Blah! Blah!! Blah!!!

Two of our favourite hangouts have closed their doors in recent weeks: one due to the decision to discontinue trading at one of their two sites (so at least they're not gone forever); the other after their estate agent landlords turfed them out unfairly (and likely unlawfully). This latter, Café Blah, were evicted with no warning (and right after paying their rent), and, following a sit-in protest and a take-to-the-streets demonstration, a Just Giving campaign is ongoing to help them get set up in a new space as soon as possible. 

A vital part of Manchester’s creative community, the folks at Café Blah regularly put on bands and DJs and sound artists and films and spoken word and art shows and all sorts of fabulous necessary cultural activity – scant days before their locks were unjustly changed, Blah co-hosted the third Party For The People and a literary quiz for the first-ever Withington Book Festival. While making our way to the demo just a week on from making our way to read at WBF, David and I decided to try and make sure Café Blah can host many more great events!

As a flurry of gigs were organised by bands at the likes of Peer Hat and Withy Public Hall, we've been busy behind the scenes setting up our own #SaveCaféBlah Fundraiser, a reading event bringing together loads of fantastic writers serving up wonderful words to contribute to the #SaveCaféBlah campaign. 

Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! Writers For Café Blah – poetry and prose for the people – will take place on Saturday 23 November, 5-7pm, upstairs at Withington Public Hall Institute, at the village end of Burton Road, between The Orion and Sainsbury's. Tickets are £10 and are on sale now – you need a ticket to get in, but if you can’t make the event and want to donate please use the Save Café Blah Just Giving link (see below for all the links).

LINE-UP: The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! #SaveCafeBlah wordy fundraiser readers will include purveyor of fine flash fiction David Gaffney, reading from his pamphlet Whale, and Professor of Poetry at the Centre for New Writing John McAuliffe, reading from his latest collection National Gallery. The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! line-up will also include Joey Francis and Tim Allen of Peter Barlow's Cigarette, Steven Waling and Pam Galloway oft spotted at Manchester Poets, and Anna Percy of the newly reinvigorated Beatification. We’ll also be hearing from Broken Sleep Books poet Nóra Blascsók, Confingo storyist Nathan Bailey, Dry River author Alicia Rouverol and death of workers/Red Ceilings/many other published writer Lydia Unsworth. Joining the party are The Emma Press-pamphleted Lenni Sanders, of Manchester Critics Collective, Red Ceilings Press-pamphleted Steve Smythe, of Speakeasy, Guillemot Press-pamphleted Jazmine Linklater, of No Matter, and Sublunary Editions-pamphleted Tom Jenks, of zimZalla and formerly The Other Room. I will be compèring and might read something too.

Bagsy your ticket quick, it’s less than a week away!

* Tickets are £10pp. Eventbrite will add a fee to each ticket price. Here's the ticket link.

** All proceeds go to the Save Café Blah fund. Big thanks to the artists for giving up their time and super big thanks to the Withington Public Hall Institute peeps for their support in the effort to raise funds for Café Blah, letting us have the venue for free.

*** Please note, if you'd like to contribute to the Save Café Blah fund, but can't make this event (or you'd like to contribute more than £10pp), you can donate direct to Blah's Just Giving crowdfunder here. 

Day tripper

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.

Holiday reading

I'm not long back from holiday, in which time I produced a villanelle (I was in France, after all!) and a melting snowball (it was hot, after all!). Here I am, sitting beneath a chestnut tree next to an old castle, wearing a kaftan (ever the pro) and knocking out a little watercolour of a nearby garden, which prompted an old fella to pop down from his very high-up balcony to find out what I was up to. I showed him the picture and explained that I'm really bad at painting, but that it's good for my <<bien-être>>, pointing to my noggin.

I also read a ton of poetry and some quite strange prose, maybe autofiction, maybe memoir, maybe a little of both or indeed neither. I bought some French books, including Michel Butor's Collation, which I've yet to start as it's quite the hefty tome, so I left it à Paris while I trained and bussed it to relax en Provence. I also bought (for the second time, accidentally) Nathalie Sarraute's L'usage de la parole (1986), a collection of short texts à la Tropismes, her first book from 1939. Not to worry, it made me read some more and brought to mind Roland Barthes' Mythologies, of which I'm a fan. On my perusal of Parisian secondhand bookshops (the first was Oxfam and the next one near Odéon with a picture of a cat on the door, this third – just down the road from a lovely little square now infested with Emily in Paris fans, sacre bleu! – was manned by a very intense young bloke, who made absolutely no comment on a blatantly English person buying a blatantly fairly difficult French text), I also picked up an illustrated copy of Françoise Sagan's Toxique (2009). This is the account of the writer's three-month stay in rehab after getting addicted to morphine following a car crash in 1957, three years after she found fame with Bonjour Tristesse, aged just 19. It's fascinating, nothing at all like her slightly romcom-y novels (which I do like, don't get me wrong – partly because they're so lovely and short), and quite an eye-opener. Perhaps I should watch the biopic, after all. 

