The metropolis revisited

Apart from the poetry walk and the writing groups we run, I haven't been into the centre of Bristol much lately; in fact, going there still feels like a bit of a novelty 'post'-pandemic. 

Another reason for not going there is because it's so bloody hard to drive around the place these days, thanks to stealth bus gates trialled when everyone was in lockdown that have been subsequently made permanent. I never thought I'd need to use a sat nav to get around my native city. 

I know something needs to be done about air pollution, but I'm not sure making people drive miles further to get from A in the centre of town to B, also in the centre of town, is helpful. I guess the intention is to make using a car so stressful people give up and take public transport instead, but nothing's been done to improve the service. I actually like going on the bus - they're great places to slip into the liminal space where poems live - but my part of town is served by a bus lane, which means cars have to make a considerable detour to cross the ring road - but no buses. Well done, Bristol City Council and South Gloucestershire.

One of the reasons I was in the centre of Bristol recently was to launch my new poetry collection, 'Learning Finity'. It was a small thrill to read the poem 'Fockynggrove' at the Folk House, which is built on the hill that went by that name in 1373. I don't have any photos of the evening, though - in fact, I have barely any photos of any of my book launches, and I've done six of them now. I'm always far too keyed up to think of recording the event, and everyone else is mostly getting stuck into the contents of the bar. Ah well. 

Another reason for being in town recently was for a school friend's 60th birthday tea, also at the Folk House - look at that selection of cake! I hadn't been able to park in either of my preferred car parks because they were full, and had ended up a fair walk away because there was nowhere to pull over to consult the sat nav on how to get to a nearer car park that can't be accessed via the most direct route any more. Still I did have a nice walk along the new cut. 

I also spent a morning dropping books into bookshops on the off-chance they might stock them, and rewarded myself for stepping outside my comfort zone by popping into the Arnolfini to see the exhibition of prints by Paula Rego, which didn't disappoint (although ending in a day or two). 

Baa baa black sheep

Border collies make the best librarians

My new collection. Learning Finity, arrived just over a week ago, Even Storm Eunice didn't hold up its delivery. Our collie, Cwtch was very interested in both the box and its contents. I think she must have been a librarian in a past life.

I'm very aware of how lucky I am to have had my lifelong ambition - to take up a little space on a bookshelf somewhere - realised again and again. Poetry is my solace in a difficult world.

I'll be holding both a Real Life and a Zoom launch for Learning Finity, the first somewhere in Bristol with my fellow IsamBards also reading (date and venue to be confirmed) and the Zoom launch on 5th May, with Chaucer Cameron and Tina Cole as guest readers. More details to follow.

'Learning Finity' coming soon

I'm delighted that after a brief delay for personal reasons, my new collection of poems, Learning Finity, will be published on 14th March 2022 by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams Publishing. Here's the front cover, of St Leonard's Lane, which probably has the most ridiculous double yellow lines in the country.

The visual resemblance of the title design to the opening crawl of the Star Wars films is serendipitous, but not misplaced. The poems in Learning Finity are set in my native city of Bristol, but travel back and forth through time, where everything changes but stories are always remembering themselves. 

More details on its real-life and Zoom launch to come. In the meantime, here's a
link to its page on the Indigo Dreams website, where pre-orders are being taken, and for good measure, a colourised photo of Gloucester Road circa 1960, at the junction of Bishop Road, where my great-grandparents lived, before passing their house onto my grandparents and their eleven children in the late 1940s. You can see Mr Hacker's the greengrocer in the foreground, and on the opposite side of the road, Miss Wyatt's Newsagent, which features in one of the poems that makes up my Gloucester Road Odyssey.   

Poetry changes lives

You hear it a lot. Poetry changed - or saved - my life. And it's not just me saying it, though I do have cause to be grateful, since this month marks ten years since my first collection, 'Communion', was published by Indigo Dreams and my life's ambition - to occupy a few millimetres on a bookshelf somewhere - happened. Since then, I've had three further collections published by the wonderfully generous Ronnie and Dawn, as well as a now suddenly topical coming-of-age novel set during the Black Death. 

Good things continue to happen for me where poetry is concerned. I'm currently more than half way through an MA in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School. Recently one of my poems was shortlisted in the 2021 Bridport Prize. And in February 2022, my next collection, a series of poems about my home city, Bristol, entitled 'Learning Finity', will be published.

After my children, my poems are my best things. I could never have dreamt I would be writing this post a dozen years ago, when I was at my lowest ebb. 

Talk to most poets and you'll likely find some sadness hidden not too assiduously in the background. Poetry attracts thinkers, and maybe also over-thinkers. Reading it can be a source of comfort. Using metaphor to shape loss, and come to terms with our unspoken fears, is a powerful way of moving past them. Noli timere, to quote Seamus Heaney.

The Leaping Word is a poetry consultancy established by me and Colin Brown, who for many years was director of Poetry Can in Bristol. We run poetry groups and workshops and offer help with editing poems, putting together manuscripts, approaching publishers with submissions, poetry performance, and putting on poetry events.

Colin is also a qualified counsellor and in addition to general counselling, he offers sessions specially tailored for writers and artists who engage with personal experience in their work. Support can be sought in relation to specific issues that are being explored, or the feelings engendered by such exploration, as well as issues of privacy and self-care. 

You aren't alone. Don't be afraid. 

Poetry and Time-Travel

There are strange time-lags in poetry sometimes. After spending most of last year watching and listening, I've been completely immersed in a different way of writing this spring, as part of my studies at the Manchester Writing School. I'm hoping the resulting sequence of poems will become a pamphlet exploring the patch of edgelands we've been visiting since the first lockdown, and which I've been documenting in this blog. 

