July has just whizzed by, and I'm only just getting round to making inroads with my European Poetry Festival follow-up activities. I was teamed up with Julia Rose Lewis for the Liverpool Camarade event in the Open Eye photography gallery on the waterfront, organised by the ever-energetic SJ Fowler. Seven pairs of poets collaborated, so 14 poets in total, and we got together to perform on a Merseyside-typical sunny-windy afternoon on Saturday 6 July. It was the final date for this year's EPF on an, as usual, whistlestop tour of the UK and even, I believe, further afield.
Anyway since May, Julia and I had been chatting over email about our usual styles and themes and so on and so forth, and decided to write about the ocean between us, imagining that I was standing in the footsteps of my late ornithologist not-quite uncle (my mum's first cousin) John, on Hilbre Island, off the tip of the Wirral over the Mersey from Liverpool, where I lived until I was 10, while Julia was standing at the foreshore of Nantucket Island, off the US east coast, where she's been resident.
I considered shorebirds coming and going, Julia thought about migratory whales; I wrote a melting snowball and Julia a snowball, and we interspersed the lines to create a sort of to-and-fro, wave-like motion. It seemed to work, members of the audience later saying they got the ebb-and-flow movement, and our props of a pair of binoculars each – a last-minute idea – also went down well. There's a video here, if you fancy seeing/hearing it. We had a great time meeting in real life and talking about the project to LiPs (Liverpool Poetry Space), and we're just about to submit our collaboration with a view to getting it published. Fingers crossed...
Behind us, and surrounding us on all four walls (and even the floor) during the performances, were some great photos of Crosby Beach, which is gradually being stripped of its top layers to reveal the war rubble dumped there after Liverpool's May Blitz in 1941. It's something I'd like to explore, especially as I recently found out that some of my dad's side grew up a stone's throw from there, in and around Waterloo, but I've been too busy until now with other projects to get time to make the trip, so as part of my recent foray into review-writing, I decided to put together a piece about the exhibition, chatting to the photographer Stephanie Wynne, and I've just submitted it to a competition. Again, fingers crossed...
The exhibition is called The Erosion, and continues until 1 September, so I'd urge you to pop in if you're passing – it's free and is part of a bigger show for the LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight programme.
