Tag: swindon poetry festival

The view, looking back

Royal Opera House
The view, looking back

I’m just taking a moment to post what will probably be my last of 2018, and I have to be careful not to descend into a sort of ’round robin’ where I refer to myself in the third person, blurt out a list of frightening achievements and try to put a positive spin on any chronic ailments with a sad emoji, etc etc. Actually I have nothing new to declare on the chronic ailments front, so HURRAH for that. Frightening achievements? Hmmm… let me see. I think that’s also a no. BUT this was the year…

I joined the Poetry Book Society

… a ‘Black Friday’ deal had me. Then after receiving my first book, Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance I was on a train to a friends’ reunion and realised I’d forgotten the ‘wrapped pre-loved paperback’ for the Secret Santa. So I wrapped Ray’s half-read book in a page from the Guardian and sacrificed it. The recipient seemed delighted with the book though – my consolation, and a reminder to give poetry more often to people who don’t buy poetry books.

I went to the Forward Prize readings

…having heard they were ‘different’ to the T S Eliots, plus a poet friend pulled together a few of us to be fangirls and boys for amazingly talented and unbelievably modest Abigail Parry. She didn’t win, but I loved the readings, especially Danez Smith who read this poem as a spellbinding encore.

I didn’t book to go to the T S Eliot Prize Readings in January 2019

This is the first one I’ve missed in (I think) five or six years. But having been to the Forwards, and bearing in mind the difficulties of getting to the South Bank on a Sunday in January, I thought I’d give it a miss. In previous years the experience has been enhanced for me by attending Katy Evans Bush‘s workshop the day before the readings, in which the shortlisted books are discussed. I’m not sure if she’s running it this year, but if she I highly recommend it.

Telltale Press launched its first and last anthology

A superb way to wrap up the Telltale experiment (for now…)

Cinnamon published a pamphlet of mine

A huge relief to get this ‘out the door’, and almost as exciting as actual publication was being shortlisted for the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition (oh that was last year, so excuse me for STILL milking it, he he.)

I wrote a booklet on how to get published in UK poetry mags

… and it’s selling a lot better than the pamphlet – surprise!

I was turned down for an ACE grant (again)

… however hard I try I can’t tick the right boxes.

I took part in a radio recording ‘with’ Alice Oswald

… OK, she was definitely in the recording. My little voice might not make the cut at all – but hey! I was there 🙂

Also …I went on a lovely Garsdale Retreat week with Ian Duhig, and blogged (blagged?) my way through the charming Swindon Poetry Festival, managed (just about) a ‘dry’ November, perfected my front crawl in the tiny local swimming pool, discovered the joy of yoga, sang in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral and experienced my first live ballet at the Royal Opera House no less. All this and a fantastic summer in the garden. Life is good.

Although I’ve been writing poetry, I haven’t been sending poems out as much as previous years, which means I’ve only had a handful of poems published. But the first collection is starting to have a shape, and I have a good feeling about it (you have to, don’t you?) AND a good poet friend has got me into freelance features writing again, so there are things coming up on that front in 2019.

Thank you so much for reading, commenting on and supporting this blog. I hope the season of goodwill is good for you, wherever and however you spend it. Here’s to whatever you look forward to.

Robin xxx

Kay Syrad, Josephine Corcoran – short reviews

Inland - Kay Syrad and What Are You After? - Josephine Corcoran

A couple of brief reviews of collections I’ve been reading:

Inland – Kay Syrad  (Cinnamon, 2018) (£8.99)

