Tag: hilda sheehan

Anthology launch, plus Hilda Sheehan at Tunbridge Wells

A busy couple of days: Monday evening saw the launch of the Brighton Stanza anthology, a labour of love for editors Antony Mair, Miriam Patrick and Andie Davidson. Andie’s company, the Bramley Press, published the book and it looks excellent, though I say so myself. Twenty six poets are in the anthology, and nine of them read at the launch event at the Lord Nelson in Brighton.

The room was packed and we heard a good variety of poetry (performance, page, mystic), basically I think everyone had a good time. I had a nasty headache creep up towards the end of the first half which thankfully disappeared after I’d stuffed a bag of crisps. (This slightly did for my ‘fast’ day but what the heck.) What a lot of poetry love. The much-missed Jo Grigg would have been thrilled. I’m proud to be stepping into her shoes as Stanza Rep, but what a loss.

Then yesterday what should I see on Facebook but an alert that Hilda Sheehan was in Tunbridge Wells last night reading at the Kent & Sussex Poetry Soc. So how could I not hot-foot it along? I first met Hilda at a Swindon workshop, one of so many events and projects she organises and is involved in. The indefatigable Hilda has a lovely reading style and her poetry is clever, entertaining and just a tad surreal. You can’t help but get pulled into her orbit of warmth and goodwill.

Hilda Sheehan & Robin Houghton

Hilda read from her latest collection The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood (Cultured Llama) and shook up the good poets of Tunbridge Wells with her tales of hornets with men’s heads, loaves of bread slicing up women and seals living in the bath. Nice one!

BlueGate Poets Anthology

Hilda Sheehan
Hilda Sheehan at the Swindon Festival of Literature

 

Swindon is a hotbed of poetry! I actually live 130 miles from there, but this year I’ve been drawn into its orbit and am very pleased to be a member of BlueGate Poets. Founded in 2008 by the extraordinary and indefatigable writer and arts event organiser Hilda Sheehan, BlueGate Poets hosts events, readings, workshops and open mics, and its membership has grown to fifty or so, from aspiring writers to published and award-winning.

It’s lovely to have a couple of my poems in BlueGate Poets latest online anthology  (check out also a previous anthology, Separate Ways, poems written on the Swindon Art Collection – some lovely gems there.)

Hilda’s first poetry collection The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood was published recently by Cultured Llama and she’ll be reading from it at the  Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair in London this weekend. I’ll be there making tea or something, so hoping to catch with Hilda and other poet friends – let me know if you’re going too!

Poetry & music at The Core

It was a great pleasure to read at the Swindon Shuffle event on Thursday. Our co-host was the lovely Hilda Sheehan of Blue Gate Poets. As well as being a fine poet and prolific writer, Hilda is clearly a major driving force for poetry good in Swindon, and I’m hoping to be able to reciprocate sometime soon and invite her down to Lewes for a reading.

I took with me both my husband and my brother- & sister-in-law who told me they’d never been to a poetry reading before, which made me a tad nervous. I needn’t have been though  – the mix of poetry and music, together with several breaks, meant it was perfect for poetry ‘virgins’.

In the first half we heard talented local up-and-coming Jadine Eagle followed by the experienced and widely published Anna-May Laugher from Reading, and an acoustic set from auralcandy which went down particularly well. Stephen Payne and I read after the break  (great to hear his set – Stephen was picked by Smith’s Knoll for mentoring and publication, so clearly a fine poet) and the evening finished with a two-piece called Wave Dance, playing what my sister-in-law confidently knew to be surfer hippy music (from her cheesecloth and VW Campervan days) which I really enjoyed, especially the fascinating array of percussion instruments, ranging from a hotel desk bell to vintage Fairy Liquid bottles filled with rice.

Swindon Poetry Reading
Top: Robin, Hilda Sheehan, Jadine Eagle. Bottom: Anna May Laugher, Stephen Payne, The Core

I think the four poets each offered something quite different, and mixing it up with music was really fun. Plus, my non-poet guests said they’d had a great time and hadn’t been scared off by anything too hardcore, so that was gratifying. A success all round!

My only reservation about the evening was there not being any alcohol available (The Core is a juice bar) – even though the atmosphere was chilled, people were very friendly and the juices got good reviews. Personally I don’t drink before I read (could’ve killed for a glass of Chardonnay afterwards though), but I appreciate an audience that’s, shall we say, a little loosened up – perhaps that’s churlish of me? Sadly I missed the post-event drink in the pub, as we had to get back to Newbury, but next time hopefully!

This Thursday: Swindon Shuffle / Blue Gate Poets

The Core, Swindon

If you’re anywhere near Swindon do come along to what should be a great night of poetry and music – The Swindon Shuffle @ The Core in association with Blue Gate Poets. I’m going to be reading alongside Stephen Payne, Anna-May Laugher and Jadine Eagle.

Many thanks to Hilda Sheehan for inviting me – really looking forward to it –  now I’ve just got to decide what to read.

Thursday 8th August, 7.30 – 9.30pm at The Core. See the Facebook event page for details.

Forthcoming readings in the pipeline: September at the Crypt in Seaford as part of the annual Seaford Live festival, and October in Tunbridge Wells (possibly the 24th – to be confirmed).

I mislaid my poetic mojo in a Ghent hostel

Poetry mags and books

Having been away for four days ‘helping’ with a college trip to Belgium (my husband was the tour leader – his A level students) I’m finding it hard to get back to poetry.

I suppose it’s partly because I’m having to catch up with work as well, and not having a proper night’s sleep the whole time we were away (teenagers don’t go to sleep before 2am, so nor can anyone else in a Youth Hostel where there are no carpets and the doors all slam).

