Drought Thoughts

I recently had my first proper rural trip away since my hip op, staying in the Yorkshire Dales for a week. I mention it because it inadvertently tied into what I've been working on recently, writing wise.   

An erstwhile sailor and hydrologist, I often write about watery subjects, but recently I’ve capsized that to explore “drought thoughts” as a poetry project – researching and writing while adjusting to life with severe arthritis. Drought was officially declared in the “Rainy City” of Manchester where I live the same week that my name went on the waiting list for a hip replacement, so it seemed appropriate to tie in this personal experience of creaking, crunching bones with the driest summer since 1976, when I was growing up on the Wirral Peninsula, a kind of island. That was last May (a year ago!) and I’ve since really enjoyed researching “drought thoughts” – from “dry-bathing” in the UK’s only desert at Dungeness before I ground to a halt completely, to charting the progress of Haweswater’s lost villages flooded to supply Manchester’s drinking water slowly resurfacing as the reservoir dropped. I’ve been thinking about daylighted rivers and winterbourne waterways, limestone and sandstone, the moon and tides, and the sun, responding to the recent “Helios” installation at Victoria Baths, where I was writer-in-residence, and the “Phoebus” print commissioned by Liberty for the Festival of Britain from the sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe, who lived and worked down the road from me. 

(Here's me with "Phoebus" on my actual first trip involving stopping elsewhere than my own house – at the amazing Women In Print exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, and on until 21 June if you're in that neck of the woods; highly recommend.) 

Being Yorkshire born, of course the "Drought Thoughts" project led to me to giving a certain amount of time to dry stone walls, even getting in touch with the Dry Stone Wall Association (“lunky” was a particularly chewy word they proffered when I asked about terminology), so Yorkshire was top of my list for an escape t'country. I was rewarded with many delights including St George’s mushrooms and willow warblers warbling and bright yellow patches of cowslips and a robin singing from his spot atop an erratic and a wee hatched blue egg fallen from a hawthorn tree just coming into bloom and conversations with blackbirds and goldfinches and sightings of oystercatchers and buzzards and hearings of curlews and owls. I managed to go off road and my health app told me: “So far this year, you’re taking more steps a day than you did last year.” All good. I even managed to climb over a few dry stone walls, and I gave up on a few as well, but either way, it all fed an overall good disposition – as well as into some new poems. 

And how excited was I to go up a valley for other stuff (a craft brewery and an exhibition) and come back with a totally dry riverbed?!!!! The pebbles looked like potatoes scattered willy-nilly as if from a burst shopping bag, just dropped mid-flow as the waters of the River Skirfare disappeared underground, leaving a bright white scar, the likes of which I am all too familiar with. I'm so glad I shouted over to a farmer, despite a sign at his gate that clearly stated “No Idiots”. He told me it's because of a fault and that if there’s a sudden and sustained substantial rainfall, the river returns, bombing it down the dry channel like a tidal wave, or a bore. Quite the sight, he told me. I don’t think he thought I was an idiot as I excitedly explained my presence peering over his dry stone wall and apologising for interrupting while he fed the chucks. Then again, maybe he’s since replaced the sign at the gate with one that reads “No Poets”.

Anyway, "more water for the Wharfe, more words for the poets" as someone (me) once said, and I've just finished another poem, about this karstian wonder. It's another new poem for the upcoming performance slot I've secured at Didsbury Arts Festival later this month to premiere some of the new poems. I'm really looking forward to sharing some of the new work, and if you enjoyed my special DAF commission “Flight Patterns”, which fed into my most recent Wainwright Prize-nominated book “Wanderland”, or indeed if you liked my concrete poetry shown at last year’s inaugural Didsbury Open, then “Drought Thoughts” may well be up your street! Join me as I transform landscapes into soundscapes on Saturday 27 June, 5pm, Emmanuel Parish Centre (Upper Hall). Tickets on sale now here. (Thanks to James for the fabulous flyer!)

Constantin's Colonne and concrete constructs

Yesterday marked 150 years since Constantin Brancusi was born in a Romanian backwater; looking at Glearth, the same kind of ribbon settlement in which I was pulled over for speeding en route to a wedding in Transylvania. This was the final leg of a very-long-and-not-without-its-adventures drive from south Manchester to Sibiu, without a proper map. As you do.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Brancusi's work and should the Centre Pompidou reinstate his studio reconstruction upon reopening (scheduled 2030), I can highly recommend a visit. I was so taken with my first and subsequent trips that I often take it upon myself to create concrete poems in the shapes of his sculptures. Here's 'Colonne Sans Fin', from my pamphlet Using Language, which just came up as a FB memory – three years ago, lovely Invisible Hand Press editor James and I were finalising cover designs, garnering quotes and proofreading.