There’s nothing predictable or familiar in this collection. Just when you feel you’re getting your feet under the table suddenly the table is gone, and the ground beneath, and your feet too. Just two poems in we encounter ‘Transcript’, a testimony with gestures-as-stage-directions which is stranger than the sum of its parts – a characteristic we meet intermittently throughout the book. The poet’s feeling for moss is visited and revisited, from ‘Nomenclature’ (‘bird’s -claw beard-moss / oblique-mouthed beardless-moss’) which ends with the line ‘ah – our fresh fingertips’ through to the last poem ‘Listening to moss’ (‘I take a blindfold, lie down and listen/ to a half-globe of star-green star-moss’). I came away with a sense of yearning, of sadness for something almost grasped but not entirely, almost said but not exactly (‘Situation of Secrecy’, ‘Scatter my bright feathered heart’, ‘Plaint’). The title poem ‘Inland’ takes the reader on a meditation around a few repeated words (gulls, grief, words, speak, heart, ship, inland) coming together and knocking against each other slowly towards a conclusion ‘gulls and men / follow the white island of the heart / all inlaid in the heart / grief in the heart / in white / I find white in the heart / inlaid’. I particularly loved Kay’s poem titles – more often than not intriguing, inventive and quirky. I also warmed to the more surreal poems, maybe because I enjoyed the fun of decoding them (or just scratching my head), much as the poet ‘translates’ a ‘secret message on a long fence’ in ‘Afternoon out’, but it’s also the magical mystery that Kay creates, sometimes as delicate as gossamer – you almost don’t want to pick it up for fear of breaking the magic.

What are you after? – Josephine Corcoran (Nine Arches, 2018) (£9.99)

Josephine Corcoran’s first collection draws upon memories (real, imagined or reimagined) to examine issues of identity, class, family and love. From the grief of miscarriage to a relationship mapped onto a litany of medical interventions (‘In 24 years, we’ve lost count / of all the body parts we’ve seen’ – ‘Love in the time of hospital visits’) the autobiographical content has an quiet honesty. Josephine situates the reader through her use of time-specific references, figures of speech period detail, popular culture and current affairs – the ‘5 o’clock bus’ from school, headrests ‘dimpled from Brylcreemed heads’. Stephen Lawrence, food banks and drones rub along with references to margarine, economy ham and the Three Degrees. Movie scenes and film references proliferate, as do dreams. The poet demonstrates great versatility and range, from the polemic of poems such as “Police Say Sorry” to the quieter lyric pieces and a wonderful pantoum ‘Fallen asleep by a Christmas Tree on New Year’s Eve’. Another trope weaving its way throughout is telephones and phone calls, featuring often as signifiers for communication (or lack of), misunderstanding, cross purposes and the gulfs between different times, ages, cultures and beliefs. Poems have been carefully sequenced, cross-referencing each other neatly. It makes sense, but if anything, I would quite have liked fewer instances of poems obviously following on from the previous one, for example ‘Gavrilo’ following ‘History Lesson’ – to makes things a bit more oblique for the reader. A very small quibble. One of my favourite poems in the collection, ‘In town for a funeral, we drive past our old house and see it is for sale’ is also possibly the longest. It’s a seemingly-simple but complex poem that invites many re-readings, yet still has plenty of secrets to give up. I can imagine Josephine might be already writing more of these longer poems. Watch out for the next collection.

I was fortunate to hear Josephine reading at Swindon Poetry Festival recently. Here is ‘Exquisite Corpse’:

 

And so to the Tent Palace…

of the Delicious Air. This will be the venue from tomorrow until Monday for the Poetry Swindon Festival (or is that the Swindon Poetry Festival? It seems to go by both names – part of its mystery!) I’m looking forward to being the “blogger in residence” for this year’s festival, which is still a true indie – none of the mainstream publishers appear to have discovered it yet – and I’m expecting a good sprinkling of Hilda Sheehan pixie-dust over events.

So, that tent. There’s a lot to unpack here: Tent. Palace. Delicious Air.

Tent: I’m not a great one for camping, and marquees bring up thoughts of wobbly floors, rain pattering on canvas and draughts. Then again, I’ve been in some posh tents in my time – the Charleston Festival tent has always involved potted plants, standard lamps and a range of soft furnishings in Bloomsbury prints, although sadly only on stage.

