European collaboration

I was delighted to be invited to participate for a fourth time in the now annual European Camarade, part of the European Poetry Festival, put together by poet-organiser extraordinaire SJ Fowler. Last year, I collaborated with flash fiction maestro David Gaffney; the year before that with Fat Roland (of Flashtag and Bad Language fame) in Manchester and Tom Jenks, formerly of The Other Room, in Leeds. 

This year, Jazz Linklater, of Carcanet Press and one-third of avant evening No Matter, kindly agreed to collaborate with me and we had much fun creating some brand-new work and performing it at Manchester's International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Saturday 13 April.  Our piece "900" was a mash-up of three gallery trips each, three sets of cafe-bar scribbles each and three dreams each. We wrote for 15 minutes flat on each occasion, then combined the results into a piece per gallery, per cafe and per dream each, and then swapped out the nouns, adjectives and verbs between our two lots of pieces. The resulting text was slightly surreal and at times funny and other times slightly sinister. You can watch us reading it here.

Here's the intro: One Five Oh times three equals four-fifty times two equals nine hundred. 900.
 To dream of the number 900 represents feelings about an ending or closure that feels chaotic. Unpredictably ending something. Alternatively, it may reflect an attempt to use creative skills to plan an unusual ending to a situation.