Filling a Lounge-shaped Silence

The Yellow evening at the stupendous Lyric Lounge did not disappoint as a finale. Lydia was a black and gold star in lace and tulle. John Hegley was a revelation. Just about all his poems were SUNG or spoken to a very groovy soundtrack of live music from 'the Megend Keith Moore' on bass cello - or was it Ken? That's the problem with a 'megend'. There was also his nephew on acoustic guitar. John sang in a wild spoof-bluesy sort of way and the poems were a joy - witty, whimsical but often with an emotional punch too. I think my favourite was about his father - formerly Renee Robert who became 'Bob' to fit in at his English office and never spoke French except when 'Grandmere' suddenly visited after 20 years. Do take a look at some of them on his website.

In addition to the fabulous John Hegley, there was a live band, 4 'talented older men' from Lyric Lounge who dished their own brand of comic poetry and a rousing chorus of Hegley's poem/song dedicated to his native 'Luton bungalow'. The audience was required to sing along, translate French and tap our spectacles in rhythm like an answering morse code. It's impossible to convey how much we laughed and why. Like the whole week, it was generous, fun and in love with versifying. When the circus packed up, what was left was a Lounge-shaped silence.

Green Lyrics Singing

Oh the lushness of green at Lyric Lounge. As I arrive, everyone's in a corner creating something. Pillars are filling up with brand new poems and drawings. Some of them make their way into our lunchtime open mic session. Graham has brought green laurel leaves (from his neighbour's garden) to garland our offerings. He improvises a reading of 'Auroral Football' with me, playing with those green Northern Lights. Ishi Khan-Jackson runs through a gentle comedy set about her Punjabi grandmother. At one point, John Hegley strolls in. He's asked if he'd like to throw something in and he plucks a poem off the wall that's caught his eye. It's by a young man called Josh who absolutely doesn't want to read it himself. So John reads it for him and it's a blinder - the lyrical rush of 'The Hungry Moon' blows us away. John bows out. Jean Binta Breeze moves in, hurls in poems about tropical sunshine and tropical rain while the weather outside is lashing windows. She does a wonderful poem called 'Lyric Lounge' which I must track down for you. And then it's the music.

What can I say about the music - Aly and Milk? Aly - aka Alysson Stoneman - is a gifted poet who's set her words to the sweet acoustic guitar sound of Milk, her mate. I've said before that I think of poetry as singing with words, with the voice, and her phrasing is just on the edge of singing. It's sublime. And when she's not busy doing gigs and writing, she is also a co-ordinator for Nottingham Writers' Studio - another happening place for words.

And that's the great thing about Lyric Lounge - the buzz of the place and the people you meet. More tomorrow when we part in yellow and round off with John Hegley's evening show. Not to be missed.

Dolls' House Blue at Lyric Lounge

Blue day at the Lyric Lounge. Rain streams the windows but inside is sunny as ever. Tables are littered with fascinating, rust-bitten objects from Leicestershire Museums. In the corner, the Book Doctor has her stethoscope out for a surgery with two writers. People begin to pull chairs around and I find myself kicking off the open mic lunchtime set with 2 poems in blue. At the last minute, a bus-load of children arrive and I am weaving between them as I unfurl this arctic story:

'... like a ribbon of blue
green or violet
your breath will
untwist
loose in the sky ...'
(Last Breath Singing)

Mark Goodwin reads a series of poems from the Behind the Scenes workshops inspired by museum objects. As he does so, the curator Nikki Clayton opens a mysterious box-case and sets out 6 Victorian dolls' house chairs. I lay a porcelain dolls' head amongst them and Mark moves on to a spooky poem about a doll dressed in Red Riding Hood clothes. The children are snapping pictures on their mobile and digital cameras. Some of the young Lyric Lounge attendants read their own poems, fresh from this morning's workshop. Jean Binta Breeze drifts across to throw in her 'Third World Blues' poem and a musician takes up his guitar, sings us through to the end of the set.

Lydia rushes off to take some young people to a Truvan film project that is part of the Lyric Lounge festival. It transpires that the children who were snapping were part of a press pack that now descends with forms to sign away permission for those pictures and requests for an interview. My mini-interview is written onto a speech bubble card and I'm photographed beside it. A creative chaos emanates from the Lounge. As I pack up my things to go, people of all ages are crouched with crayons and pencils for the afternoon's Drawing workshop. I'm half reluctant to leave but I'll be back for the Write Way Up evening performance. Seven poets inspired by museum artifacts ...

And a quick evening post: Home from Write Way Up - a fabulous show at Lyric Lounge putting really original work by young writers together with film and music - why isn't poetry presented like this more often? Kevin & Pam did a great job with these performers - cheers all round ...

Purple Poetry at Lyric Lounge

Today I drifted into the sunlit Lyric Lounge for 'Bridging the Gap', a discussion on the relationship between the Page verses Stage. This is a phrase I've been hearing more and more frequently with poets often announcing themselves to be 'a page poet' or a 'performance poet' or some hybrid of the two. Page poets write for literary magazines, with a readership of subscribers, and work to get a chapbook or collection published. Performance poets play at live spoken word events on a growing scene of slams, open mic sessions and gigs. Here the twain met in the pleasant no-man's-land of the Y-theatre lounge to shake hands and swap challenges.