Meanwhile, my publishers, Dawn and Ronnie of Indigo Dreams, have sent me the first draft of my fifth collection, Learning Finity, to work on, which means taking a complete break from common, wood and field for a week or two, and revisiting poems almost all of which were written before the pandemic struck.  It's a big shift back to a past that now seems a long time ago. 

For me, writing poems is a particularly intense means of expression. My brain tends to up sticks and shift completely into the world my current poems inhabit, so switching from one project to another does feel like negotiating a rift.  This is ameliorated, however, by the fact that the poems of Learning Finity exist mostly in mythic time, and are themselves well practiced in time travel.  And to encourage me in making this mental leap, my copy of Poetry Salzburg No 37 arrived from Germany today, in which three of my Learning Finity poems find themselves in excellent company. I'm especially pleased that they're alongside work by my comrade in poetry, Chaucer Cameron. 

I've realised that during this time of pandemic and Poetry Zoom, I haven't been posting much about poetry and publications.  They have, however, been getting out and about while we haven't been able to. Here are a few more of the publications they've appeared in. Many thanks to the editors involved. 

Bristol, the morning after the Saturday night before, after lockdown

I have a collection of poems mostly set in Bristol coming out later this year. It's called 'Learning Finity', and I need an arresting cover photograph, so I got up early last Sunday and went to town to wander the old lanes.

In my enthusiasm for the project, I'd overlooked the fact it was the morning after the Saturday night before, after lockdown, and it wasn't that pleasant down there. The Mud Dock car park was full of discarded food, take-away packaging and broken glass, and the stench of piss in the doorways and alleyways was overwelming. Not that this state of affairs isn't understandable, with no venues able to offer inside eating, and all the public toilets closed years ago on account of the council thinking 'let's try and keep within our meagre budget by making them use shops and pubs, because there will never come a time when those facilities are out of commission, will there?' 

Anyhow, here are some photos, one or two of which are contenders for a cover and most of which aren't. I haven't made up my mind which of my shortlist to use yet. 

St Augustine's Reach

The empty plinth where the slavetrader once stood

The old SWEB building, St John on the Wall, and St Lawrence House, where I worked in the mid 80s, now student accommodation

The bottom of Zed Alley

Looking up the upper section of Zed Alley. My great-grandmother used to go to school somewhere here in the 1870s

Looking down the upper part of Zed Alley

Christmas Steps, where my great-grandmother lived with her parents and sisters

I'd completely forgotten about these. I begged my mother for one for Christmas because I wanted to be a writer so badly - I think I must have been about five - only for her to point out - quite reasonably - that it wasn't actually a proper typewriter because it didn't have any keys. I was gutted ... 

Down Johnny Ball Lane

Looking through one of the side arches of  St John's Gate, up Broad Street

Leonard Lane

St Nicholas Street

Welsh Back

Learning Finity and the persistence of stories

I'm very pleased to be able to post that my publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, are going to publish my fifth collection of poems next year. It's called Learning Finity, and it's about mythic time and how a place might change beyond recognition but still retain an imprint of the past. It's also about getting old and the mutability of everything, except, maybe, stories.

I like to think that something of the past and its people, their lives, loves and disasters, remains in a landscape. That the trees that colonnade the nave of St Mary Le Port Church, now a bombed ruin tucked behind a curtain wall of 1960s brutalist office blocks, themselves empty, are engaged in rebuilding it. And that the valerian that bursts through cracks in walls on the hillside above where the ice rink and the Locarno used to be remembers when it was patch of woodland called Fockynggrove, and was a very well frequented spot indeed.

If you've read other posts here, you'll probably guess I'm talking about Bristol, the city I was born in and which I've never managed to leave. Here I am, hanging out with local poet and bad boy, Thomas Chatterton, quite a few years ago now. 

I mostly love my native city, though there are times I've been deeply ashamed of it, such as when Points West asks whether it should apologise for its slaving past and then does a vox pop stuffed with belligerent locals, who haven't fully grasped the implications of how our forefathers made its wealth. And the fact that if it weren't for Black Lives Matters protestors tearing down his statue, this city would still be commemorating Edward Colston right in its heart is excruciating. 

I often wonder what my great-great grandparents, who lived and worked on Christmas Steps, right in the centre of the city, would make of it all, if they had the chance to wander around their city now, which is so different from how they remember it and which will be unrecognisable to future citizens. Everything is mutable, but stories persist. 

'Fockynggrove' was first published in Atrium, May 2020

The John Brooks Award

Starving - or otherwise dying - in a garret is overrated and seldom looks this good.

Henry Wallis: 'The Death of Chatterton'

But austerity has hit writers hard. There's less money available in the form of grants for the arts, and schools and other institutions have had their budgets squeezed so hard, paying visiting authors or poets is out of the question. 

Carl Spitzberg: The Poor Poet

This is why the Society of Authors is so important. Part of its work is to administer a number of grants for writers, to help fund works in progress and support those in financial difficulty.

William Hogarth: The Distrest Poet

As well as being a practical help, these grants also provide the writer with validation, encouragement and recognition.

Gustav Metzger: Homage to the Starving Poet 

I recently received the inaugural John Brooks Award for writers living in the West of England and Wales. 

Pubd 8th August 1826  by Wm Cole: an impoverished poet sitting in a garret surrounded by sheets of paper

It will help me continue
 to work part time and care for my disabled adult children, while I complete my current work-in-progress, Learning Finity.

John Joseph Barker: The Poet Chatterton 

To the Society of Authors, I'd like to say a heartfelt thank you. To you - if you are a writer - I say Join. And Apply. You Never Know.

Joseph Mallord William Turner: The Garreteer's Petition