Palace: only slightly anxious about this one. I don’t have a ball gown or a tiara, but in these Harry-n-Meghan days jeans are probably OK. And thick woollies, of course (palaces are only slightly less draughty than tents).

Delicious Air: hmmm. Could be an ironic reference to a local farmer doing his muck-spreading, or possibly a nearby sewage works. Or maybe it refers to the fresh semi-outdoors ambience (must take woollies!!!). I just hope there are no vases of scented lilies.

But naturally I’ve done my research, and I see it’s a quote from Richard Jefferies’ The Open Air. The festival takes place at the Richard Jefferies Museum (his birthplace) at Coate. I hadn’t heard of Jefferies until I went to the 2014 Swindon Poetry Festival. The Wikipedia entry tells me he’s known for his nature writing, and another little detail jumped out at me – that he lived for a short while in Eltham, in South East London, where I grew up. Small world indeed.

I’ll be blogging about the festival events – workshops I’m going to, readings, the odd interview and maybe even some gossip – at the Festival Chronicle, so please do head on over there if you’d like to read all about it. I’m also hoping to fit in the odd nap (I can’t do the late nights like I used to!), a bit of in-room yoga, and I’ve heard there’s a swimming pool which I’m very happy about. I may well blog a bit here too, let’s see how it goes.

Back from Swindon Poetry Fe(a)st

I must stop trying too hard with blog post titles. What’s with the ‘fest’/’feast’ thing? Stop me, somebody.

Anyway, I’m now musing on a weekend in Swindon, not a place I’ve ever had strong feelings about, I confess, but clearly a place where poets settle and are proud of. The indefatigable Hilda Sheehan and her team worked hard all weekend, and the atmosphere was one of laid-back fun and a definite hippy vibe. Workshops and readings took place at Lower Shaw Farm, which looked like the set from ‘The Darling Buds of May’ with a bit of fruit-picker-style accommodation thrown in. It’s clearly a secret place – without the help of sat-nav I found myself in estate cul-de-sac hell for some time before I found it on Friday afternoon. One attendee came by taxi and admitted the driver had never heard of it. “What happens here?” he asked nervously, as if expecting the reply “oh, cooking with cheesecloth, tantric sex and ritual sacrifice.”

Over the two days I enjoyed hearing readings from Kathryn Maris, who turned out to be none other than Maurice Riordan’s ‘willowy companion with the ombre hair’, Maurice Riordan, Alison McVety, Don Share, David Morley, Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton and the prize winners in the Battered Moons poetry competition. I also took part in a short workshop led by Cliff Yates and a day-long masterclass with Don Share (more on this in a separate post). It was great fun to meet some people I’ve only known via this blog or social media, or just by reputation: Cliff Yates, Judi Sutherland, Alison Brackenbury to name but three, and to catch up with blogging buddy Josephine Corcoran and editor of The Interpreter’s House Martin Malone.

Don Share and backing musicians
Don Share and backing musicians

One thing I really enjoyed about the evening readings was the music element  – on Friday we were treated to Don Share reading to a musical backdrop from some fine musicians doing jazz improv. It could have been the sixties, but without the marijuana, the greasy hair or the loon pants. Then on Saturday, to complement the Battered Moons competition readings, there was a wonderful performance of flamenco guitar from a chap whose name escapes me (what a shame) and Cristina Newton mesmerised us with her dramatic and moving reading interspersed with some Romany singing. This photo doesn’t do her justice. She has a wonderful singing voice. Fire and beauty.

Cristina  Newton
Cristina Newton

Although it rained on Saturday morning, in the afternoon the skies cleared and we had a wonderful walk up at the White Horse at Uffington.

On the Ridgeway
On the Ridgeway
Robin Houghton & Josephine Corcoran
With Josephine
The eye of the White Horse
The eye of the White Horse
Poets at the White Horse
Poets at the White Horse

And so to Sunday, and our day with Don Share. So much great stuff came out of that, so I’m going to write a separate post with as many tips, stories and Don-isms as I managed to jot down.