I've modelled 'Colonne Sans Fin' next to a photo in my Brancusi book of one of the Endless Columns in situ at the 8 Impasse Ronsin studio in Montparnasse (long gone, and replaced by a morgue; I've checked). Legend has it Brancusi twisted the arms of mates including Man Ray to help him lug a tree trunk back to Paris from the countryside so he could turn it into one of the columns – the next two slides show a column in the garden of a rich patron and some of the columns in the Pompidou show a couple of years back. That was a hot day – there's a selfie on my camera roll and I look like I've melted.

Anyway, bon anniversaire, Constantin, la multi ani! By coincidence, I've been working on some more concrete poems and sculpture-inspired pieces this week. The stars must've aligned.

Decades, dates, David Bowie and me

There's been a lot of coverage to commemorate ten years (yesterday, 10 January) since the death of David Bowie, and the concurrent release of his final LP Blackstar (on 8 January, his 69th birthday). And rightly so: it's a great album; he was a talented multifaceted artist. I'll admit, it took me a while to accept him into my early listening life after taking strongly against much of his 80s output (let's not talk about collabs such as Under Pressure or Dancing In The Street), but luckily that was eventually rectified and I'm as big a fan as any of Space Oddity and Life On Mars and even songs unrelated to any celestial set-ups. 

But I don't usually blether on here about such things as who and who I don't lean towards musically – and there's a reason why I'm doing it now: in order to open up a tiny crack and shed a little light into my world beyond reading and writing. Four weeks ago tomorrow, I had my right hip removed and replaced with a foreign body that it is claimed will make my life better. In the month since the hip op hippety op don't stop the boogie, I'll not lie, my life has been a very long way from better. Who knew pain like this could exist, and also how many types of pain there are? 

We won't dwell on this, nor on the absolute inconvenience of not being able to do the most mundane things like putting on socks, nor the realisation that dropping things on the floor is actually more commonplace than house sparrows or terrible second series you've waited so long for, in vain, the unforeseen inability to take in any written words beyond a couple of teeny Insta posts and one easyread article in Vogue (about Chanel here across the Channel; they assumed the punning half-rhyme was enough to hook a feature on), the downright discombobulation at the concreteness of two steps forward and one step back. (Pic is of me on one of my last trips out before the procedure, a sunny winter's day on Castlefield Viaduct.)

Anyway, the op was a week before my birthday, which is two days before Christmas, so at least I'd stocked up on nice biscuits and booze-tinged truffles from the Aldi middle aisle before checking into the hozzy (Trafford General, birthplace of the fabulous NHS). Small wins. Since you ask, I turned 54, like the famous New-Yorkaise studio where David Bowie was a regular. Ah, yes, so the Bowie thing. Well, ten years ago, on Saturday 9 January 2016, I was in a cab with Blackstar playing over the tinny speakers and the driver pretending not to be in panic mode as he drove an inflating me a short distance to Manchester Royal Infirmary where I was superspeedtriaged and rushed through to A&E and pumped full of antihistamines and steroids and dragged back from the edge of anaphylaxis and all the rest of it. 

Exciting stuff, but what has this to do with total hip replacements? OK, just before the festive season of 2015, I'd been shown the results of an X-ray, having presented at my GP – not for the first time – with shocking pain in my right hip. As with the previous presenting occasions (one of which was during a period involving me having to make my way up and down the stairs of my house in Chorlton – so we're going back a long time here – on my bum), the X-ray showed significant-but-not-significant-enough erosion of my old bones thanks to arthritis (thanks, Arthritis). The doctor was very sympathetic and advised ibuprofen as ideal for next time I found myself in discomfort or anticipating being on my feet all day or undertaking other such physical jerks. The morning of Saturday 9 January 2016, David and I were sitting in our flat's kitchen, planning a trip out to recce possible places for moving to while eating breakfast (boiled eggs and soldiers, orange juice and coffee, since you ask – plus, of course, the magical antiflammatory I'd been advised). 

Five minutes or so later, I was saying I didn't feel so good and was having a little lie-down, with Pushkin Cat lying on top of me purring while David Googled "anaphylactic shock". It was Leap Year. On 29 February 2016, I asked David to marry me; this one's a keeper, I thought. Later that year, we moved, on Brexit vote day. We'll have been here ten years this summer. We tied the knot up the road from here on Saturday 29 February 2020 and had our honeymoon in a springtime Paris, making it out on the final Eurostar before France went into confinement, and the UK announced lockdown effective 26 March. There's always a date-related story, isn't there?

Concrete poetry at the Parsonage

When I submitted my artwork to the Didsbury Arts Festival Summer Open earlier this year, I knew I was taking a punt, as it’s not what you’d call usual exhibition fare. I love to create concrete poetry, which plays with text and also how it appears. Often a concrete poem can take the shape of its subject matter; sometimes its layout can reflect a mood or feeling – in the case of my submission, “Rivers”, the whole look is intended to convey a sense of movement.

