Devon last month and the IsamBards' poetry walk through the centre of Bristol, I might have expected things to quieten down a little, but poetry has continued to throw up plenty of surprises and delights.

The first, two days before our poetry walk, was the Bristol Poetry Institute's annual reading by Denise Riley, which had been postponed from just before Christmas. Having written an essay on Riley's collection, 'Say Something Back', while I was studying for my MA in Creative Writing, I was looking forward to re-encountering those mordant poems, but quite unprepared for the added intensity of hearing the poet read them and I have to say, they floored me to the point where I was a bibbling wreck when it came to have the evening's poetry purchase signed by Riley. Driving back along the Downs in the setting sun, all I wanted to do was get home and write - a common reaction after hearing a truly great poet (which sadly doesn't happen as often in Bristol as it used to.) 

The above-mentioned essay also considered 'Deaf Republic' by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky, and as luck would have it, Kaminsky gave the Annual Lecture of the Poetry Society on the theme 'Poetry in a Time of Crisis'.  Since it was held in Liverpool, my attendance was only virtual but it was a privilege to hear one of my very favourite poets addressing such an important matter, and also reading some of his poems from 'Deaf Republic'. 

Maybe the lecture will be made available in perpetuity in due course. I hope so, because there was too much to think about in one listening. In the meantime - or if not - here's Kaminsky reading 'We lived happily during the war'. 

Two more excellent poets guest-read at Satellite of Love this month, namely, Emma Purshouse and Steve Pottinger, both of whom manage to be hugely entertaining and thought-provoking, at the same time, which is A Feat, and Silver Street Poetry was our best yet, bidding farewell to the local poetry journal Raceme as it published its final issue. Three of the four editors guest read for us, and the open mic-ers who'd had a poem published in one of its issues all came clutching their contributor's copy to read from. I was honoured to emcee this farewell event, and I'll miss Raceme, but if its demise means the editors have more time to concentrate on their own poems, that will be some consolation.

One of my own poems - 'When an albatross crash-lands in a dream' - found a home at Ink Sweat & Tears this month, and settled in very comfortably, and London Grip published a thoughtful review of 'Learning Finity' by Clare Morris. Thanks to everyone involved with both of these forays into print. 

Finally, I got to read some of my poems at a bijou bookshop that hasn't long opened in Bristol, namely, Heron Books in Clifton arcade, along with Mab Jones, whose latest pamphlet is also published by Indigo Dreams. It was a beautiful late afternoon, full of leaves and sunlight and blossom, and the palpable feeling that summer is nearly here at last. Thanks to my publisher, Ronnie Goodyer, for agitating on my behalf, and proprietor Lizzie for organising it all. 

Two Poems for National Poetry Day 2018

Today is National Poetry Day and the theme this year is Change, of which there has been a lot lately, and not all of it good. Nationally and internationally we've seen that progress is not linear, and change can set us back to a point where hard-won gains have to be fought for all over again. It's pretty dispiriting. 

A more welcome change for me recently was the annual observance of Flannelette Sheet Night, which always falls around this time and which is, I think, the best night of the year, when autumn starts to bite and the bedding becomes ever so slightly fuzzy.  

Here's a poem which mentions flannelette sheets, although the real changes in it are far more fundamental. It was partly inspired by the death of DJ Derek in 2015, and was highly commended in the International Welsh Poetry Competition 2018 earlier in the summer. 

where he lay undiscovered

In the never-quite-dark

of those first summer nights

I heard police helicopters sweep overhead

seeking the heat of suspects in hiding

trespassers, burglars, car thieves, murderers,

cannabis farmers.

                                

It was blow flies that found me.

After the buzzing, lascivious squirms

the memory of rotting plums forgotten in a fruit bowl,

then squadrons of beetles homing in

the family of foxes that fed on my lungs,

the bone of my shin.

                                                                                                                                     

As for you lot driving past

after tiles for your bathroom, this week’s fashion

upgrades for last year’s mobile phone

who don’t notice me in elders and brambles

on your daily commute to your home,

there’s no need for guilt.              

                                            

You’ve not ignored insects crawling on windows

snowdrifted mail behind a glass door

and I like it here. Already

a second year is turning,

I wait for dead leaves to tuck me in, ground frosts

soft as flannelette               

                                 untongued, undone

I don’t call out.

Another poem of mine about change, 'A Pint at the Shifting Sky', is published today on the poetry and prose webzine, Ink Sweat & Tears. Thanks to Helen Ivory and Kate Birch for giving it a home.