The panel intros. were very good natured with much agreement but the discussion was wide-ranging and threw up all sorts of questions. Is poetry on the page seen as better, 'proper poetry', more complex, more 'academic'? Is there an Establishment of the poetry world, a class divide between page and stage? They certainly have very different audiences. How has performance poetry been rooted in music and the rhythms of an Afro-Caribbean or Black American culture? What part does non-verbal communication, movement and personality play in performance poetry? Why do many page poets 'murder their own work' in reading it aloud? Are some performance poets lacking in writing 'craft' or 'morality'? Can performance poets get published? Can and should page poets learn the skills of communicating with an audience of listeners? What can either 'side' learn from the other?

Inevitably, this discussion challenges us all to see where we fit in. I write for both page and stage and one reshapes the other in a fluid process with no clear boundary, though some poems obviously work better with listeners than others. The label 'performance poet' might lead an audience to expect a different style than mine, I'm not sure. But I have learnt a great deal from the performance poets I've seen at Leicester's WORD events. I love their theatricality, how they use movement and claim the whole space of the stage, how they cradle the audience within their performance. And I try to do all those things in my shows. But the same poems do their stuff on the page in my new book - the white space they originated on.

I very much enjoyed not only the interplay of ideas but the generous vibe between panel speakers and audience in today's Lounge. Graham Norman of Leicester Poetry Society, conveyed his love of words on the page but also his growing awareness of the power of live, spoken poetry. Sureshot, aka Michael Brome, revealed the same love of reading song lyrics on vinyl records and the importance to him of crafting the poem on the page first. Lydia Towsey and Alison Dunne shared their own experience of both forms. And Jean Binta Breeze strolled in, gorgeous in purple (today's Lyric Lounge colour) to share some final words from a poetry mistress: 'A love of language is everything - without that, you don't have a poem.' 'Your voice is your instrument - your sound should seduce your audience and create that space where your poem can live.' 'The performance is a conversation between artist and audience - it begins even before you get on stage.'

The Lyric Lounge is part of the cultural program for the Special Olympics and as such is a vibrant and inclusive affair with all sorts of workshops, performances, open mic sessions - you name it. If you want to experience a passionate engagement with live literature wrapped up in lots of fun, head down there. Jean is doing her stuff every lunchtime. And they have John Hegley on Friday. Tomorrow, the colour theme is blue for those who like to chime with the time. I'll be dreamy in turquoise.

Icebergs and Dark Flames at Polyverse

I feel my recent silence in the blogosphere needs some explaining. For the past fortnight, I've been nursing a bad neck strain, negotiating the world at eye-level gaze. Even neck swathed in scarves, peering at my keyboard aggravated it so blogging was out.

Luckily, I was able to rehearse my revived show STORIES DRUMMED TO POLAR SKIES. I was thrilled to be appearing this weekend as one of the headlining acts at the Polyverse festival. On Friday evening, I played to a very responsive audience in the Martin Hall theatre at Loughborough University. It was great to be doing this show in a theatre space again, with Saami music drifting over the PA and dramatic lighting to capture the mood of these arctic stories. At the end, one audience member said she wanted me to rerun the PowerPoint images and replay the whole thing; poems, music, auroral physics and all. Now that's what a poet loves to hear.



Polyverse was my first ever poetry festival and I was completely smitten. I heard some stunning poetry, bought a heap of books and chatted with editors and jobbing poets from across the country and beyond. It was especially good to finally meet my lovely editor from Original Plus, Sam Smith, down all the way from Cumbria. The festival lived up to its name with an astonishing range of styles and voices and subjects. I particularly enjoyed the other 'arctic poet', Susan Richardson, whose vivid performance was a revelation. I am so envious of her journeys to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland and her poetry found a magnetic resonance in my bones:

'It's a force that's attracted to the North in her,
the thunder of summer light,
the blood of explorers in the tundra,
the tilting cap of ice.'

There were many other very engaging readers, including some startlingly talented young poets, and of course, Carol Ann Duffy was sublime. A consummate storyteller, here is no declaiming. Her delivery is sly and taut and draws us in to collude in her mischief. The hair is all dark flames. She has a way of holding back on the last line, leaning into the mike and loosing that killer phrase with a glint in her eye. Her wicked narrative poem, 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls High' , rang a real bell with me from my own Catholic girls' schooling. This was delivered in separate slices to keep us begging for more. And then the moving sonnets of Rapture to finish. Here in the lover's 'Row', Duffy's images are so astonishing and right and conjured for me that stomach-pit feeling:

'But when we rowed,
the room swayed and sank down on its knees,
the air hurt and purpled like a bruise,
the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled.'