“Rivers” consists of three concrete poems: the simple ‘Boat’, which took its original spark from Lisa Robertson’s book of that name and a reading she gave on a typically Mancunian autumnal evening in Ancoats; ‘Banks’, inspired by me navigating the River Seine through Paris a number of years ago, and ‘Arethusa’, a nod to the opening of Under Milk Wood. 

An earlier version of ‘Arethusa’ appears in my limited-edition poetry pamphlet Lune, which was published by Red Ceilings Press and is now sold out – it notes the names of all the craft moored on the creek downstream from Dylan Thomas’s boathouse in Laugharne when I wandered along there a couple of years ago. 

The three pieces were made at different times, but with their watery themes, I felt they sat well alongside each other so I brought them together and played about with their positioning to also achieve an appealing picture.

I’ve mentioned the idea of “playing” twice now – and playing about with words and ideas and techniques is something I enjoy when approaching all my poetry, not just the concrete work. 

I’m a big fan of the Oulipo movement, a group of writers and mathematicians who got together in 1960s Paris and applied constraints such as anagrams and noun-swapping and forms such as sestinas and snowballs to free their work. I learnt about Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature) as an undergrad at the University of Manchester during the 1990s, taking French Studies and eventually submitting a thesis on the Oulipian writer (and crossword puzzle setter) Georges Perec. 

When I returned to do a masters in Creative Writing in more recent years, I also revisited my studies into Oulipo and started applying restrictions to my own poetry as I developed my style. I really like how imposing certain systems forces me to land on words and phrases I may have otherwise overlooked, and which by default makes the poem infinitely more interesting and innovative than it might otherwise have been. It’s also pretty good fun.

Concrete poetry also helps focus the mind and I appreciate being able to make something that is a poem but also something that can be put in a frame and hung on the wall. I’ve shown concrete poetry in the past, in the Manchester Open at HOME and also at the annual Blah Open in Withington, and submitting to the DAF Summer Open paid off as the whole show was really impressive with some fabulous work including by well-known artists, and superbly curated by Nan Collantine, setting “Rivers” beside Chris Williams’s lovely lighthouse linocut in the Orange Gallery at Didbsury Parsonage (coincidentally where I performed my “Flight Patterns” commission for DAF 2023, pictured). What’s more, “Rivers” now has a new home, hurrah!

The DAF Summer Open PV was on Friday 4 July 2025 and the show ran at Didsbury Parsonage, Manchester, until Sunday 20 July 2025. Didsbury Arts Festival will be back with a full programme in the summer of 2026.

READ MY BLOG POST ON THE DIDSBURY ARTS FESTIVAL WEBSITE HERE.

The windmills of my mind

It's a little over a month since the European Poetry Festival rolled into town (well, the town of Liverpool). My collaborator – the marvellous Carolyn Hashimoto – was delayed en route from Scotland, wasps and wrong turns, but well in time for the intros, by Chris McCabe, in his LiPS (Liverpool Poetry Space) capacity, and EPF organiser extraordinaire SJ Fowler. The annual European Poetry Festival pairs up poets who have often never met, and many of whom cross borders to join the project, to produce brand-new work (to fit a seven-minute timeframe) to be performed at different events around the UK.

At the Liverpool leg, Carolyn and I were up third, mesmerising (I'm sure) the Open Eye Gallery crowd with what Carolyn named "the chant section", before launching into our piece properly. The chant section involved us wandering around in not quite dizzying circles and wittering what probably seemed to be random words and numbers. O ye of little faith, there's no randomness at EPF – there's always method to the madness! 

And much method was applied to mine and Carolyn's particular creation – a sestina inspired by spirals and vortices and maelstroms and eddies and whirlpools and whirlwinds. Carolyn landed on the theme, combining her current concerns with my own, emailing: "I’ve been writing around Nothingness and Vortex most recently. Spinning in circles and not getting very far, but I did wonder if there might be some way of connecting the work you are doing with rivers and seas with whirlpools and maelstroms...?" 

Next, I landed on the form, after lugging my well-thumbed copy of not insignificant-in-size The Penguin Book of Oulipo on a trip to London, where I happened to be seeing its editor Philip Terry, at the issue launch of Long Poem Magazine at the Barbican. As I dug into The Penny Borough of Ourselves (its alternative N+7 title), it dawned on me that the sestina would link nicely to our spirals and going round in a circle. The slightly elongated train journey from Manchester, meanwhile, meant I could go rabbitholing – a mention of “gidouille” led me to finding out this denotes the 11th month in the Pataphysical calendar, corresponding to the period June 15 to July 13 – the performance was chalked up for July 6 and I was soon going to be passing the Collège de Pataphysique on Boulevard Diderot in Paris. It all had a warm feeling of circular serendipity.