I interspersed the two French women with – all four on rotation – some English language poetry: Denise Riley's Lurex (2022), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Mirror Trade (2004), the first full-length poetry collection by Zoë Skoulding. I also read Sphinx by Anne Garréta, the first novel by a female member of the Oulipo to be translated and published in English. I've tried and failed to get the original French version in a real bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore, so the internet might have to be called upon – now I've read the English, I can see that it's going to be actually a very different read again, due to a very specific constraint. I'm currently reading Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal, to keep my head in France for as long as possible. Once that is done, I will return to her Boat, which I'd left moored at the side of my bed as it was quite cumbersome for travelling. But the to-read pile is still blocking the view from my desk to the street, so...

Critical mass

The first months of 2024 have seen me step out of my new comfort zone of writing poetry, and turn my hand to poetry criticism. If I didn't feel imposter syndrome before, imagine the fear in my eyes now. (The fear in my eyes above is that I am taking a selfie.)

First, I was invited to contribute to PN Review, and commissioned to review a couple of poetry collections, which was an honour, if somewhat daunting, although the comments back were on the whole pretty positive and the amends (well, really additions – expand on what you really think) were minimal. I subsequently found out that my contribution was "typically stylish and brilliant", which is nice, and that PNR (to his friends) "will be hoping to publish her work again in future". The issue in which my two reviews appear has just hit the shelves, and you can find out more here.

So in between the writing of the PN Review reviews and the feedback, I applied for a six-week workshop series facilitated by Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University for a tight band of eight new and emerging critics – and subsequently became a member of The Critic Collective.

Over the course of my career writing and editing for magazines and newspapers and culture websites and wotnot, I've written my fair share of reviews and previews of different art forms (literature, theatre, dance, cinema, visual arts, and even pantos; oh yes I did!), but I thought it would be beneficial to get more of insight into the "art" of criticism.

The aim of these workshops was to challenge expectations about what criticism is and can do, and consider criticism as a creative practice – drawing on art-writing and performance criticism, as well as using poetry as part of reviewing writing, events, recordings and exhibitions. 

We looked at and discussed various examples and approaches, and were treated to workshops from three guests: writer, translator and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation Khairani Barokka, TS Eliot and Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Kit Fan, and John McAuliffe, Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester and co-director of the Centre of New Writing, and Associate Publisher of Carcanet Press and co-editor of PN Review.

The Critic Collective lives on, is the aim, and the culmination of the six weeks is the commission of a review from each of us who took part. I'm still gathering source material for my piece, having decided to review not only Jos Charles's collection a Year & other poems just out with Broken Sleep Books (whose "A Call To Arms" campaign you should totally support – browse the bookshop here), but also her brilliant reading (and chat with Manchester Writing School's Andrew McMillan, below, as part of the new and very welcome live series – keep your peelers peeled on Creative Tourist for regular updates) at the Poetry Library round the end of April, bookending her residency there. As such, there is more to be studied, and I'm just waiting on getting eyes on that.

Magical surrealism

I've just had a "writing week" in Shropshire and picked up this book on Chagall in a charity bookshop on my travels, for the princely sum of £1.50, and since poured out 1,000 words in a sort of experimental style (not poetry nor prose) inspired by his “magical surrealism” and taking as its start (and end) point my encounter with the ceiling he painted in the main auditorium at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, which was unveiled 60 years ago to, of course, both acclaim and derision. 

It (the ceiling) has his signature flying folk and funny animals and embracing lovers and bright colours and circus motifs and also sights in my favourite city, including le Tour Eiffel and l’Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Coeur. I don't have a photo of the ceiling, I don't think, as when I visited it was all film, baby, and I was young and skint and couldn’t afford much in the way of development so didn’t take tons of pictures aside from my arty stuff (City & Guilds in photography, I’ll have you know).

I do remember snapping the other Paris opera, the one at Bastille, as I really liked the juxtaposition of old and new architecture, and Paris really was falling down in parts at that time (the 90s, since you're asking), but with these big shiny edifices plonked in the middle of the crumbling masonry. I'll have to dig out the photo; I feel it was in black and white for extra contrast.

My mum's just dropped off another Chagall book, so I'll be having a leaf through that when I get a chance. Right now, I'm trying to finish the latest novel in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series, as it's due back at the library. He swore the Anna Madrigal one was the last, but then snuck this in ten years or so later. You'd have thought he might have been able to find a decent proofreader in all that time...