Although they were (for the most part) very nice people, I just found the whole being-around-40-teenagers utterly exhausting and a tad depressing. Their energy saps mine, their zest for life deadens my creativity. I’m amazed at how so many writers are able to combine a teaching career with writing – and yet it’s such a common combination, whether it’s by choice or necessity.

OK, I realise I’m probably being over-dramatic here, after all I think a foreign trip is tiring even for the full time teachers, because you’re never off-duty, not for a moment.

Anyway, I think I now have an even higher respect for my husband and his colleagues for everything they bring and give to teaching. I just know I don’t have that kind of generosity in me!

But on a more positive note… lots to look forward to, not least of all some much-needed sunshine!

The answer to a creativity deadzone for me is to read, and read good stuff. I’ve still to explore the new Poetry Review and Magma which arrived a week or so ago, plus I’m reading Abegail Morley’s Snow Child and Ben Parker’s The Escape Artists, so I’ll be talking about those soon on the blog.

Poetry readings coming up: Hilda Sheehan has very kindly invited me to read at the Blue Gate Poets meeting on 8th August in Swindon, and I’m currently talking with the organisers of the Shoreham Wordfest about putting on a poetry night where I hope to be reading alongside some lovely poet friends. Then come October there are exciting plans for a reading with Abegail Morley and Emer Gillespie – will keep you posted.

George Szirtes workshop in Swindon

George Szirtes

The sun was shining, it was a great day for a drive and even the M25 was a breeze. So my trip yesterday to Swindon was relaxing from the start. Actually I say ‘Swindon’ but the workshop was at the Richard Jefferies Museum which turned out to be a short hop from the M4, so I didn’t see anything of Swindon itself. But by the end of the day I had a clear picture of how the literary scene and poetry in particular is evidently thriving here.

There were sixteen of us in a cosy low-celiinged room, George in the comfy armchair and the rest of us fanning outwards in a kind of how-well-you-know-George pecking order, with copious amounts of tea and biscuits generously supplied by the lovely Hilda Sheehan of BlueGate Poets, our host for the day.

An interesting array of poets – I had probably come the furthest in terms of miles but many had travelled an hour or so, so clearly George Szirtes was a big draw. It was fun to get off of my usual patch, and always intriguing to ‘infiltrate’ a different poetry scene. Most exciting of course was finally meeting Josephine Corcoran, who gamely allowed me to take a snap of us on my phone (I think she came off better than me!)

Robin Houghton & Josephine Corcoran

The theme for the day was ‘form’ – we explored some of the elements that make up a formal poem – not specific forms (although we were asked to write a sonnet in the afternoon) but rather rhythm & metre, rhyme, length and so forth. George made the point early on that form isn’t just to do with the shape of a poem, it’s also voice – voice changes according the context, (which I guess is true of all kinds of formal writing, for example the language, the voice of a legal document versus a love letter versus a school report. In fact I started thinking about the word invoice and wondering about it.)

George talked about the frailty of language and likened the making of a formal poem to the patterns created by a skater on thin ice over a deep pond. There is something below, beneath the language, to be discovered. “Patterns can be difficult but there’s an exhilaration in executing them.” Language itself is purely a signifier, it’s not the thing itself. Rhyme, he said, is arbitrary – “language is not to be bullied into what you want – you have to listen to it…. there’s a couple dancing here but you’re not the leading partner.”

I particularly liked “most good poems are not the execution of intention but the discovery of possibilities…. with practice you develop an instinct about how you ‘fall’ into something, or how the poem moves along.” By being open to rhyme, but not forcing it, you are opening yourself up to new meanings, unexpected or surprising directions. George’s complaint about many competition entries is simply that he knows too soon where a poem is going – the poet hasn’t surprised herself –  “If there’s no surprise in the poet, there’s no surprise in the poem.”

Another tip about rhyme: if you have two rhyming words you wish to use but it’s not working, try swapping the rhymes – one may be more ‘difficult’ than the other – try using the difficult one first. The simple act of a swap can achieve a different or more interesting effect.

Much of this for me felt relevant for all poetry writing, not just form or aspects of form. I think the idea of ‘being surprised’ is one of my biggest takeaways from the day. I know in myself if I decide to write in a specific form I can get bogged down with metre and rhyming words, without paying attention to the possibilities that may be opening up.

In the afternoon we had a go at writing a 14 line poem to a form introduced by George – not exactly a sonnet, but a 3-part poem: the first part featuring a room or a location where something happens. Then in part two, a shift of perspective – a turn away from the action in part one, to something happening elsewhere. We were encouraged to think in terms of camera stills. Then the final part not exactly a resolution or consequence, but a new direction suggested as a result of the first two parts. Try to improvise, said George, “listen… don’t plan it! Poetry is all hunches!”

We also discussed the reordering of lines, the cutting of early material when you might have been just ‘warming up’ (I find often this is true of blog posts… and to be honest, workshops also!) and the fact that different poets have used the same forms in very different ways – compare the iambic pentameter of Yeats, Tennyson and Gray, for example.

“Nothing is an entrapping as you think … forms are just instruments to play/use.” A day workshop like this is only ever going to be a quick skate over thin ice, but I did feel I took away some useful gems of wisdom and new insights. Can’t ask for more than that really.

The day ended with a sadly all-too-short reading by George from his latest book Bad Machine (l have serious title-envy about that one) which he admits contains much that was experimental for him. He’s a poet who has produced a vast amount of work and is still looking for new challenges and directions. Inspirational stuff.