So, here's the science: a sestina incorporates six stanzas each six lines long, moving along following a pre-set pattern of end-words, culminating in a final stanza of three lines involving all six end-words, two per line. Phew. It’s super complicated, the old sestina, but as a collaborative effort, I thought it might work quite nicely. For the record, the pattern of the end-words, in stanza order, is: 123456 / 615243 / 364125 / 532614 / 451362 / 246531. The sixth stanza is then followed by a tercet that is known variably by the French term "envoi", the Occitan term "tornada", or, with reference to its size in relation to the preceding stanzas, a "half-stanza". It consists of three lines that should take the pattern of 2–5, 4–3, 6–1; the first end-word of each pair can occur anywhere in the line, while the second must end the line.

We decided that the best way forward would be to pick our six end-words between us, thinking about incorporating things to do with our thoughts of whirlpool, vortex, sea, tide, sun, moon and wotnot, and coming up with a longer list then whittling that down… After a bit of backwards and forwards, this became Flow / Pull / Swirl / City / Side / Blue – and this selection later on became the basis of the chant sections, which closed as well as opened our performance. The chant sections (pictured below) saw me recite? incant? the end-words in the order they appear in the sestina, while Carolyn came up with "a little bingo sheet", or "pull side / poolside bingo" of the numbers and words. Someone said they "got it", so that's good.

Our next job was embarking on the first stanza, which we both made a stab at, then I – by now on holiday in Provence, where the sestina was invented by a troubadour called Arnaut Daniel (who appears in Dante's Inferno) – fiddled about with the two resulting versions, so that one of the first stanzas could become the second. Each had its own feel, but the two teamed up nicely – Carolyn's with time zones and a sense of distance and proximity and "two minds", and mine tying in with that via the aforementioned Pataphysical calendar and foreign names and watery journeys... we both liked my stanza to open and Carolyn's redone as stanza 2, as it meant we started abroad and then came together in Liverpool, with the first beginning "Round and round" so we're spiralling from the get-go, and tying in with the performance movement ideas we were having, and the second stanza starting with "Always in two minds"... So our pattern was set and we continued building the poem like a tennis match.

Having slipped into the River Seine in the first stanza, in the third, I continued travelling via waterways and thinking about whirlpools, and brought us into the Irish Sea, with Liverpool in our sights, passing Anglesey's Menai Straits Swellies and the Hilbre archipelago, tidal islands just off the Wirral peninsula, where I grew up. More rabbithole research (my favourite kind) led me to discover the full moon in July is known as a buck moon and it reminded me about the legendary deer that swam from Wales to Hilbre (where my uncle John was a pioneer of the bird observatory).

By stanza five, I'd remembered that the wee boat I sailed out of Liverpool and around the Irish Sea (and beyond) was a Twister, and, as Liverpool is often a bit on the blowy side, my thoughts turned to all things windy. The "tornada" of the sestina means turned or twisted, and the usual French word for whirlwind is "tourbillon", one of the words I'd already written in my notebook – they were fixing the windmill sitting at the top of the village where I was staying, so windmills had been on my mind (never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel). 

Also in search of inspiration in keeping with our project, Carolyn took herself off to the Crawick Multiverse in her home county of Dumfries and Galloway – a large land art project with distinctive snailing hills designed by Charles Jencks (see also The Garden Of Cosmic Speculation, Jupiter Artland and the art gallery in Edinburgh), and offering forth some immense physicality in the "upward swirl" as we are invited by Carolyn to "climb the spiral hillside".

Carolyn also tabled some brilliant plans (and even diagrams!) for the performance, talking Slinkys, Maypoles, Swingball, but my inability to turn quickly meant these had to be sidelined. We thought about having the person not speaking walking around the person speaking, reflecting the vortex and spiral idea, with maybe one of us going clockwise and the other going anticlockwise, then that might also represent time zones and calendars... but then we remembered the microphones. Those wires could have wreaked havoc. Anyway, you can see a film of what we did get up to here. 

The other performances can also be watched on YouTube, and the poets involved were, in this order: Lenni Sanders and David Spittle; Julia Rose Lewis and Alec Newman; Carolyn Hashimoto and Sarah-Clare Conlon; Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler; Endre Ruset and Stephen Sunderland; Sarah Dawson and Andrew Taylor; Chris McCabe reading for Thomas Ballhausen and Robert Sheppard, and, finally, Lena Chilari and Michael Sutton. More on the European Poetry Festival here and specifically the Liverpool leg, which closed EPF 2025, here.

(Apologies for the all-over-the-shop fonts – Blogger is ancient and creaking and I looked in the back end to organise the code and came straight back out again, it's so hideous in there.)