On Sunday I attended 2 really useful workshops on 'what to write' with Pam Thompson and 'who to ask' with Damien Walters of the Literature Network re. resources, funding, publishing etc. So I feel I got a glimpse of the whole poetry landscape. We were incredibly lucky to have this festival on our doorstep and let's hope this is the first of what will become a long tradition. I'm indebted to Radcliff Gregory for his vision of it and also Kerry Featherstone who steered this rambling herd of poets in the right direction all weekend. Fabulous!

Now I would mention Lyric Lounge, that other great spoken word event in Leicester, running all this week - but my neck is starting to do that twisty, creaking thing. More later ...

Map-poems and Bar-codes

I love poetry workshops where you do quirky little exercises and allow writing to be as free as play once was. I was completely hooked today from the moment where Jean Binta Breeze asked us to draw around our hand on a page. The workshop was on 'Identity' and there we were - with an emblem of something so uniquely and solidly ourselves. This hand became our 'island' and we began to name its oceans and straits, its bays and inlets, its peaks and cliffs and the long meandering 'life-line' road that straddled its palm. In no time, we had our maps and marking a cross, began to trace a journey around this island-self. By the end of the first hour, we were sharing a dozen 'map-poems', negotiating the Cliffs of No-Eating, the Troubled Straits, the Inside-Out Road. I was astonished by the variety of images, witty, dark and surreal, from our varied Pilgrims' Progresses. My map-poem began:

'Backstreet Point has walls black as the berries
that hang-over from the elder tree,
rooted and glittering in the field where things
get lost and forbidden ...'

And then we were down to the main business - to let ourselves be inspired by the multiple pieces making up The NHS Open Art Show in Leicester's City Gallery. Jean invited to find one face amongst the many and let it speak to us. I chose a montage piece called 'Identity 9615 13395165'. This played on ideas of identity-tagging with snippets of forms pasted over family photographs and a black mounting cut to suggest an overlaid bar-code. It was a clever and suggestive piece and this is one verse it inspired:

'Barred face
lifted bravely to the light;
lamplight in the parlour
cut by the bar-code,
spliced by faltering
neuronal narratives ...'

It's hoped that some of the poems we produced in this workshop will appear with the exhibition as it tours The Hinckley Ten 2 Gallery, Victoria Hall (Oakham) and Charnwood Museum (Loughborough). So you might look out for this striking piece amongst others. The workshop was free, organised by the lovely Lydia Towsey of BrightSparks , and Jean did a great job of steering us through. And now I'm away to edit up my two brand new poems!

WRITERS ON THE ROAD

Blogs, poems, even meals – were scattered to the winds this week in the headlong rush to get the show on the road. And I have to confess, I love the frenzy of rehearsals almost as much as the greasepaint and lights of the performance itself. The show was WRITERS ON THE ROAD – as the photo suggests, an attempt by Leicester Writers Club to get out of our comfort zone and take our work to new audiences. On Thursday night we gathered 18 writers into the Richard Attenborough Centre and slogged through 4 hours of dress rehearsal. The pace was manic because we'd had so little rehearsal time together and now there was set, lights and sound to add to the mix. But the ensemble camaraderie was in full swing and we knocked things into shape. A night later, we were back for the real thing before a lively and responsive audience of over 60 people.

Suffice to say it was a roaring success because each performer had put in hours before the mirror or mouthing scripts in the Green Room. And our technical crew somehow delivered sound effects or powerpoint magic bang on time. The programme ranged from children's fiction to poems to several plays and some edgy and powerful literary fiction. Everything from the heart-breaking to the laugh-out-loud. It effectively displayed the diversity of writing in the club – the thrill of good storytelling in every genre. The gasps and giggles from our audience more than repaid the hours of fine-tuning that it took to put the show together. And in a week that took in the excellent Short Fuse spoken work event, it got me thinking again about the pull of live literature.

As writers, we spend so much time struggling to get our work into print, to get the permanence and kudos of that. And indeed, turning pages of your own words in a real book is a pleasure hard to beat. But I also find myself drawn to the very different excitement of communicating story and emotion to a live audience. And the challenge of events like Writers on the Road or Short Fuse is to find new ways of presenting material and bringing it to life for an audience of listeners who have no page to revisit or linger over. Short Fuse do a brilliant job with a set of about 6 writers reading on a spot-lit stage with breaks to digest what you've heard. We also had powerful solo readings from writers experienced at standing in front of a mike. To that we added the dynamics of a play with several actors – or two voices sharing a poem. There was live music from Julian Wright. There was a truly bizarre and ingenious depiction of a Dalek, complete with plunger, from Chris de Lacey. There was a shimmering sari to evoke the Northern Lights – my own contribution. Given the chance, I will always veer for that element of theatre.



Personally, I think every writer gains from this exposure to live literature, to developing the skills of doing more than reading from the page. And it's wonderful to be part of a whole team sometimes, not just you and the keyboard. As we packed up props at the Attenborough Centre last night, I was already missing it. Don't be too surprised if you hear that I've chucked everything to run off and join the circus ...