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 rabbit hole 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.