Slenderise the new spiralise

At the start of the month, the European Poetry Festival Camarade was back in town, and it was completely sold out! Manchester Poetry Library was so full – packed in the stacks, you might say – it was actually warm in there for once. Fourteen poets took part, some of whom I'd collaborated with in the past (so lovely to see everyone), and this time I'd invited Manchester Multilingual Poet Nóra Blascsók to team up. 

We met up on a super-sunny day over the summer to gather our ideas, deciding to follow the theme of "meadows" with a vague thought of exploring erasure. We then each wrote a poem that was "meadow adjacent", swapping them over for experimentation. Anaesthetics were administered and the complicated, time-consuming operations ensued. We both applied three methods each to slenderise the original poems and create something new. 

With mine – a villanelle about a crow's eye view of the melt-revealed alpinous (not a word) spring – Nóra removed first the verbs, then the verbs and adjectives, then the verbs and adjectives and pronouns. It was like poetic Ker-plunk, removing the structure and seeing what held. A really interesting exercise, getting down to the bare bones, with lots of lovely repetition!

For Nóra's piece, which tells of an unhappy encounter with nettles, I looked up the Hungarian word for meadow, which is "rét", and I used combinations of the letters R and E and T to cut back – round one was removing all the words that didn't contain at least one of R or E or T, round two retained only words containing at least two of these letters, and the final round involved slashing all the words that didn't contain all three – this saw only three words standing: "encounters", "their" and "fillérekért". 

I'd asked Nóra to include some Hungarian, which of course I'm fluent in but I asked Google Translate to do the honours anyway, and it told me that its translation was "capturing the sharp, colloquial and slightly vengeful tone of the Hungarian text". Oof. Obviously, I had to read out the Hungarian, albeit subsequently stripped back, and the video (here) shows proof of Nóra laughing at my pronunciation.

Featuring Anna Luňáková and Sarah Dawson / Nóra Blascsók and Sarah-Clare Conlon / Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler / Martin Kratz and Julia Rose Lewis / Carolyn Hashimoto and Ayse Kongur / Thor Magnus Tangeras and Agata Maslowska / Lydia Unsworth and James Davies - more here.